Philosophical Detritus V: Determinism and Free Will.

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)

And the source:

• 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

Bad Free Will Philosophy

Philosophy is an important activity. Ideally, philosophy helps us to make sense of the world, ourselves, and our place in the world. Unfortunately, philosophy, at least on the level that I engage with it, is plagued with unhelpful legacy concepts from the Victorian period. Victorian accounts of subjects like reason, consciousness, and free will are all anachronistic and contradicted by a weight of evidence. It's not clear that these terms offer any advantage as starting places for discussions about the world, ourselves, or our place in the world. Also, virtually all philosophy seems to be solipsistic. whereas we human beings are social animals and we make sense of our world in a social setting. 

Free will is one of the most aggravating subjects to be interested in because the whole discussion is poorly framed: bad definitions, bad methods, and bad theoretical frameworks. Of course, the three coincide in some cases to make for spectacularly bad philosophy, but it only takes one to spoil the whole enterprise. In this essay, I'll walk through what seem to me to be the most egregious aspects of bad free will philosophy.

Bad Definitions

Almost no one starts off a discussion of free will by defining what they mean by free will. And, don't laugh, I'm not going to, either (well, maybe a bit, later on). It is seldom clear what any commentator means by free will, what kind of evidence they think is relevant to the discussion, or what they would consider a valid source of knowledge on the subject. And it gets worse, because not only is free will not defined, but neither are "free" or "will". Much of the time it's not even clear why we need to talk about free will.

Of course, one may sometimes infer from what someone says what assumptions they are making after a while, but this is a very inefficient way to communicate. Worst of all, after one has suffered through enough nonsense to collect sufficient information to triangulate what they actually mean, they usually mean some form of contra-causal free will.

Contra-causal free will is the view (almost universal amongst physicists) that our decisions are not caused by anything. And by "anything" we include everything physical, visceral, and social. So for example, if our own emotions are involved in decision making, then we have no free will. Also, it doesn't count if the decision we make is unconscious. Our state of knowledge tells us that our emotions are involved in every decision, every choice, and every evaluative thought we have because we encode the value or salience of information as feelings. And it seems very likely that all decisions rely on unconscious inferential processes. Ergo, physicists argue that we don't have free will, meaning, we don't have contra-causal free will. But so what? Contra causal free will is a nonsense idea to start with.

Coming back to the problem of bad definitions, the people who are talking about contra-causal free will almost never use the words "contra-causal"; they may not ever have heard the words "contra-causal" (I hadn't, until recently). So, while they appear to be talking about the same thing as other people, they are not, and they probably don't really know what they are talking about, and don't know that they don't know.

A major problem with all these kinds of discussion is that people conclude what they believed at the outset. Deduction from axioms only reproduces the axioms in the end. Assume that we have free will and you can deduce that we must have it because at some point we will judge a proposition to be true on the basis of our belief in the axiom. Assume that we don't have free will and an equally valid line of reasoning will deduce that we cannot have it. This is a built-in flaw of deductive reasoning. We ought to know better by now, but one of the basic assumptions about free will debates is that we don't need to examine our starting assumptions before giving our opinion.

And the reason is obvious. By the time most people have given an accurate account of what they axiomatically believe about free will, it's apparent that they are not interested in having a discussion about it, they merely wish to assert a more or less elaborate belief system. Either that or, by spelling out their assumptions, they realise how stupid the subject is and give up before attempting to communicate it. Most of what makes it into the public domain is ipso facto stupid.

The most egregious examples of this are the ones that grant that I feel myself making decisions, but assert that because the equations that govern the movement of atoms are deterministic, that my decisions are an illusion. In other words, yes, decisions do get made, but we cannot think of them as decisions because that contradicts the model (in which the axiom is "we don't make decisions").

Moreover, the mythical "rational faculty" that is supposed to be the deciding faculty for free will really doesn't exist. This is explained in Mercier and Sperber's book The Enigma of Reason, which looks at the data on how people use reason and shows that we don't. At least, we don't use it for solving problems. 90% of people fail at simple tests of logic, though 80% of us state that we are 100% confident about our answer. All of us do better at solving problems in small groups. What we call "reason" is, in fact, used to propose reasons for things that have already happened. We make decisions using unconscious inference, then, when we need to know why, then reasoning kicks in and produces a reason.

It would be helpful is everyone could spend some time identifying what they believe and why they believe it before contributing to a discussion. 

Bad Methods

Almost everyone who still argues against free will relies at some point on the opinion of Benjamin Libet, which has been proven wrong by his peers. I comprehensively debunked Libet in a blog post called Free Will is Back on the Menu, so I don't really want to go over this ground again. Really, I suppose all I did was repeat the many ways in which other people, Libet's colleagues, debunked his opinion about his results. Libet wasn't exactly a fraud, he just misinterpreted the data based on a faulty model. The intellectual frauds are all the people (mainly physicists) over whom Libet exercised a powerful confirmation bias and who have been uncritically repeating his opinion ever since, without ever looking at the literature within which it is embedded.

Included in the data on human decision making we ought to include all the tests like the Wasson Selection Test that show we don't use reasoning to solve puzzles.

And again, if someone sets out to study decision making, but they take as axiomatic that there is no contra-causal free will, then they are much more likely to design experiments to show this. And again, so what? Contra-causal free will is not a useful way of thinking about human experience. 

Bad Theories

Almost everyone I've come across who denies free will does so either on the basis of a metaphysical commitment to reductionism or a metaphysical commitment to absolute being. So let's look at these.

Metaphysical Reductionism. 

Metaphysical reductionists believe that only the finest possible layers of the universe are real. The search for the nature of reality is the application of a conceptual microtome, slicing the universe so thinly that it cannot be sliced any thinner: atomic means "uncut, indivisible." Obviously, the atom is very cuttable, but we're stuck with calling atoms "atoms" even though our search for the truly atomic continues. This connection with the thinnest layer is why some people link quantum physics and reality.

What's more, they assert that the properties of the atomic entities that exist on that smallest scale are the defining properties of the whole universe. Thus, because they believe it is accurate to describe the universe on the smallest scale as deterministic, then everything, on every scale, is deterministic.

However, there are huge problems with this view. As Sean Carroll will explore in his new book and has talked about in several recent podcasts and various blog posts, we don't know what the world is like on that scale. Of course, we know how to manipulate the equations to predict what kinds of effects we can expect to manifest at a macro-level, but we have no idea what this connotes in terms of physical reality. How does the quantum Hilbert Space relate to reality? No one knows. We don't know what is real at this level and this is the level at which reductionists decide what is real. So... at present we know nothing about reality on those terms.

A majority of physicists have come out against the Copenhagen interpretation of the measurement problem, which in simple terms is the idea that the universe behaves one way when our back is turned and another way when we look at it, which is trickier than it sounds in a system where everything interacts with everything else. But they cannot agree on what does happen. Are there hidden variables that determine how the universe unfolds? Or does each quantum event cause the universe to split into different versions? Are their quantum pilot waves that push the particles around? No one knows. And at present, no one is sure whether we can know. There may be an epistemic horizon beyond which reality exists but we cannot know it or say anything about it. But right now, there is an epistemic horizon and we don't know what lies beyond it or if we ever will. 

Part of the epistemic problem is that we may be able to solve the quantum equations for a single hydrogen atom, but we cannot do so for a deuterium atom, not even in principle. Three particles in a  quantum system make it impossible to provide a precise mathematical description. We have to introduce some pretty gross simplifying assumptions. These assumptions give answers that are pleasingly accurate and precise. When we're already unclear about what the unsimplified equations tell us about reality, how does adding a series of increasingly gross assumptions help get us in touch with reality? Adding simplifications to make the math work takes us further away from reality (if we take the reductionist view). Why is anyone in quantum physics talking about reality? 

Here's the thing. Metaphysical reductionism is just a bad theory. It ignores the role that structure plays in the universe. It's all very well saying that water is really one atom of oxygen and two of hydrogen; but if you have a litre of water and atomise it, you now have no water. You cannot slake your thirst by drinking liquid oxygen (-219 °C) or liquid hydrogen (-259 °C) or any mixture of the two. If water is not real, over and above the existence of its component parts, then the whole category of "real" is nonsense.

Absolutism

The idea of absolute being manifests in many different ways and has a very long and varied history. It was very popular and became highly developed and differentiated in India. And it is still very popular in Advaita Vedanta circles. 

In this idea we are all just manifestations of a larger entity which is characterised by absolute being: it transcends notions of time and space and causation (and all that other metaphysical stuff). Our individuality is an illusion, our "being" as separate from universal being is an illusion, and especially our sense of having free will is an illusion. Absolute being demands strict determinism. So the irony is that even if human beings have free will, God is wholly deterministic. 

However, there is no need to take seriously any theory of absolute being. They are all figments of our imagination. It is not a theory that rests on evidence or makes any testable predictions. Indeed, the  very idea that a spatio-temporal being can experience the Absolute is nonsensical. This is why religieux have to keep making up ad hoc supernatural entities (like a soul or ātman) that are a little bit of the absolute in us; allowing us to bridge the unbridgeable gap between absolute and temporal. Nonsense compounded by more nonsense.

So much for the arguments against free will. However, rather than argue for some version of free will, I want to try to outline the kind of philosophical discussion I find useful. 

Is There A Way Out?

Back in 2016, I wrote a long three-part essay on reality called A Layered Approach to Reality. I was influenced mainly by Richard H. Jones and John Searle. But also by other philosophers and scientists. My small contribution has been a new way to think about the ancient philosophical problem of the Ship of Theseus. In the Layered Approach essay, I argued that reductionism is fine for discovering knowledge about substances, i.e., what the universe and things are made of. And I argued that a universe in which there is one kind of stuff is the only one that is consistent with all the observations and other theories of science. But this is less than half the story of the universe. 

The basic stuff is made into a lot of other stuff, i.e., structures that persist over time, that are insensitive to swapping out identical parts, and which act as causal agents in ways their component parts alone cannot (like water dissolving salt). In other words, structures are real by any useful definition of that term. In Feb 2019, Sean Carroll recently interviewed James Ladyman on the subject of Reality, Metaphysics, and Complexity. Ladyman's philosophy is similar to what I've proposed in that he argues we have to treat persistent structure as real, but there are some differences between us as well. Listening to him wrestle with the status of numbers I wanted to shout, "Read John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality!" Anyway, I just wanted to point out that I'm not the only one. Incidentally, note that John Worrall's (1989) argument for structural realism is a different kettle of fish.

Any biologist will tell you that dissection can only reveal so much about an organism. You could sequence the entire genome, all the epigenetic info, and map all the genes to proteins and you'd still know nothing about how an organism behaves. You have to observe the living organism interacting with its environment as a system in order to appreciate that organism. Analysis and dissection are the methods of reductionism. And again, these are great for studying substances. It's just that if the object we wish to study is a structure, then reductionism is useless because the moment we dismantle a structure to find what it is made of, we cease to have a structure. 

So, we combine reductionism for understanding substance and anti-reductionism for understanding structures. Anti-reductionism is also sometimes called emergentism. George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) first referred to "emergent properties" of structures in 1875. An emergent property is a property of a complex object that is not possessed by any of its component parts alone or in simple combinations (lacking structure). Generally speaking, emergent properties are not predictable from the properties of the components.

John Searle's analysis of kinds of facts can help us understand how this relates to our daily life.


Kinds of Facts

My Searle-y explanation of the ancient problem of the Ship of Theseus illustrates the principle. Timber has certain intrinsic properties that are ontologically objective: they are real and don't depend on an observer, or we could say that they are true for all observers. Intrinsic properties don't allow a pile of timber to transport a hero across a sea. The timber has to be assembled in a particular way to create a range of new properties. The hull of a ship encloses a volume that has a net density that is much less than the density of the timber and less than the density of water. So a structure floats even if the building material does not. Thus we can build ships from steel which is 8 times as dense as water. Low density is an (emergent) property of the structure that its component parts do not possess. Similarly for the shape that makes a ship move easily through the water, and which resists sideways movement, and so on.

Such a structure is then fit for transporting Theseus across the sea. Functions are observer-relative, and require prior knowledge. A naive dweller may look at a ship and conclude, rather, that it is a cistern for keeping water in. However, for a knowledgeable observer, the fact that a ship is a ship, is epistemically objective. It is true for everyone who knows what a ship it.

Most discussions of this ancient problem centre on "identity" which is, at best, an ontologically subjective fact. I would argue that since identity is only apparent with prior knowledge, that identity is likely to be epistemically subjective as well. The question "Is it the same ship?" has to be followed by the question "To which observer?". All the accounts I have read of the problem assume an unchanging observer with prior knowledge, which is nonsense, and why the problem presents as a paradox.

To come back to the relevant point, the timber has intrinsic properties that make it suitable for shipbuilding. But the ship qua structure also has unique intrinsic properties that are limited by, but not determined by, the properties of the components: the density of the building material does not determine the density of the ship's hull. Structures, in other words, are every bit as real as components.


Structures are real

In my essay about layered reality, I accepted the pragmatic premise that structures are real. But I also pointed out that emergent properties accumulate with complexity. Something as fiendishly complex as a biological cell has many layers of properties that cannot possibly be predicated of mixtures of its individual atoms. There are 1000s of relatively simple chemical compounds as well as 10s of thousands of complex polymers such as peptides, proteins, and nucleic acids. 

As I say, we don't really know what subatomic reality looks like. But the atomic theory of matter is a very successful theory in that it explains a great deal and makes nice and highly accurate predictions. Matter at the atomic scale (just beyond the quantum indeterminacy) is deterministic. The laws that govern matter give (relatively) simple answers: the way the universe evolves on that scale is described by relatively simple equations and if we know the state at any given time, we can use the equations to determine its state at any arbitrary time. 

But this very soon breaks down. As with quantum systems, macro systems quickly become too complex to calculate. If we consider the problem is one of calculability, that is, strictly speaking, an epistemic problem, and we call this view weak emergentism. In this view, the entire universe is still deterministic even if we cannot understand it well enough to predict it. Reductionists who dabble in emergentism (like Sean Carroll) tend to favour this kind of emergentism.

However, if emergent properties are real, if they result in more than just increasing complexity and actually produce wholly new properties, then we have a new ontology at each new level and this is strong emergentism. Reductionists argue for a single, fundamental, ontology combined with some necessary approximations to cope with complexity. Metaphysical antireductionists argue that only the universe considered as a whole, with everything affecting everything else all the time is real (this position is rare). I take a middle path: reductionism for substance, and antireductionism for structures. 

One complicating factor is that in non-linear systems (typically where a large number of components are interacting) predictability may fall to zero. And this happens quickly. A simple pendulum is entirely predictable. But add another degree of freedom halfway along, a pendulum hanging from the end of a pendulum, then the result is apparently chaotic and certainly unpredictable. But this does not make it non-deterministic. The system is still evolving according to patterns (which we call laws when we can codify them), it's just that the system is highly sensitive to changes in the initial conditions. The pattern of a double pendulum is too complex to be computable with any usefulness. The question is whether at some point the unpredictability becomes non-deterministic, i.e. not simply that we cannot determine the pattern from observation, but that the evolution of the system is not governed by simple laws at all. No one would argue that living cells do not change in ways that have patterns, but do such patterns as exist constitute determinism?

The difference between a mass of unstructured matter and, say, a living cell, is vast. So vast that it opens the door to strong emergentism. And if matter organised into biological cells is not deterministic, then how much less so an organism composed of trillions of such cells, themselves structured into organelles, organs, and systems, all in multiple feedback loops. And as we now learn, all in meaningful relationships with our symbiotic microorganisms on the skin and in the gut.

Cutting Loose the Legacy of God

One might ask why we debate free will at all. It is, after all, a theological concept designed to make God seem to be less of a monster for having invented evil and suffering. We're under no obligation to the legacy philosophy and theology of the past. Indeed, the question of whether we have free will is not really the best place to start a discussion about morality. It doesn't even come into my long essay on the evolution of morality for example. What kinds of questions might we really interested in? 

,

Mainly, as far as I can see, we're nowadays interested in the issue of culpability. It is through this issue that discussion of will has become naturalised in the secular world, i.e., in the absence of god what is the basis for our continuing with the idea that good people deserve to be rewarded and bad people deserve to be punished. In a sense, this is now the issue. Not God's big evil, but our petty human evil. But culpability admits to degrees. I discussed this to some extent in an essay in 2015 called Why Killing is Wrong and I'm actually working on a more nuanced version of this in an essay provisionally entitled Objective Morality (chosen to be provocative). I also touch on relevant issues in my recent essay We Need to Talk About Utilitarianism, which criticises the assumptions that utilitarians make and the way they address moral questions.

If I kill someone, the question is not "am I culpable", but "to what extent am I culpable?" My role in society may involve killing or allow it in certain circumstances (soldiers, police, doctors). As a citizen, I am allowed to defend myself, my loved ones, and my property and lethal force may sometimes be justified. And so on. There are many nuances. 

We know that decisions and choices are influenced by many factors, not least of which is our social environment. It's now many decades since social psychologists pointed out that assuming a person's behaviour is 100% because of their internal motivations is a fallacy (the fundamental attribution fallacy). We are social animals, and much of our behaviour is influenced by what our group expects from us, or at least how we perceive their expectations. We have mutual obligations, sometimes these take the form of rights and duties. We're also subject to "priming", by which I mean if we're having a bad day, for whatever reason, we make different decisions than if we're having a good day. It may even be that what we encounter in the moments before making a decision unconsciously influences the outcome.

Societies do best when there is political stability and citizens are prosperous. Too much stability and a society will stagnate, cease to innovate, and when the time comes they will fail to respond to changes in the environment.  Too little stability and the society will become chaotic and fall apart from the inside out. So we consider everyone to be under mutual obligations. And in large societies, we formalise rights and duties in law codes, the oldest examples of which are almost as old as civilization itself. No human being ever had absolute free will because we live, we exist, in a social network with mutual obligations. Any philosophy that ignores this aspect of humanity is worthless. 

Illusions

Discussing free will in a reductionist framework is filled with traps. For example, reductionists conclude that anything which is dependent on something else is not real, because it can be reduced to its components. And we've seen how badly physicists go wrong already: If Amy has six apples and Sheldon reduces them to a quark-gluon plasma in a super-apple collider and captures the plasma in a specially designed container that prevents any loss of matter or energy, how many apples does Amy have? None. Reductionists literally cannot see the forest for the trees. Or they cannot see the universe for the quantum fields.

One of the most common reductionist tropes is that human experiences are "just an illusion". It doesn't matter that you have a persistent sense of self, a lasting personality, are able to remember your life, and experience love. In a reductionist framework, it makes sense to say that free will is an illusion, because making decisions is a mental activity, and because everything that is involved in the decision-making process is complex and dependent on component parts. 

If we take an anti-reductionist approach to structure, the fact that an object or entity is complex and made of parts is not important as long as the structure persists over time. Of course, some reductionists also say that time is an illusion. Certainly, the way we measure time is somewhat arbitrary - we simply count the number of iterative processes or events that occur over the period of observation. Time measurements are arbitrary in this sense, but this does not mean that time is an illusion, far from it. Time is a way of talking about the patterns of change that we perceive in the universe around us. Because we can retain information about previous states and compare them to the present, we can perceive change. Change is ubiquitous and unidirectional with respect to the second law of thermodynamics. This gives us the so-called "arrow of time", by which we mean that far in the past the universe was in a low entropy state and the total entropy has been steadily increasing ever since. So time is also real. It doesn't matter that time is not absolute, because nowhere in my definition of real is there any reference to absolutes. Indeed, I'm inclined to argue against absolutes on principle. For example, we know that relativity is wrong at the beginning of time (the big bang) because it predicts a universe of infinite density. That kind of absolute tells us we've made an error, no matter how good the equations are in less curved spacetime. Even if someone manages to prove beyond reasonable doubt that time is an emergent property of quantum fields (and it already seems likely that space is such an emergent property) it won't make time an illusion. 

The problem here is that illusions are not causal. An illusion doesn't make a difference in the world because it cannot interact with the world. Thus, to say that free will is an illusion is to say that humans make no difference in the universe. This is not merely dismal fatalism, it's self-defeating. If humans make no difference, then it makes no difference what we believe and there is no reason to believe that we don't have free will. It is equally valid (at least) to believe that we do have free will. As a philosophy, it ought to lead to passivity, but it doesn't. People who don't believe in free will go on being active and making decisions; they just tell themselves a story about the experience of deciding that makes sense in a legacy/reductive framework, but doesn't in a more sensible framework. 

The same arguments occur for having a sense of self. Of course, self is not an entity; of course, it is generated by the brain, but to argue that our sense of self is not causal, that it makes no difference, is clearly ridiculous. Else why would so many people want to persuade us to stop believing in it? 

The (ill)logic of the Free Will Illusion

The argument is that free will is an illusion, i.e., that there is no free will, and that our apparent free will is not causal, i.e., it makes no difference in the world. But if it is not causal, why is it a problem? The answer is usually that our belief in free will (or self or whatever the "illusion" is) is problematic in some way (usually it makes us unhappy). So free will is an illusion but, being a potential causal agent, a belief is not an illusion. Indeed, in this argument, a belief is real and has causal potential. Beliefs make a difference in the world or they would not be a problem. 

We often see that the same metaphysical reductionists who get so exercised about free will being an illusion seem to become apoplectic about people who hold religious beliefs or even those people who continue to believe in free will. But if free will is an illusion and the world is deterministic why does it matter what anyone believes? Indeed, if there is no free will then no one has a choice about what they believe and trying to persuade them to change their mind is a wild contradiction in terms. If there is no free will then no one ever changes their minds because that would require us to be free to do so.

The reductionist argument about free will being an illusion is not followed through to its logical conclusion by any of its proponents (that I know of). There is clearly a glaring contradiction in asserting, on the one hand, that "free will" (whatever we mean by it) is an illusion and, on the other, asserting that beliefs are persistent in time and causal (i.e., real). Because believing, willing, and selfing are all of the same kind; they are all forms of mental activity (and this epistemically and ontologically subjective). If a belief is causal, then so is our will. Or if will is not causal, then neither are beliefs. You can't have it both ways. 

It does matter what we believe and it matters what we do, if only to the people around us. Because of the latter, the reasons we discern behind our own actions also matter. Will, belief, and behaviour have to be seen in a social context. We need to be able to produce accounts of our behaviour (i.e., reasons) that make sense to those around us, more especially when our behaviour contravenes group norms. Morality evolved in, and only makes sense in, a social context. The broad parameters are limited by our biology, but our flexibility as a species allows for huge variety in mores and customs (and interpretative frameworks).

~~oOo~~

Freewill is Back on the Menu

“There is now no safer occupation than talking bad science to philosophers, except talking bad philosophy to scientists.”

- Mary Midgley.

I don't find freewill a particularly interesting problem, but it does come up from time to time. Because it is essential to Buddhist ethics, I've ended up writing about it a few times despite my reluctance, mainly to try to counter what I see as a pernicious trend to Determinism amongst Buddhists influenced by Advaita Vedanta. My essays on the subject include: Do We Have Freewill?(6 Feb 2015), A Sutta on Freewill Experience and Free Will in Early Buddhism (4 Apr 2014). The problem has become a cause célèbre amongst scientists since the 1980s when Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) first published results of his experiments on the so-called "readiness potential". The correct interpretation of these experiments has always been hotly disputed, though Determinists seldom cite any dissenting voices when they reference this material (so readers might be unaware of the controversy). We have seen a number of physicists in recent years citing Libet in the media and in books for the general public as "proving" that there is no free will. But as Peter Clarke observes:

Despite the fame of the Libet experiment and its frequent acceptance in popular and semi-popular writings, it has been the subject of intense controversy. Indeed, most specialists in the philosophy of free will who have addressed the Libet claim have rejected it. (2013)

Philosophers and physicists seem to fall out in public quite often these days. See, for example, Goldhill (2016) for a typical complaint about facile arguments from prominent physicists on the subject of philosophy. Physicists seem to take a perverse delight in dismissing philosophy out of hand, but often show their deep ignorance in the process. Stephen Hawking infamously declared philosophy dead. Paraphrasing Goldhill, this is a very stupid thing for a very smart person to say. Which just goes to show that smart people do make mistakes and do say stupid things. We can't just abdicate the responsibility for evaluating what people say, even when they are experts. As Richard Feynman said, "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts". And if we are not in a position to judge, then we can always seek out those who are and get their opinion. Unfortunately, physicists are often seen as authorities and thus their views on philosophy are widely taken seriously, even when they are out of their depth and saying stupid things. 

In this essay, sparked by a blog by Deric's MindBlog, I will outline Libet's findings, explore some responses from other scholars, and look at the philosophical implications. We might not be able to put to rest the wailing of "there is no free will" by Determinists, but we can at least give them something to chew on for a while.

Libet's Experiments

Libet was investigating the phenomenon of readiness potential (RP). The RP is a slowish build up of electrical potential in the brain, measured at the scalp over the motor cortex by an electroencephalograph (EEG). It occurs a second or more before people make voluntary movements. As the name suggests, this build up of electric potential was assumed to be the brain "getting ready" to initiate a movement. Libet was interested in the timing of the RP and the decision to move.

Libet's classic experiments (Libet 1985, Libet et al. 1983) asked people to make a simple movement, usually flexing their hand or wrist. The subjects were instructed to move whenever they felt like it (within a 20 sec window). At the same time they observed the position of a spot moving in a circle on an oscilloscope screen and reported the position of the spot when they felt the "urge to move". What he found was that there was a delay of some 200 milliseconds (ms) between becoming consciously aware of an urge to move and the actual movement. However, the readiness potential began to build up 350-500 ms earlier.

Note, this is a very short-range phenomenon. The voltage measured on the scalp is in the order of a few micro-volts (10^-6 V). The amplitude drops off sharply. Another few centimetres from the scalp and the electrical activity would be undetectable (so no, this is not a mechanism for telepathy!). Indeed, one of the drawbacks of EEG for measuring brain activity is that it doesn't detect electrical activity below the cortex layer. The technique is also poor at localising the activity - multiple electrodes and sophisticated analysis of the activity can improve this, but EEG is still a pretty blunt instrument. The technique is famous for the early discovery that the activity in the cortex occurs in waves.

Libet controversially interpreted the initiation of the readiness potential as the "decision" to move, the point where the brain unconsciously began preparing to move. Becoming conscious of an "urge to move" came significantly later, and then, finally, the action itself was initiated, the whole process taking almost half a second. In this interpretation, the experience of willing our hand to move comes quite a long time after the brain has decided to move. In other words, the experience of willing our hand to move is a secondary feature in the process. Hence, freewill, interpreted as contra-causal freewill, is not what initiates a voluntary movement.

Contra-causal Freewill

I was alerted to idea of contra-causal freewill by reading Patricia Churchland's book Touching A Nerve: The Self as Brain (2013) in which she argues against it. Contra-causal freewill is the idea that we have an abstract capacity called "will" that is like the executive branch of the abstract capacity of "reason". To be considered contra-causally free, this capacity to make decisions or initiate actions must be free from any influences other than itself. Specifically, emotions, motivations, desires, goals, and knowledge must be excluded as potential influences. If any of these influence our decision making then, in this view, our will is not free. Thus for Libet, if some unconscious part of the brain is making the decision to move and then placing the idea in our conscious minds, then even though our brain is still making a decision, it does not count as free will because it is not based on the abstract reasoning capacity.

Any long time readers of this blog will know that this definition of free will is suspect at best. There are two main problems with it. Firstly, the definition makes an egregious mistake in considering reason to be an abstract capacity. I follow Lakoff and Johnson in taking reason to be a function of an embodied mind. Reasoning specifically uses metaphors grounded in our experience of the world to enable abstraction. It is not that we have an abstract capacity for reason, but that we have an embodied capacity for abstraction. Research by Antonio and Hannah Damasio (amongst others) has shown that emotions are involved in all decision making. As I have explained it, emotions tell us how salient any fact is to our decision making process (see Facts and Feelings, 25 may 2012). There is simply no plausible way for contra-causal freewill to operate. Secondly, the definition involved legacy understandings of how reasoning works. I also follow Mercier and Sperber in seeing reasoning as an argumentative capacity. It is well known that individuals are generally very poor at reasoning tasks. Most of us do not to make rational decisions and when we try to, we almost inevitably fall into cognitive bias or logical fallacy. On individual tests of reasoning, we frequently score worse than random guessing. The long lists of cognitive biases and common logical fallacies that we are prone to bear stark witness to this. Reasoning is not activated until we are assessing someone else's argument or retrospectively justifying our own actions (see An Argumentative Theory of Reason, 10 May 2013). 

As Churchland has said, contra-causal freewill is not particularly interesting. Even if the experiment showed that we do not have contra-causal freewill, this would still not be interesting as the concept is a legacy of a bygone era that has no place in modern discussions about the mind or morality. Clearly, many scientists are poorly informed on developments in philosophy because they think philosophy is worthless. They cannot be relied on, in general, to be guides to the philosophy of freewill. This is an important caveat when considering this question. My suspicion is that the criticism cuts both ways. That as much as philosophers like to comment on science, they are often too poorly informed about it to be trustworthy guides to it. All too many philosophers in this field seem to be ontological dualists who do not believe that studying neurons can tell us how the mind works, for example. Sorting out whether or not any individual commentator on this issue makes sense is really quite difficult. No doubt I am also a poor guide to this issue. However, other scholars have been trying to reproduce Libet's experiments and assessing his interpretation of the results since it was published. And we can turn to them to get some balance.

Re-evaluating Libet.

As I say, the interpretation of Libet's experiments has been the subject of intense controversy since they were first published. It seems, from my outsider point-of-view, as though physicists have lined up to say that they prove that human beings are Deterministic and that there is no freewill. But even casually reading around this subject we see that philosophers have lined up to deny that Libet tells us anything about freewill.

For example, what exactly is a voluntary movement? Peter Clarke (2013), for example, cites the example of a tennis player serving a ball. The decision to serve may be voluntary and the movement of the arm might even be partially under conscious control, but the myriad movements that coordinate the whole body as it moves and balances to support the motion of serving are almost entirely unconscious. The motions that direct the ball to the precise location on the opposite player's court are mostly not under the direct control of the player. Tennis players have developed a kind of reflex that allows them to serve accurately at speeds that does not require conscious thought. Indeed, in many sports, we know that thinking too much about key muscle movements is counter-productive. So, is serving the ball a voluntary act? I get this playing the guitar. I train my fingers to find and pluck the notes I want so that I don't have to think about them and this enables me to sing at the same time. If I was consciously seeking out notes on the fretboard and dredging up lyrics and all the other components of articulation and delivery, I could not play the simplest tune, let alone something as complex as, say, the Beatles' tune Blackbird. The assumption that a decision to act cannot occur without being conscious of it is deeply problematic. In playing a tune like Blackbird, I initiate hundreds of actions with no consciousness of doing so because my attention is usually elsewhere. So this question is far from trivial and it ought to make us pause before considering what it means for an experimental subject to make a "voluntary movement". Even if Libet relies on a single movement, how do we know that this is representative, or that the experiment is able to isolate that movement from everything else that is going on in a conscious subject?

An important criticism of the Libet experiment is that it is very difficult to judge when one experiences the "urge to move". Clarke (2013) did the experiment himself and commented "When I try this, I find it very hard to judge the precise time when I decided to move my finger / wrist." Clarke describes studies on the reliability of the subjective timing of events which have shown it to be very imprecise. Additionally, the experiment involves an attention shift from the movement to the timing that "may have introduced temporal mismatches between the felt experience of will and the perceived position of the clock hand." Attempts to eliminate this mismatch have shown that the RP occurred before the "urge to move" only in about two thirds of subjects. To try to improve accuracy, the experiment was performed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and this also showed that "the activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex was correlated with the decision [to move] with 60% prediction accuracy, up to 10 sec before the conscious decision." These findings seem to say that there cannot be a causal relationship between the RP and the "urge to move", else it would occur every time. In which case Libet appears to have misinterpreted what the RP is.

Clarke (2013) lists a number of other published criticisms of the Libet experiments. Firstly, Libet takes the RP to represent a decision to move; i.e., he believes that there is a causal connection between the beginning of the RP and the action, if and when it comes. However, it appears that there is no neural connection between the areas that build up potential in the RP (the sensory motor-cortex) and the parts of the brain associated with decision making (in the parietal lobe). Thus, in addition to there being a disconnect in practice, there is no obvious mechanism for the RP to cause the urge to move, either.

Secondly, if the RP was the cause of the movement, then we would expect a strong correlation between the timing of the onset of RP and the timing of the urge to move. But this correlation does not occur. Experiments to test this seem to rule out the RP as cause of the urge to move, though not of the movement itself. So, at the very least, the mechanism proposed by Libet has a missing link. And that link might play an active role in the process (i.e., might be directly causal).

Alfred Mele offers a third criticism of the Libet experimental set up, noted by Clarke (2013). In Libet's experiments, the data was only stored when a movement is initiated. Libet collected no data on what happened if the subject decided not to move. This vitiates his finding because it's entirely possible to prepare to move, which would presumably initiate an RP, and then not experience the urge to move. If an RP can exist and not give rise to an urge to move, then RP may not related to the urge to move at all. This possibility ought to have been excluded, but was not. A variation on the experiment by Trevena and Miller did collect data on cases where the decision was made not to move. The RP was the same whether they moved or not. And this suggests that RP does exist without giving rise to the urge to move, or an action, which undermines Libet's conclusion that RP represents a decision to move. 

A fourth weakness was pointed out by Hermann, et al. They set the experiment up as a decision to press one of two buttons in response to a stimulus. They also found the RP appearing before the urge to move occurred, but the RP occurred even before the stimulus appeared and thus is unlikely to have been related to a decision about which button to press. Again, the evidence points away from a coupling of RP and the urge to move. In fact, Schurger, et al (2012) showed the decision to move occurs very late in the course of the RP, not at the initiation of it.

Libet himself argued that his interpretation showed that, although freewill in the sense of consciously initiating actions was ruled out, we still had the option of inhibiting actions between the initiation of the RP (what he called the decision to move) and the urge to move. Some people called this "free-won't". This might be an interesting thread to follow up, except that considering the various critiques of Libet's experiment and interpretation, it seems that treating the initiation of the RP as the decision point makes no sense.

The real nail in the coffin, however, was published in Feb 2016 (just a couple of weeks ago as I write this). Libet was focussed on spontaneous voluntary movements (SVM) and it turns out that these are rather different in their underlying dynamic than movements initiated in response to a stimulus. Citing from Deric Brown's blog:

"A new generation of experiments is now suggesting that brain activity preceding spontaneous voluntary movements (SVMs) 'may reflect the ebb and flow of background neuronal noise, rather than the outcome of a specific neural event corresponding to a ‘decision’ to initiate movement... [Several studies] have converged in showing that bounded-integration processes, which involve the accumulation of noisy evidence until a decision threshold is reached, offer a coherent and plausible explanation for the apparent pre-movement build-up of neuronal activity.'" (Shurger et al. 2016)

So what looks like a build up of "readiness potential" is, in fact, happening because of anticipating having to make a decision at some point (and in the experiment the subject is explicitly primed to do so). The actual decision is reached when background neural activity reaches a peak:

"In particular, when actions are initiated spontaneously, rather than in response to a sensory cue, the process of integration to bound is dominated by ongoing stochastic fluctuations in neural activity that influence the precise moment at which the decision threshold is reached. ... This, in turn, gives the natural but erroneous impression of a goal-directed brain process corresponding to the ‘cerebral initiation of a spontaneous voluntary act’"

In other words, if we look again at the graph of "readiness potential" the decision to move comes at the peak of neuronal activity not at the onset of the RP. The RP is an accumulation of more or less random neuronal activity. This would explain some of the contradictory results mentioned above.

But, crucially, what this suggests to me is that the urge to move precedes the decision to move. The urge to move may, in fact, be an important factor in the decision to move. So it seems that Libet's interpretation of his experiment was flawed in these various ways and that freewill is back on the menu.

Conclusions

I discovered this information because I happen to read a number of neuroscience blogs and Twitter feeds and one of them happened to mention this new article by Shurger et al. (2016) which drew me into the subject anew. But there was always debate. Over what freewill means. Over what the readiness potential represents. Over the causal relationship between the readiness potential and the urge to move; or between the RP and the actual movement. Over Libet's experimental methods.

This experiment is so often presented with a one-sided interpretation, with no mention of the mass of contradictory evidence that make Libet's interpretation look doubtful. There is no mention of the intense debate that has ensued. Any reader could be forgiven for thinking that it was an open and shut case or that Libet had definitively shown that freewill could not exist. But this was never the case. The interpretation of the experiment could never be considered unequivocal proof of anything. The weakness of Libet's experimental design and the many contra-indications for Libet's interpretation of the readiness potential as a decision or even as causal, ought to have been given more prominence in the discussion of freewill.

Most scientists are aware of the problem with "proving" an hypothesis anyway. As Karl Popper observed, an hypothesis can really only be disproved or a conjecture refuted. A scientific theory may make more or less accurate predictions. For example, the Higgs Boson has not in fact been proved to exist. However, the theory (The Standard Model of Particle Physics) did predict a particle would be found in a certain energy range and such a particle was found in the Large Hadron Collider. So the theory survives another test, and we now try to test other predictions that it makes. The theory could fail at any point, and many scientists hope that it does, because that would make their work far more interesting and open up the field to new discoveries. The failure of the Standard Model would initiate a golden age of inquiry into the nature of the universe. Scientists are frankly bored by the idea that everything has been discovered. Which is the opposite of how they are sometimes portrayed and the opposite of religious approaches to knowledge. 

When so-called scientists give a biased presentation of an issue, citing only the evidence for their interpretation and avoiding even mentioning that there is considerable evidence against it, then that is a kind of fraud. Scientists committing such fraud ought to be censured by their peers. False statements ought to be retracted. And I think in this area of freewill many scientists are guilty of this kind of fraud. And many laypeople have repeated the fraudulent claims and perpetuated a falsehood.

In this the public have been extremely badly served by lazy journalists who have simply failed to report the experimental evidence. Whether this also amounts to fraud depends on your point of view. I see the primary function of journalism as being entertainment. Entertainers are always allowed some "poetic licence" to deceive us about facts if the version of events they present is more entertaining than reality. Hollywood films almost always distort history because the real story is often boring. Science journalists are a mixed bag and you never know which kind of story you are reading, but these days I just assume, with very few exceptions, that if a journalist is writing they are seeking to entertain rather than inform.

There will be those who cite this case as showing that the scientific method is broken. That in overturning a previous interpretation of the data science has proved that it cannot be trusted. To my mind, it says completely the opposite. This is science in action. This is the scientific process at work. The overturning of previous interpretations is part and parcel of embracing science. What we think we knew today is quite likely to be overturned tomorrow. For the religieux seeking certain knowledge and believing that they have found it, this seems anathema. That knowledge could be transient and contingent makes it seem untrustworthy. Religion is predicated on the idea of absolute knowledge, from which comes certainty, and relaxation, as all mysteries are resolved in the long run. But that is an impossible fantasy. In the real world, things are messy. Knowledge is never absolute. There is always the possibility of being wrong.

Religieux seem very uneasy with the idea that they might be wrong. Buddhists, in particular, seem to find this concept deeply troubling. Scientists, by contrast, embrace uncertainty and the principle that all knowledge may be overturned by a better explanation. Science progresses by testing ideas to destruction. This attitude of contingency with respect to knowledge of the world is, in fact, far more in keeping with Buddhist ideology. Most Buddhists appear to believe that the world can be understood in absolute terms, that the Buddha was omniscient in this sense, and that the Dharma is an expression of this absolute knowledge, i.e., that it represents absolute truth. They further believe that we can come to this absolute knowledge through introspection and believe that we cannot come to knowledge through examining the world. I have been told by a colleague, for example, that "no amount of study of the brain will ever tell us anything about the mind". Which is just Cartesian Dualism, as far as I can see, and thus a thesis that has already been soundly refuted.

However, despite having cast considerable doubt on the Libet interpretation, this is not the end of the story. There are other arguments against free will that are much more difficult to tackle than Libet's and his Determinist fans, for example, the argument by Sabine Hossenfelder on the Backreaction blog. I don't necessarily agree that arguments from fundamental laws eliminate the possibility of unexpected emergent properties that are indistinguishable from free will, but she still makes a strong argument for anyone who acknowledges the laws of physics. And so the arguments will go on. But as religieux we do need to be wary of pursuing a conjecture only because it supports our doctrine. Freewill is interesting because without it Buddhist ethics would be meaningless. If we seek only to bolster our view, rather than to seek the truth, then the possibility of being wrong is excluded and we are unlikely to accept that we have been wrong when the evidence becomes unequivocal. I see this happening in the area of the afterlife, for example. Intelligent people must always hold to the possibility of being wrong. But intelligent people are also the most reluctant to reconsider their considered views. Intelligent religious people are the worst. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Alexander, P., et al. (2016) Readiness potentials driven by non-motoric processes. Consciousness and Cognition, 39: 38–47. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2015.11.011

Churchland, P. S. (2013) Touching A Nerve: The Self as Brain. W. W. Norton & Co.

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

Fried, I., Mukamel, R. & Kreiman, G. ‘Internally generated preactivation of single neurons in human medial frontal cortex predicts volition’, Neuron (2011) 69: 548-562.

Goldhill, O. (2016). Why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy? Quartz. March 05, http://qz.com/627989/why-are-so-many-smart-people-such-idiots-about-philosophy/

Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary
action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8: 529-566.

Libet, B., Gleason, C.A., Wright, E.W. & Pearl, D. (1983). Time of unconscious intention to
act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (Readiness-Potential), Brain, 106: 623-42.

Schurger, A., Sitt, J.D. & Dehaene, S. (2012) An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-iniated movement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. USA doi:10.1073/pnas.1210467109

Schurger, A. et al. (2016) Neural Antecedents of Spontaneous Voluntary Movement: A New Perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2), 77 - 79.

Additional reading

Fischborn, Marcelo (2016) Libet-style experiments, neuroscience, and libertarian free will. Philosophical Psychology. 1(9) doi: 10.1080/09515089.2016.1141399

"The general result is that neuroscience and psychology could in principle undermine libertarian free will, but that Libet-style experiments have not done that so far."