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? 

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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."

Do We Have Freewill?

In the latter half of the 20th century a series of pioneering experiments by Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist at the University of California in San Francisco, demonstrated a rather startling phenomenon. Libet was able to show that a conscious decision to flex one's wrist was preceded by brain activity which prepared to make the movement. It appeared that we decide unconsciously to make the move, the brain prepares to send the signal to move, and only then do we become conscious of having made a decision. This experiment and others like it have been interpreted by many as showing that freewill is "an illusion". In this essay I explore this argument and outline an important counter-argument by Patricia S. Churchland, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at UC, San Diego. I also look briefly at the determinist argument that some physicists profess. Freewill is not a particularly interesting problem, but since a lot of people talk about it, this is my two cents worth.

Is My Unconscious Part of 'Me'?

The first assumption to look at in the claims based on Libet is the idea that unconscious mental activity is somehow excluded from the freewill debate, even though it occurs in the same brain. But if my unconscious mental activity is not 'mine' then whose is it? The conclusion seems to be that when a decision is made unconsciously, even though it is our brain that makes the decision, that the decision does not count as freewill. Churchland sees this as a manifestation of matter/spirit dualism that separates out reason as a function of spirit. As I explain in my essay on this metaphor, having associated reason with spirit (arguing that reason itself is the essence of being human) it is entailed in the metaphor to then see reason as  "good" and the unconscious as more closely related to matter and therefore "bad". Additionally, reason appears to be under our control and the unconscious is not. Indeed part of the power of the Libet results is that it shows that reason is not under "our" control at all. It begins to look like a byproduct or an afterthought. However the general view of reason is in desperate need of an overhaul. 

I've gone over this material many times now: Damasio and others have shown that all decisions involve weighting of information via emotional resonances. In making a decision we defer to our emotions and find reasons afterwards (See Facts and Feelings). The practical demonstration of this is found in the advertising industry which, since the 1920s and the interventions of Edward Bernays, has appealed to desires rather than to reason when selling products and ideas. Bernays was able to apply his uncle Sigmund Freud's ideas to changing views. Most famously he convinced women to break the social taboo on women smoking by linking cigarettes with suffragettes. He did this by paying debutantes to pose smoking cigarettes during a parade, and alerting the press so they published the pictures under headlines touting cancer-sticks as "torches of freedom" and thus doomed several generations of women to horrible deaths from cancer and emphysema. (See Culture Wars, or The Society Pages) Sometimes taboos are good! In addition I've repeated cited the argument by Mercier & Sperber that in fact individuals are terrible at reasoning (An Argumentative Theory of Reason). We almost always fall into bias or fallacy when trying to reason on our own. They argue that this is not the case in small groups where different ideas can be kicked around and the group reasons collectively. Small groups are much better at reasoning. 

So it appears that the idea that conscious reasoning is what defines humans is long past it's use-by date. Any theory which even implicitly relies on this definition of reason ought to be discounted. Human beings make use of a range of faculties, including emotions and unconscious processes to make all decisions. Nor is it true to say that sapience is restricted to humans. We have now documented self-awareness and tool making in a number of species. Somehow the antiquated idea about reason being our highest and defining faculty still seems to be invoked, but we ought to be very wary of this. 

What Kind of Free Will are we Talking About?

Patricia Churchland makes a very important distinction about who means what by "freewill". Most philosophers and many scientists use freewill as a shorthand for "contracausal freewill". This is the kind of freewill described by Immanuel Kant. Churchland says contracausal freewill means that:

"... your decisions are not caused by anything at all—not by your goals, emotions, motives, knowledge, or whatever. Somehow, according to this idea, your will (whatever that is) creates a decision by reason (whatever that is)." (2013: 179; emphasis in the original)

When some scientist says, on the basis of Libet, that we have no freewill, this is what they appear to mean. They are arguing that we have no contracausal freewill, because conscious reason comes into play late in the decision process. Apart from the fact that this definition of freewill is counterintuitive and seems unlikely to non-philosophers, we've already undermined some of the key assumptions involved in it. As discussed above, Churchland sees that entailed in this view is the idea of a non-physical soul. By disconnecting the decision making process from our bodily processes (like emotions) and assigning it to "pure" reason, those who use this definition seem to be subscribing to a matter/spirit dualism in which reason is a function of spirit not of body. 

The more commonsense variety of freewill is less well defined partly because, like many commonsense definitions, we use it efficiently without fussing over the meaning. To make us more comfortable with the fuzziness of the definition Churchland invokes George Lakoff's ideas about categories being defined by relatedness to a prototype. In this view freewill is not an all or nothing proposition, but some actions are more free than others. Some acts are more typical of freewill than others. And people are somewhat free to choose which actions most represent freedom, since categories are what we impose on experience to help organise it. Most people intuitively understand that sometimes we have more choice than others, or that sometimes people are compelled to chose one option even though in theory they have a choice. This recognition of degrees of freedom seems vital to any sensible theory of how we make choices, especially moral choices. 

Churchland argues that:

"...if contracausal choice is the intended meaning, the claim that free will in that sense is an illusion is only marginally interesting, Because nothing in the law, in child-rearing, or in everyday life depends in any significant way on the idea that free choice requires freedom from all causes." (184)

In other words the freewill that is being denied by philosophers is not very interesting because, being divorced from experience, it's hardly credible anyway. Churchland likens the claim that contracausal freewill is an illusion to announcing that alien abductions are not real. The response is, "So what?", "Who cares?" or "Duh!" Those who deny freewill on the basis of the Libet experiments are not saying anything interesting, though of course at first glance it appears to be a controversial thing to say so the media covers it and the meme gets spread. This whole section of the debate about freewill can safely be shelved with other legacy ideas from philosophy that are no longer relevant. The question is not "Are we free?", but "How free are we now and how free can we be?"


Self Control

Even if there is some doubt about what freewill means, Churchland argues that there is a related concept about which there can be no doubt: self-control. She points out that self-control, the over-riding of impulses to act, takes conscious effort. And in terms of morality, self-control is often just as significant as conscious choice. Morality is very frequently defined in terms of refraining from actions: "thou shalt not..." (in a Christian context) or "I choose to refrain from..." (in a Buddhist setting). Libertarian secularists often complain about religious morality as just being a bunch of rules, but it might be a natural consequence of self-control being a much clearer concept. And although our laws are profoundly influenced by religious models, there has been no significant move away from prohibitive rules even in secular (or nominally secular) countries. 

Most of being a good group member would appear to be inhibiting impulses that go against group norms. Any sociable animal must at times repress selfish impulses in order to benefit the group. Social animals for example prosper by sharing food sources in a way that solitary animals do not. Our motivation for exercising this impulse control vary: fear of reprisal, shame, habit, altruism, and generosity can all come into play. Or we may feel that the "law is an ass" or decide that a small breach of the rules will draw attention to a greater breach (civil disobedience to protest government corruption for example). In other words we can be negatively motivated or positively motivated to follow established norms or to break them.

My reading of Churchland's account of the freewill debate is that for the most part it is poorly framed and thus does not produce interesting results. The reasons for considering contracausal freewill to be the best definition are no longer plausible if they ever were. It serves to confirm that the freewill debate, such as it is, is not particularly interesting. 

Making Moral Judgements

This is not to say that the matter of voluntary actions is unimportant. Social groups operate with norms and rules and when enforcing those norms it's important to know why breaches happened. This is why most legal systems make distinctions of degree in crimes like murder. A murder than is planned months in advance is always seen as a worse crime than one committed in the heat of the moment. A calculated crime is relatively more serious than an impulsive one. This is because consciously breaking the rules is a clear repudiation of those rules. In this case we have serious doubts about the willingness of the person to return to lawfulness. Part of any calculation to commit a crime is usually elaborate planning to avoid detection and punishment. Even if the rule-breaker shows remorse, we have reason to distrust them in the future.

The crime of impulse however is more likely to be understood as a momentary lapse and to be treated more leniently if accompanied by suitable remorse and a willingness to admit fault. Those who plead guilty tend to get lighter punishments. However if someone is prone to repeated crimes of impulse then we tend to treat them like the person who does calculated crimes, because we cannot trust them to keep the rules.

If someone sets out to injure a person and that person inadvertently die then this is less serious than if the assailant intended kill. It might still be considered murder depending on how we judge the risk involved. An attack with a weapon is more likely to kill than a fist-fight for example. This situation can be seen in the light of calculation and impulse also. If someone is killed purely by accident, with no intent to harm, we may still be found culpable for depriving them of life, but the consequences may be still less severe. For example neglecting our duty of care while doing an inherently dangerous activity, like driving a car, is still quite a serious crime. But if we were proceeding with due care and a pedestrian crosses the street without looking causing them to be knocked down and killed then we are not culpable even those someone has died.

On the other hand if we kill someone in the process of defending ourselves or our property we may not be culpable at all as long as the force we used is judged to be proportionate to the threat we faced. Police officers and soldiers are seldom held to be culpable of murder when they kill someone in the line of duty, even though the community may feel they should be held accountable. This is extremely controversial, but in a culture where murder is fairly routine the enforcement of law comes with severe risk. It's unreasonable to expect police to risk their lives when apprehending a suspect. Soldiers are not given carte blanche to kill. Under the modern rules of war, they may not purposefully kill civilians for example, though this is not a universally recognised restriction especially in asymmetric war where one side is far more powerful than the other. Soldiers may not only kill enemy combatants, but will be rewarded for doing so. In the Vietnam War, efficiency guru Alain Enthoven used the "body count" as a measure of how well the war was going (he subsequently was brought in to reorganise the British health service by introducing the "target culture").

People can be found not-guilty of even the most serious crimes if they do not have the ability to understand the consequences of their actions - either permanently or temporarily. We often detain such people purely on safety grounds. In making judgements about the severity of breaches of social norms we have to take many degrees of intentionality and self-control into account.

Thus an all-or-nothing freewill is not a very helpful instrument in thinking about morality. Moral judgements can be very complex indeed and always take in the motivations and the underlying mental and emotional state of the perpetrator (and often the victim as well). Thus contracausal freewill is fully irrelevant to how our laws operate and to how common sense morality operates (as already pointed out by Churchland). 

As an aside, it is interesting that the baby boomer counter-culture seemed to be all about allowing one's impulses free reign. From "free love" to "greed is good", sections of the post-war generations felt the need to stop restraining themselves and let it all hang out (as the saying goes). As it turns out the backlash against this call for loosening of social restraints has been a far more significant social movement. Neolibertarianism was driven primarily by conservative business people. They wanted freedom from government control on their collective ability to do business, and conceived of this within strong social boundaries which restricted what was acceptable behaviour. The irony is that Neolibertarians are often authoritarian control freaks. They saw increasing liberalism and individualism as a threat to their way of life and took steps to take back control. Now, ironically, we struggle to pass laws to curb the excesses of those same business people even in the face of global economic instability and catastrophic climate change. We can now talk openly about sex, and women have a great deal more social equality, but the businessmen own a great deal more of the wealth and have virtual control over governments. The ideology of the world's leaders is that nothing ought to restrain the creation of profits and that abstract markets are more efficient than governments (though every empirical fact shows this to be untrue). Conservative elements in society still allow liberalism to make gains, such as same-sex marriage for example, but only where it has no consequences for the wealth of the wealthy. At the same time the threat of terrorism continues to eat away at civil liberties and individual freedoms. So the disinhibition of the 1960s is a pyrrhic victory.

The question of who is responsible for actions has become obscured to some extent by determinist scientists. The media has shown itself time and again to be highly irresponsible when reporting science. Media companies are in the business of entertainment and so news streams are only secondarily about informing us and are primarily about distraction and sensory stimulation. Scientists with a controversial message are more likely to get the oxygen of media attention than those with the more sober message. However there is still an argument about freewill based on the view that the universe is deterministic. We turn now to this argument.

Are We Deterministic Robots?

The view that being able to frame regularities in the universe in mathematical expressions, means that the universe is therefore deterministic is popular amongst physicists. In a deterministic system if we had perfect knowledge of the starting conditions, the elements, and rules, then we could perfectly describe the behaviour of the system indefinitely far into the future. This kind of Determinism was espoused, for example, by Stephen Hawking in his last book The Grand Design:

"so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion." (32)

Sean Carroll has also expressed the view that we're all machines that think. This argument is related to the one I was exploring with regard to the afterlife. Life is made up of atoms and we understand the behaviour of atoms, so we understand the basis upon which life exists, even if we don't quite understand all the processes of life yet. But whereas the claim about the afterlife was strictly limited to the persistence of information about the person after death as governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy always increases in a closed system), this claim about a deterministic universe is unlimited. The unlimited nature of the claim trips it up.

It is true that we understand the behaviour of atoms at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to living things. But we also have to take into account the nature of complex systems. Even when a complex system is made up of simple elements following simple rules, the behaviour of the system is nondeterministic: we cannot predict it. When a system is made up of complex elements which combine according to complex rules and we get emergent properties at several different levels at once, then that system is decidedly not deterministic. An economy or the weather are not deterministic, not predictable.

As far as life is concerned we don't have perfect knowledge of the starting conditions and nor can we ever gain such knowledge. As far as the universe as a whole this also appears to be true. We can conjecture, but not have perfect knowledge. In fact because of random quantum fluctuations in space-time we can never be entirely sure about the elements in play. And the rules are sufficiently complex that to date no one understands them with anything like perfect knowledge (something acknowledged by Hawking, who goes so far as to say that he doubts we'll ever have a unified set of equations for the universe). The mathematics describing a single sub-atomic particle interacting with all the known fields has yet to be solved: it involves 7 or 9 extra dimensions of space that themselves at so small that they add nothing to the dimensionality we experience.

We can demonstrate the problem by considering a simple pendulum and then adding complexity. A simple pendulum vibrates in two dimensions, with one end fixed. The behaviour of this pendulum follows a simple law: the period of the vibration for small amplitude (θ << 1) is approximated by:

Where L is the length of the pendulum and g is the acceleration due to gravity. In fact for longer amplitudes the equation is more precisely:

This is complicated, but in fact not difficult to solve to an arbitrary level of accuracy (the factors in the series quickly become vanishingly small). For most large clocks only one or two members of the series are required for sufficient accuracy in calculations.

Intuitively we might think that adding a joint to the pendulum halfway along it's length, in effect a pendulum attached to the end of another pendulum, would complicate matters, but not so much. But in fact a double pendulum's motion is chaotic. Technically if we precisely specify the starting conditions we can predict it's motion, but we can only calculate the next moment, by precisely knowing what has happened from time = 0. For each moment in time the calculation gets longer until it very quickly becomes too difficult a problem for all the computing power inherent in the universe. If we start at an arbitrary time we have almost no chance of calculating what will happen next. A double pendulum is still technically deterministic, because it is theoretically possible to know the starting conditions, the precise details of the system, and the rules that must be followed.

If we conceive of an atom as being connected to other atoms by forces, then a system with two atoms would be like a double pendulum with no fixed end and instead of vibrating in only two dimensions they vibrate in three. The motions of these two atoms are chaotic and far more difficult to predict than a simple double pendulum, i.e. far more difficult than virtually impossible.

Now consider than there are of the order of 10¹⁰⁰ atoms in the universe and all of them are connected via forces to each other. And we need to keep in mind that atoms, themselves are in fact systems of smaller particles which are again all interacting with all the other particles, and that fundamentally all that we see as particles and forces are simply vibrations of interacting fields that extend throughout the universe. Conceived of as a pendulum the overall motion of the universe is essentially infinitely complex. Even if we could precisely define the first moment in the history of the universe (something we cannot yet do), then by the second moment the vibrations in the various fields would be impossible to calculate. By the time particles appeared on the scene as an emergent property of the cooling universe, the system is already impossible to predict on the lowest scales. A system like this cannot be considered deterministic, even in theory.


What Kind of Ordered Universe Do We See?

So an obvious question then is, why do we see ordered behaviour at all? The order we see emerging from this 3D pendulum with 10¹⁰⁰ moving parts is because of emergent properties when looking at different scales. Order, or quasi-order, appears in chaotic systems. Think of a hurricane. From space it looks like a relatively regular spiral, or a circle, even though at ground-level it can be chaotic. Also the intensity of the forces involved follow inverse square laws, or inverse fourth-power laws. In theory all fields extend throughout the universe, but the effects of forces are typically short range. Gravity is the only force with a very long range and that is mainly because the masses involved in cosmological phenomena are unimaginably large.

The characteristic ordering (or quasi-ordering) we see depends on the scale we adopt. For example 1g of pure carbon contains about 6 x 10²³ atoms. In a previous essay I pointed out that if each atom was one millilitre in volume, that gram of carbon would fill the western Mediterranean Sea. The atoms are in motion, but the motions are many orders of magnitude smaller than a human eye can see. When we look at this many atoms, the tiny motions of each atom are cancelled out by other atoms doing the opposite. Each atom is regular in a number of ways: each carbon atom has six protons and six electrons, and either 6, 7, or 8 neutrons (giving ¹²C, ¹³C, and ¹⁴C), the chemistry of carbon is very predictable and the shape of its molecules known very precisely. But a diamond, a single gigantic molecule of carbon atoms, does not behave like an individual atom. Crystals are macro-structures that exhibit different kinds of regularities than atoms do. Sit two diamonds together and they do not interact, do not behave as a system at all. Carbon macro-molecules have very different properties to individual carbon atoms. A carbon atom is highly reactive and can form millions of compounds. Diamond by contrast is one of the most inert naturally occurring substances.

Steven Hawking wants us to believe that people are just complex machines. But this is not credible either. Perhaps at some absolute level of abstraction this is true, but not in any meaningful sense. The most complex machines we can make are still less complex than a single cell in our body. We are made from atoms, but millions of billions of billions of atoms, following complex rules; built up from another system of simpler components, also following complex rules, itself the visible manifestation of fields. We could not specify all the atoms of a person and predict what was going to happen next without first calculating every vibration in every field in the entire universe from the first moment in time. With all due respect, Hawking might be a good physicist, but he appears to be a poor philosopher. This may be why he also wrongly claims that philosophy is dead. There is nothing deterministic about a human being, which is why philosophy is very much alive (if not entirely well).

Nothing we know about the emergent properties of collections of Septillions of atoms rules out freewill as an emergent property. Nor are consciousness, or for that matter life itself, ruled out as properties of these unimaginably complex systems. We are very far from having plumbed the depths of the complexity of the universe, despite the fact that the elements and the rules governing the system are quite clear. An analogy here is the chess board. There are 32 pieces on 64 squares and the game has clearly defined rules. We can calculate the theoretical number of different games, and the best computers are better than the best humans, and yet not once has a recorded game ever been the same as a previously recorded game. The difference is that our game has 10¹⁰⁰ pieces!

So, Do We Have Freewill?

The answer to the freewill question appears to be the one that is ascribed to the Buddha in last week's sutta translation and commentary. We unquestionably have some choice And at the very least we exercise self-control. Perhaps this is why the Buddhist precepts are phrased in terms of refraining from actions? 

The arguments against freewill that have emerged recently in the scientific community are simply poor philosophy. As Mary Midgley (1979) has said:

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

That so many scientists are poor philosophers is of course deeply unhelpful. Midgley had Richard Dawkins firmly in her sights in making this comment. She considered his metaphor of the "selfish gene" to be very poor philosophy indeed (as do I). To be fair Dawkins and his followers thought Midgley completely misunderstood what he was getting at. From my point of view, Dawkins' idea is just a Neolibertarian reading of Darwinism. That's not science, it's not even philosophy really; it's ideology. What's more Neolibertarianism is rooted in the Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, which is really rubbish philosophy since it fundamentally misunderstands human beings. Many of these behemoths of popular science are in fact quite poor at philosophy and have created a legacy of poor thinking—especially in the form of unsuitable metaphors—that will continue to haunt intellectuals for many years to come. 

In many ways this debate about freewill is simply silly. It's a legacy of theological debates that were silly to start with. In order to deny freewill one must make a choice. In order to argue against free will, one must make a sustained effort. It's simply not credible. Of course one can choose not to believe in freewill, but that argument is self-defeating. Anti-free will campaigners must argue that they are compelled to believe what they do. This leaves them trying to explain why not everyone is compelled to the same conclusion. If we are not free, then we are apparently not free in a variety of different and conflicting ways. The different conclusions are a powerful argument against determinism if ever there was one. 

~~oOo~~

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

Midgley, Mary. (1979) 'Gene-juggling'. Philosophy. 54(210): 439-458.

See also:-

Metzinger, Thomas. (2013) "The myth of cognitive agency: subpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy." Frontiers of Psychology, 19 December 2013 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00931. http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00931/full