I'm about write an essay about determinism and free will. No one is compelling me to do this; I just noticed that a lot of people were confused, and I hope to arrive at some clarity. I do not know in advance what each sentence is going to say or how many sentences there will be. I don't even know, as I start writing, all the ideas that I'm going to explore. I do research and learn things as I go. But I sit and write, usually in several sessions, until I think I've covered the topic adequately, and voila, another essay emerges.
English has a large vocabulary, with many nuances and synonyms. It also has a very flexible grammar, allowing ideas to be stated in many different ways with slightly different emphases. Moreover, the issues I want to write about are complex.
There are a million essays I might have written. How did I come to write this particular one? It certainly feels like I chose the words and sentences as I sit and deliberate on what to say and how to say it. Most especially when I write a sentence one way and then subsequently change the wording or phrasing. But what is really going on?
Do I choose words on a coolly rational basis, with no input from any other faculty, including my own emotions? Or were the words that I apparently chose to write actually predetermined by the laws of physics at the time of the Big Bang? Are either of these two widely believed possibilities plausible? Should I appeal to some middle ground, or should I find some completely different way to frame the discussion? How would I even know?
Of the legacy philosophical concepts I've commented on in this series of essays, determinism and free will are probably the least coherent. And this essay has been the most difficult to write. There are so many different approaches that even a basic overview of the main currents in this topic would be longer than I intend this essay to be. For any given statement one can make, the contrary is likely to be vigorously asserted by someone else. As before, my aim is to try to cut through the bullshit with some pragmatism. There's just so much of it in this case.
The plethora of approaches for both determinism and free will (viewed as standalone concepts) are only multiplied when they are combined into one argument, where they are sometimes mutually exclusive and sometimes compatible. There is no consensus on either term on its own, and no consensus on how the two relate. It's not just that we disagree on details. There is no consensus on how to conceptually frame this discussion. In the case of free will, those who take a determinist stance argue that it simply doesn't exist, so there is nothing to frame. The situation is not helped when commentators tacitly assume a worldview and proceed as if that view is normative, which is all too common.
In matters related to determinism and free will, there is a profound dissensus and continuing divergence of views amongst intellectuals. The issue only becomes more complex over time. This abject failure to agree is sometimes presented positively as pluralism; however, in genuine pluralism, we expect a range of coherent positions that compete to explain some phenomenon. Here, we cannot even agree that there is a phenomenon to be explained.
Discussions of this type have been documented for thousands of years. Nowhere are the failures of academic philosophy and science more starkly revealed than in such long-term unresolved issues. I agree with Einstein that concepts should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. I'm not arguing for an enforced unity or some naive oversimplification. I'm genuinely perturbed by wanting to understand such issues and finding them so hopelessly lost in the weeds. At this point, it would take considerable effort to do worse than professional philosophers.
Academic philosophy seems to have devolved into competitive sophistry, completely unrelated to the lives that most of us live. Of course, people who like arguments find competitive sophistry endlessly entertaining. While arguing can be a diverting hobby for some, the rest of us find it annoying and counterproductive: it doesn't really change anything.
One of the main themes of these essays has been the lack of epistemic privilege. No person has privileged access to reality. Ergo, no one is in a position of authority vis-à-vis reality. And this was strongly pointed out by both David Hume (1711 – 1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804). Rather than admit this, priests, scientists, and philosophers all seem to charge ahead regardless. And so confusion reigns. And I find this intensely irritating. Unlike some of my other suggestions about legacy concepts, I don't see anything here worth rescuing.
I think the whole, millennia-long exercise of arguing about determinism and free will has been a gigantic waste of everyone's time. If you are confused about this topic and go looking for clarity amongst philosophers, scientists, or historians, all you will find is a great deal more confusion. The topic is a tangle of shifting definitions, hidden assumptions, and conflicting ideological commitments. No layperson has any hope of finding genuine clarity, but all kinds of pseudo-clarity are on sale.
Pragmatically, we all experience making decisions and choices; we experience the impact of the choices we make and the impact of the choices that others make. This has to be our starting point. But we also have to acknowledge that we are often baffled by our own decisions. Decisions involve conscious and unconscious mechanisms. Any philosophy which does not say something constructive about these is not worth our time and energy.
Demonic Determinism
The modern idea of determinism is often traced to the great French mathematician Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749–1827). In 1814, he wrote:
“We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.”
— Essai philosophique sur les probabilités. (tr. by F. W. Truscott and F. L. Emory) Chapman & Hall, 1902. p.4.
The "intelligence" (une intelligence) mentioned by Laplace somehow became known in English as "Laplace's demon". While we credit Laplace, this mechanistic idea about the universe seems to have been quite widely accepted at the time.
These days, we usually sum up the idea by saying that if we knew the location and momentum of every particle in the universe with perfect accuracy and precision, and if we also knew all the laws of physics that govern particles to the same perfect degree, then we could perfectly predict the future.
In this hypothetical, the word if is doing a lot of work. For example, it is assumed in this view that such knowledge is theoretically possible. Remember that Laplace was saying this a century before quantum physics had been conceived. His view of the universe was purely classical and mechanistic.
Laplace also assumes that we can always recover the past by putting in negative values for time into some mathematical description of nature. This is true of classical laws of motion, but it's not possible in statistical mechanics (and thus thermodynamics) or in quantum mechanics. And note that all we get from this exercise is knowledge of the past, not the actual past (I will come back to this point in an essay about time and time travel).
The idea of "conservation of information" is quite popular, though it's unrelated to physical conservation laws based on physical symmetries in the universe (Noether's theorem). As far as I can see, the idea that "information" is conserved relies on a series of ontological presuppositions that cannot be true, not least of which is the assumption that the universe is absolutely deterministic. Arguments along the lines that, apparently, lost information is only hidden and unrecoverable, rather than truly lost, seem to have a weird definition of "lost".
The basic idea of determinism is that events can only occur in one way. All events are absolutely predetermined in advance by the starting conditions of the universe and the combined laws of nature. This view is similar to the absolute fatalism of Advaita Vedanta theology, which attracted Erwin Schrödinger in his later years.
Determinists believe that, even though we experience ourselves making choices, there is never any doubt about the outcome. In this view, everything can be reduced to particles following rules. Obviously, if we have no choices and make no decisions, then there can be no such thing as "free will" or any other kind of will. An important corollary of this fact is that there can be no coherent morality or ethics. If no one chooses to do actions, then no one is responsible for those actions (Buddhists who deny the existence of agents also have this problem). Indeed, the idea that evil is blameworthy is entirely negated. Determinism is a form of nihilism. Nothing we do, say, or think makes any difference. Concepts like morality, fairness and justice no longer have any meaning. Nothing matters.
My sense is that while determinists make some powerful arguments, almost no one is willing to simply abandon the concept of morality. Which means that while some people (especially some physicists) argue for an uncompromising version of determinism, most intellectuals understand that morality needs to be retained and preserved. Indeed, the mainstream of academic philosophy has always promoted so-called compatibilism: a range of ideas that embrace determinism but argue that it (somehow) does not rule out free will.
Importantly, the idea of determinism is largely absent from our judicial systems. Notions of agency and responsibility appear to be indispensable to a society. This is a theme I plan to circle back to by way of a conclusion to this series of essays.
As an aside, note that male intellectuals like to call their favoured, often uncompromising, stance on any given topic the "hard" version, and any compromise the "soft" version. So, an uncompromising approach to determinism is often called "hard determinism", and compatibilist approaches are called "soft determinism". And one cannot help but think that, while Freud was wrong in most respects, he was not totally wrong. I try to avoid penis-based terminology in my writing.
In practice, there are dozens of different perspectives on determinism and even taxonomies that are supposed to help us grapple with the definitional promiscuity. If this problem is unfamiliar, I've posted a structured list at the end as an appendix. No doubt some will find the list inadequate, which only reinforces my point about the proliferation of definitions. However, I don't find any of these approaches interesting or meaningful. I don't think the idea of metaphysical determinism is coherent or cogent, at least as far as Laplacian determinism is concerned. There are numerous problems.
Mechanics of Various Kinds
Newtonian, Hamiltonian, and Lagrangian formulations of physics are deterministic as conceived, but also incomplete: they cannot account for events in systems with very large masses, very high relative velocities, and very high energies. Einstein's relativity theories are deterministic and can account for the exceptions. However, relativity is also incomplete, since it cannot be reconciled with our theory for very small masses and it clearly makes a wrong prediction for the Big Bang. We don't know of any classical—i.e., deterministic—theories that are complete. They all break down beyond certain limits.
Moreover, we cannot even see the entire universe, and we have no idea what lies beyond the limits imposed on us by the speed of light. We can infer that parts of the universe exist from which light will never reach us. We have no way to infer the extent or nature of those parts of the universe. We can infer that physics is the same across the visible universe, but we simply don't know if this holds beyond the limits of our knowledge. Our "universe" could be a tiny bubble in a much larger structure.
Incidentally, I don't find any multiverse theories cogent. This is simply what happens when you canonise mathematics and adopt the procedure of bending reality to fit your theory (a procedure that has more in common with medieval theology than with empirical science). Which brings us to so-called "quantum mechanics".
As far as I can see, quantum mechanics is not deterministic at all. While some people like to assert that it is, I showed why this is not the case in my previous essay: quantum mechanics can never tell us where a particle is. Precise location information is simply not a possible output of the Schrödinger equation. Indeed, to do a location-based calculation, we have to tell the Schrödinger equation where we expect the particle to be (often based on classical approximations). And all it does is tell us the probability of finding it there. This means that Laplace's demon has no starting information, so even if it knew the laws of physics, it couldn't apply them.
That is to say, there are no deterministic rules in quantum mechanics that govern where a particle is now or where it will be 1 second from now. But it gets worse.
The uncertainty principle says that the precision with which we know where a particle will be (based on its momentum) is inversely proportional to the precision with which we know where it is now. This means that if we could know exactly where all the particles are at some time, we would necessarily know nothing about where they are going. Even a quantum Laplace demon could not know exactly where a particle is and simultaneously know exactly how it is moving.
Another problem is that quantum mechanics is not a scalable theory. The Schrödinger equation for hydrogen, while being a complex problem in three-dimensional calculus, is nonetheless solvable. The Schrödinger equation for helium is not solvable, even in principle. Rather, in order to use quantum mechanics in a three-body system, one has to impose a series of simplifying assumptions, not least of which is treating the nucleus as a classical object. Rather than admit the implications of this for determinism, physicists simply ignore the fact and proceed as if quantum mechanics is a complete description and fully deterministic.
It's widely known that physicists themselves are deeply divided over the ontology of quantum mechanics, see:
- Gibney, Elizabeth. (2025) "Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality, Nature survey shows." Nature News 30 July 2025.
Again, this is not simply a failure to find a consensus on details. With the mathematics treated as canonical and inviolable, physicists are left to propose increasingly bizarre speculative accounts of how "reality" might be bent to fit the maths canonical. In philosophy, we call this a Procrustean bed.
If you accept canonical quantum mechanics, then you must abandon determinism.
Structure Matters
I wrote three long essays exploring the idea that both structure and scale are important factors in any description of nature (NB: I was still using the term "reality" in a reified way a lot back then; I wouldn't phrase it that way now, but the basic intuitions about structure and scale are still relevant).
- A Layered Approach to Reality. Part I.
- A Layered Approach to Reality. Part II.1
- A Layered Approach to Reality. Part II.2
Here I owe a debt to Richard Jones, see
- Jones, Richard H. (2013). Analysis & the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism & Emergence. Jackson Square Books.
Incidentally, Jones is also the most underrated Nāgārjuna scholar on the planet. He has published English translations of all Nāgārjuna's major works and a good chunk of Prajñāpāramitā. His commentary on Prajñāpāramitā was a major influence on me. But like me, Jones is an outsider.
Structure refers to (relatively) static arrangements of stuff, be it particles, bricks, or people. A structural property is a property that an object obtains by virtue of the arrangement of its parts. A good example is the buoyancy of a ship made of steel. Steel is ~8x more dense than water. A 1000 kg lump of steel would have a volume of about 125 litres, about the same volume as a bathtub. In water, it would sink like a proverbial stone. However, if you take that 1000 kg lump of steel, flatten it to about 5mm thick, and shape it into a hollow cylinder that encompasses a volume greater than 8000 litres, then that steel structure will float on water.
I use "structure" as the general term, but I mean it to include systems. Structures are relatively static and stable, while systems are relatively dynamic and can be unstable.
Reductionism focuses on parts, aiming to find something irreducible at the bottom of the well. Metaphysical reductionism says that "reality" resides only in the lowest level of structure that cannot be further reduced to parts; the corollary being that macroscopic objects are not real. Reductionist methods aim to first eliminate structure to expose the underlying parts.
The problem with this becomes apparent in biology. Simply atomising an organism tells us little about it. Even dissecting it only tells us so much. To understand a biological organism, we have to leave it whole and observe how it interacts with surrounding structures and systems (ecology), which themselves are inevitably only parts of much larger systems all the way up to the universe as an all-encompassing structure (cosmology).
Life cannot be understood via reductionism alone. The alternative goes by several names: holism, antireductionism, and emergentism.
It seems to be true that the universe is made of atoms, for example. And that atoms are made of electrons, protons, and neutrons. And that protons and neutrons also have some structure. But just as a pile of bricks is not a house, a universe of unstructured atoms is not what we observe. Atoms form molecules. Molecules form crystals, polymers, cells, and other kinds of structures. Cells form organs. And organs form bodies. And bodies form societies.
Structure exists. It persists over time. And it confers causal properties on complex objects. These properties are sometimes vaguely called "emergent", but "structural" is more accurate and precise, and less open to abuse. Importantly, while lower levels of structure place constraints on higher levels, they do not determine higher levels (I'll come back to this).
In order to understand the universe we actually inhabit, we do need to use reductionist theories and methods to understand the substantial foundations. But on its own, this is not enough. We also have to use holist theories and methods to understand the structures that the foundations support.
Scale Matters
As we move between different scales, our explanations of nature often break down. It was larger scales made visible via telescopes that exposed the incompleteness of Newtonian physics. Structure imparts structural properties to stuff. Microscopic effects are lost at larger scales, and macroscopic effects are greater than the sum of their parts.
For example, quantum mechanics simply ignores gravitation because the impact of it on the scale of electrons and protons is so small that ignoring it has no meaningful impact on precision or accuracy, and the simplification offers a huge advantage in computability. But if your theory ignores gravitation, it has no claim to being "deterministic" in the Laplacian sense.
Scale matters because, as I noted already, substantial properties constrain but don't determine structural properties. We cannot doubt, for example, that the properties of molecules are constrained by the properties of atoms. A molecule cannot have arbitrary properties. However, the properties of water (OH₂) are also strongly related to the asymmetrical arrangement of the three atoms. It is this structure that gives the water molecule its polarity, for example. Organic chemistry is even more fascinating since the possible arrangements of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms are almost endless.
As we scale up, we lose track of microscopic details. In chemistry, we talk in an idealised way about individual molecules, but, actually, 1 gram of water contains ~3 x 10²² water molecules. This number is unimaginably large, and individual molecules are unimaginably small. The only way to deal with such large numbers of molecules is with abstractions and statistics. Hence, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.
For example, the temperature of a volume of gas is proportional to the mean kinetic energy (= ½mv²) of the molecules in that volume. The pressure the gas exerts on its container is proportional to the average speed with which molecules collide with it. And so on.
In any case, determinism is a relic of reductive, mechanistic thinking about the universe. Uncompromising determinism is a castle built on sand. Physics is far less complete than it would need to be to support determinism, and quantum physics is not deterministic at all (at least in the Laplacian sense). Moreover, the absolute fatalism of determinism seems to fly in the face of experience, requiring us to abandon the whole concept of morality, which almost no one outside of academic physics is willing to do.
If anything, the situation with free will is even worse.
Free Will
We cannot even agree on how to spell this concept that may or may not exist. Three spellings are in common use: "free will", "free-will", and "freewill". Research suggests that most people opt for two words these days and that the other options are out of fashion. But the concept is singular, and the phrase seems like an obvious compound to me (in Sanskrit we'd call it a karmadhāraya compound). Sigh.
If you look at general histories of free will, you will see claims that discussions extend back to antiquity, but my sense is that this is not quite true. People in antiquity may have speculated about how we make choices, but the particular idea of free will seems to be somewhat later.
However, we are hampered in such deliberations by the absence of a consensus on what free will means. Again, I have supplied a structured list of major views in the appendix for easy reference.
Apart from ancient discussions, ideas about free will embrace a range of influences. Early modern philosophers such as Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, and Kant all wrote about free will. Many scientists, such as Laplace, Darwin, and Einstein has commented on the issue, most often as a consequence of their commitment to determinism. Freud also commented on the issue. It's one of those issues on which the great and good all have (different) opinions.
One of the most striking forms of evidence that physicists cite against free will is the experiments performed by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s. This suggests that we make decisions around half a second earlier than we become aware of having made a decision. I noted in an essay titled Free Will is Back on the Menu (11 March 2016) that few of Libet's colleagues accepted his interpretation at the time, and it has been thoroughly debunked since. What Libet measured was conscious anticipation, not unconscious decision-making. See, for example:
- Clarke, P. G. H. (2013). "The Libet Experiment and its Implications for Conscious Will." Faraday Paper No. 17. Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. http://www.bethinking.org/download/faraday-paper-17-clarke-en
And yet, it is still common to see Libet cited in arguments about free will, especially by physicists. Notably, when Libet is cited in this context, no other neurophysiology authors are cited, and, notably, none of the neurophysiology literature that discussed Libet's work is ever cited. Which flies in the face of scholarly methods. The "literature review" remains an essential part of any research project.
Part of the problem with free will is the idea that there is one and only one decision-making faculty. And this faculty is all or nothing; it either makes all the decisions, or we don't make any decisions. Which is not even remotely consistent with my experience of making decisions. For a start, most decisions don't involve any conscious deliberation. And according to Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber—authors of The Enigma of Reason—the reasons we give for such unconscious decisions are merely post-hoc rationalisations, fabulated on the fly.
One of the main sources of argument about free will is Christian theologians responding to the problem of evil, starting in the fourth century CE. The problem is relatively simple. If Jehovah is both good and omnipotent, why is there evil in the world at all? If Jehovah cannot do anything about evil, then he is not worthy of worship; if he can but does not, then Jehovah is evil. The theologians decided to blame humans, or more precisely, to blame women via their mythical progenitor Eve. God gave Adam and Eve free will, and Eve used it to disobey Jehovah's stricture not to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, thereby bringing evil into the world. Obviously, the theology of free will requires applying some rather torturous logic to some rather implausible fairy tales.
And the result of all this attention from intellectuals across centuries, if not millennia, in at least a dozen different cultures? A vague, poorly defined, hotly disputed, abstract concept that may or may not exist.
It is already clear that if one adopts determinism, then one is forced to abandon morality. This result is so appalling that many philosophers and other intellectuals have tried to have their cake and eat it. They embrace determinism, but still claim that morality is meaningful. This kind of view is called compatibilism.
Compatibilism
Here is Albert Einstein in 1929 (by which time he probably knew that quantum mechanics was not deterministic, even if few other people did):
I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will... I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. (from an interview published in the Saturday Evening Post. 26 Oct 1929, p.114)
However, Einstein immediately contradicts himself:
Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.
If no actions are the result of decisions, if "we can only wish what we must", then no one is responsible for their actions, and thus they are not culpable for transgressions. The very idea of transgression has to be deprecated. Einstein's position is incoherent. Which just goes to show that physicists, no matter how great they are, often make lousy philosophers.
Compatibilism is not a single unified idea, but generally speaking, compatibilists do what Einstein does. They begin by claiming to accept determinism. For example, they will agree that all events, including human actions, are fixed by prior states and laws. They try to get around the morality-denying fatalism of this statement by redefining morality or some other fudge. For example, one approach is to argue that an action becomes morally significant when it flows from the agent’s internal psychological structures—desires, reasoning, character—without external compulsion.
Unfortunately, under determinism, the notion of an "agent" is incoherent. There are no agents; there are just entities evolving according to laws. Agency implies choice, and choice is eliminated by determinism.
Compatibilism is also simply incoherent.
Deciding to go Up Hill
Every adult human has vast experience of making decisions. This is something we all do all day long. Banal choices like what to wear or eat, and morally significant choices like choosing to be honest or non-violent. Life choices like where to live, who to live with, or what job to do.
As with choosing which words to write in this essay, there are almost always many options for what to do next in any situation.
Anyone who denies that we are making decisions, as Einstein did, is bound to provide an alternative explanation of what is actually happening. If that alternative explanation is determinism, then agents, free will, and responsibility are automatically eliminated, and we lose morality entirely. So, rather than explaining human behaviour, determinism simply eliminates it from consideration.
We have the category "agent" precisely because agents are not like other objects. Water has no choice but to flow downhill: water is not an agent. A thrown rock follows a parabolic arc. Rocks are not agents. A planet orbits a sun in an elliptical orbit. Planets are not agents.
Agents are not passive in the face of physics. An agent can go up hill or around hills. Some agents can fly over the hill. Humans often simply remove inconvenient hills or tunnel under them. As a being that experiences having agency, I would say that, where agents are concerned, there is something more going on than merely following laws.
Agents use energy to do actions that are allowed but not favoured by the laws of physics; actions that would never happen spontaneously in nature. Agents can remain in overly energetic states over long periods of time, consuming energy to remain so.
The Choice of Illusions
Simply saying "choice is an illusion" is not an explanation. If we go down this road, then reductio ad absurdum, all experience is an illusion. In which case, we have not explained anything. An illusion ought not to be able to participate in causality. However, it's quite clear that my choices translate into actions and events that are causal.
For example, I start writing in the morning with a flask of pǔ'ěrchá 普洱茶 or Pu'er tea (普洱 is a toponym that cannot really be translated). From time to time, I take a sip. When my cup is empty, I refill it. When my flask is empty, I make another pot of cha. Each action has objective consequences in the sense that it results in a repeatable sequence of objective events that would not happen if I chose not to do them. This is how we objectively define causation. This causal sequence of events is not an illusion. My cup being empty is objectively not the same as my cup being full. My desire for more tea causes me to refill my cup. But it doesn't compel me to refill it, nor does it compel me to fill it with tea, let alone Pu'er tea. There's no inevitability in this situation.It's one thing to performatively state the belief that "experience is an illusion", but in practice, people who act like experience is an illusion typically have a psychiatric problem such as dissociative disorder, and they find it difficult or impossible to function socially.
It would be weird to believe that our decisions are not influenced by our cultural conditioning, the language we speak, our peers, and environmental exigencies. The idea of a perfectly free will—sometimes called contracausal free will—is clearly nonsensical. Like the fictional "rational faculty" that operates without any input from emotion or external influences, free will in this sense is a unicorn. And yet it is precisely contracausal free will that many people tacitly have in mind if they have not thought much about it.
Framing the issue in black and white terms—either free will exists or it doesn't—virtually guarantees failure to understand decision-making. And yet this is what most commentators seem to insist on, and certainly this framing of the issue is by far the most common one amongst the general public.
A better, more pragmatic approach would be to enquire into what factors influence our decisions. I've already mentioned some of the main influences.
As I write, for example, my word choices are governed by the rules of the English language, by my vocabulary, by the style I adopt, by my knowledge of the subject and its conventions, and so on. Language itself is constrained by human anatomy and physiology. There is no arbitrary or abstract "freedom"; it's not a standalone idea. There are degrees of freedom within an elaborate set of physical and social constraints. That's what we should be talking about.
Conclusion
Growing up, my moral education often consisted of simplistic aphorisms. This may help explain why I'm still fond of aphorisms (see my collection on the about page). One of the most common aphorisms I heard as a kid was: "Two wrongs don't make a right." In determinism and free will, we have two wrongs. Added together, they do not make a right.
Determinism seems attractive because, superficially, it offers a level of objective certainty that religious fanatics can only dream of. However, beyond the surface, determinism unravels because none of our working theories of nature is truly deterministic or complete enough to support determinism. Moreover, the tendency to combine uncompromising determinism with uncompromising reductionism creates a false picture of the universe. Importantly, such views ignore the influence of either structure or scale.
Our principal microscopic theory of matter, quantum physics (in its various manifestations), doesn't even scale from a hydrogen atom to a helium atom, let alone to the macroscopic world. The calculations are simply too complex to ever be solved without making radical assumptions like treating the nucleus as a classical object. Which, incidentally, proves that nature is not performing calculations when a helium atom comes into existence.
The addition of layers of structure is significant. Because structure makes a qualitative and quantitative contribution. Structure is objective and causal.
Certainly, the macroscopic world is constrained by features of the microscopic, but it is not determined by them. Molecules are more than the sum of their parts. And that "more" is not mystical, magical, or emergent: it is precisely the contribution of structure. This is why reductionism fails as a universal approach.
Compatibilism is not unlike bleeding heart liberalism, the proponents of which acknowledge the evil done by capitalism, and strive to meliorate or mitigate the damage it does through acts of charity, but who nonetheless wholeheartedly embrace capitalism.
The real problem with determinism, and the reason that even ardent determinists like Einstein adopt compatibilist approaches, is that it denies all forms of morality. The most fundamental assumption of morality is that we make choices that are reflected in our behaviour, especially our behaviour towards others. Without this assumption, all of our ideas about morality, fairness, and justice go out the window.
Religious theories of morality are even worse, since they divorce moral sensibilities from human experience. In theistic religions, morality is perceived to be imposed by some external agent. The Abrahamic religions have a very dim view of humanity. Buddhism, quite frankly, sees most people, and all non-Buddhists, as moral idiots.
I follow the primate ethologist Frans de Waal in seeing morality as structural feature of living a social lifestyle, and as rooted in the capacities of empathy and reciprocity. For a more detailed account, see my series of essays on this.
- The Evolution of Morality. Introduction and Deontology. (18 November 2016)
- The Evolution of Morality. Two Pillars of Morality - Reciprocity (25 November 2016)
- The Evolution of Morality. Two Pillars of Morality - Empathy. (02 December 2016)
- Waal, Frans de. (2013). The bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Amongst the Primates. W.W. Norton & Co.
In this view, we are naturally moral, since we inherit the capacities for empathy and reciprocity. If we are immoral, this is probably the result of deliberately suppressing empathy or subverting reciprocity. It is detrimental to the group, and the group is essential to our survival and the passing on of our genes. Ergo, the group acts to curb and prevent actions that undermine the group, which helps to keep the group functioning harmoniously. The main job of the "alpha male" chimp is to interpose in conflicts on the side of the weaker party. And to ensure that any members of the group who are in conflict find a way back to harmony. Rather than being the strongest or most violent, the alpha male is generally the most trusted and respected male in the group.
The social primate code is "United we stand, divided we fall. All for one, and one for all."
Any philosophy of nature that denies the centrality of morality in our (social) lives is practically useless. As I said at the outset, I don't see anything worth rescuing from this mess. Neither determinism nor free will is even a good idea. Whereas morality is a great idea. If the choice is either determinism or morality, then I choose morality without any hesitation.
~~Φ~~
Appendix
Approaches to Determinism
- I. Determinism Proper (what is fixed?)
- Global determinism — the complete state of the world plus laws fixes all future states
- Local determinism — determinism holds in some domains but not others
- Nomological determinism — determinism relative to the laws of nature
- Causal determinism — every event has a sufficient prior cause
- Logical determinism — truth-values about the future fix what will occur
- Theological determinism — divine foreknowledge or decree fixes outcomes
- II. Indeterminism (denial of fixation)
- Ontological indeterminism — the world itself is not fully fixed
- Causal indeterminism — causes do not necessitate effects
- Event-level indeterminism — some events lack sufficient causes
- System-level indeterminism — higher-level descriptions are indeterminate
- III. Hybrid Views (mixed structure)
- Soft determinism — deterministic structure with explanatory slack
- Probabilistic causation — laws constrain outcomes statistically
- Emergent indeterminism — indeterminacy arises at higher levels
- Chaotic determinism — determinism with practical unpredictability
- IV. Epistemic Positions (about knowledge, not reality)
- Epistemic determinism — the world may be deterministic even if unknowable
- Epistemic indeterminism — indeterminacy reflects limits of description
- Predictive scepticism — determinism undecidable in practice
- V. Deflationary / Quietist
- Instrumentalism — determinism as a modelling choice
- Pragmatic determinism — determinism adopted for explanatory utility
- Semantic deflationism — disputes about determinism are verbal or framework-relative
- VI. Metaphysical Rejections
- Anti-realist determinism — no fact of the matter about determinism
- Pluralist metaphysics — multiple incompatible but adequate descriptions
Approaches to Free Will
- I. Denial
- Eliminativism — no such thing as free will
- II. Deflationary / Revisionary
- Pragmatic / practice-based — “free will” fixed by its role in responsibility practices
- Revisionism — weakened notion retained for moral or social purposes
- III. Accounts of Agency (what kind of thing acts?)
- Reductive event-causal agency — actions explained by mental events
- Non-reductive agency — agency irreducible to subpersonal processes
- Emergent agency — agency arises at the personal level
- Agent-causal agency — agents as primitive causes
- IV. Accounts of Control (what makes action mine?)
- Reasons-responsive control — sensitivity to reasons
- Guidance control — ownership of the mechanism producing action
- Hierarchical control — higher-order endorsement
- Identification/ownership — identification with motives
- V. Accounts of Sourcehood (where does action ultimately come from?)
- Historical sourcehood — dependence on past self-shaping
- Structural sourcehood — present-time ownership of springs of action
- Ultimacy-based sourcehood — agent as ultimate origin
- VI. Phenomenological / Narrative
- Phenomenological agency — lived experience of choosing
- Narrative identity — agency embedded in a self-narrative
