In these lectures, I have tried to answer what are
to me some of the most worrisome questions about how we as human beings fit into the
rest of the universe. Our conception of ourselves as free agents is fundamental to our overall
self-conception. Now, ideally, I would like to be able to keep both my
commonsense conceptions and my scientific beliefs. In the case of the
relation between mind and body, for example, I was able to do that. But when it comes to
the question of freedom and determinism, I am, like a lot of other philosophers, unable
to reconcile the two. One would think that after over 2,000 years of worrying about it,
the problem of the freedom of the will would by now have been finally solved. Well actually,
most philosophers think it has been solved. They think it was solved by Thomas Hobbes and
David Hume and various other empirically-minded philosophers whose solutions have been
repeated and improved right into the 20th century. I think it has not been solved. In this lecture,
I want to give you an account of what the problem is and why the contemporary solution
is not a solution, and then conclude by trying to explain why the problem is likely to stay
with us. On the one hand, weāre inclined to say that since nature consists of particles
and their relations with each other, and since everything can be accounted for in terms
of those particles and their relations, there is simply no room for freedom of the will.
As far as human freedom is concerned, it doesnāt matter whether physics is deterministic, as
Newtonian physics was, or whether it allows for randomness or indeterminacy at the level
of particle physics, as contemporary quantum mechanics does. Indeterminism at the level
of particles in physics is really no support at all to any doctrine of the freedom of the
will because first, the statistical indeterminacy at the level of particles does not show any
indeterminacy at the level of the objects that matter to us, human bodies, for example.
And secondly, even if there is an element of indeterminacy in the behavior of physical particlesāeven if they are only statistically predictableāstill, that by itself gives no
scope for human freedom of the will. It doesnāt follow from the fact that particles
are only statistically determined that the human mind can force the statistically
determined particles to swerve from their paths. The strongest image for conveying this
conception of determinism is still that formulated by Laplace: If an ideal observer knew
the positions of all the particles at a given instant and knew all the laws governing
their movements, he could predict and retrodict the entire history of the universe. Some of
the predictions of a contemporary quantum mechanical Laplace might be statistical, but they
would still allow no room for freedom of the will. Well, so much for the appeal of determinism.
Now letās turn to the argument for the freedom of the will. As many philosophers have pointed out, if there is any fact of experience
that we're all familiar with itās the simple fact that our own choices,
decisions, reasonings and cogitations seem to make a difference to our actual
behavior. There are all sorts of experiences that we have in life where it seems
just a fact of our experience that though we did one thing, we know or at least think we know perfectly well that we could've
done something else. We know we could've done something else because we
chose one thing for certain reasons, but we were aware that there were also
reasons for choosing something else, and indeed we might have acted on those
reasons and chosen that something else. Another way to put this point is to say: itās
just a plain empirical fact about our behavior that it isnāt predictable in the way that the
behavior of objects rolling down an inclined plane is predictable. And the reason it isnāt
predictable in that way is that we could often do otherwise than we in fact did. Human freedom
is just a fact of experience, and if we want some empirical proof of this fact, we can
simply point to the further fact that itās always up to us to falsify any predictions
that anybody might care to make about our behavior. If somebody predicts that Iām
going to do something, I might just damn well do something else. Now, that sort of option is simply not open to glaciers moving down mountain
sides or balls rolling down inclined planes or the planets moving in their elliptical orbits. This
is a characteristic philosophical conundrum. On the one hand, a set of very powerful
arguments force us to the conclusion that free will has no place in the universe. On the other
hand, a series of powerful arguments based on facts of our own experience, inclines us
to the conclusion that there must be some freedom of the will because we
all experience it all the time. Now, thereās a standard solution to this philosophical conundrum. According to this solution, free will and determinism are
perfectly compatible with each other. Of course, according to this solution, everything
in the world is determined, but some actions are nonetheless free. To say that they are
free is not to deny that they are determined, itās just to say that they are not constrained,
weāre not forced to do them. So, for example, if a man is forced to do something
at gunpoint or if he is suffering from some psychological compulsion, then his
behavior is genuinely unfree. But if, on the other hand, he freely acts, if he acts as
we say of his own free will, then his behavior is free. Of course, itās also completely
determined, since every aspect of his behavior is determined by the physical forces operating
on the particles that compose his body, as they operate on all of the bodies in the universe.
So, according to this view, free behavior exists, but itās just a small corner of
the determined worldāitās that corner of determined behavior where certain
kinds of force and compulsion are absent. Now, because this view asserts the compatibility of free will and determinism, itās usually
called simply ācompatibilismā. I think itās inadequate as a solution to the
problem & hereās why. The problem about the freedom of the will is not
about whether or not there are inner psychological reasons that cause us to do things, as well as external physical causes & inner compulsions. Rather, itās about whether or not the causes of our behavior, whatever
they are, are sufficient to determine the behavior so that things have to happen
the way they do happen. And thereās another way to put this problem: Is it ever
true to say of a person that he could have done otherwise, all other conditions
remaining the same? For example, given that a person chose to vote for the Tories,
could he have chosen to vote for one of the other parties, all other conditions remaining the same? Now, compatibilism doesnāt really answer
that question in a way that allows any scope for the ordinary notion of the freedom of
the will. What it says is that all behavior is determined in such a way that it couldnāt
have occurred otherwise, all other conditions remaining the same. Everything that happened
was indeed determined, itās just that some things were determined by certain sorts of
inner psychological causes, those which we call our āreasons for actingā, and not by
external forces or psychological compulsions. So weāre still left with a problem. Is it
ever true to say of a human being that he could've done otherwise? Compatibilism,
in short, denies the substance of free will while maintaining its verbal shell. Well
then, letās try to make a fresh start. I said that we have a conviction of our own free will simply based on the facts of human experience.
But perhaps our belief that such experiences support the doctrine of human freedom
is illusory. Consider this sort of example. A typical hypnosis experiment has
the following form. Under hypnosis the patient is given a posthypnotic suggestion.
You can tell him, for example, to do some fairly trivial, harmless thing, such as, letās
say, crawl around on the floor. Now, after the patient comes out of hypnosis, he might
be engaging in conversation, sitting, drinking coffee, when suddenly he says something
like "What a fascinating floor in this room!" or "I wanna check out this rug"
or "Iām thinking of investing in floor coverings and Iād like to investigate the
coverings on this floor", and he then proceeds to crawl around on the floor. Now, the
interest of these cases is that the patient always gives some more or less adequate
reason for doing what he does. That is, he seems to himself to be behaving freely. We, on the
other hand, have good reasons to believe that his behavior isnāt free at all, that the
reasons he gives for his apparent decision to crawl around on the floor are irrelevant;
that his behavior was determined in advance, that he is, in short, in the grip of a post-hypnotic suggestion. Now, one way to pose the problem of determinism, or at least one important aspect of the problem of determinism is: "Is all
human behavior like that?" But now, if we take that example seriously, it looks as if it
proves to be an argument for the freedom of the will and not against it. The agent
thought he was acting freely, though in fact his behavior was determined. But it seems
empirically very unlikely that all human behavior is like that. Sometimes people are indeed
suffering from the effects of hypnosis and sometimes we know that theyāre in the grip
of unconscious urges which they cannot control. But are they always like that? Is all human
behavior determined by such psychological compulsions? The thesis of psychological determinism is that prior psychological causes determine all of our behavior in the way that they
determine the behavior of the hypnosis subject or the heroin addict. On this view, all
behavior, in one way or another, is psychologically compulsive. But the available evidence
suggests that such a thesis is false. We do indeed normally act on the basis of
our intentional statesāour beliefs, hopes, fears, desires, and so onāand in that
sense our mental states function causally. But this form of cause and effect relation is
not deterministic. We might have had exactly those mental states and still not have done
what we did. Instances of hypnosis and psychologically compulsive behavior on the
one hand, are usually pathological and easily distinguishable from normal free
action on the other. So psychologically speaking, there does seem to be scope for
human freedom. But is this solution really an advance on compatibilism?
Aren't we just saying, once again, yes, all behavior is determined, but what
we call free behavior is the sort determined by rational thought processes?
Sometimes the conscious rational thought processes donāt make any difference, as
in the hypnosis case, and sometimes they do, as in the normal case. But of course, those
normal rational thought processes are as much determined as anything else. So once
again, donāt we have the result that everything we do was entirely written in the book of
history billions of years before we were born, and therefore nothing we do is free in any
philosophically interesting sense? If we choose to call our behavior "free", thatās just a
matter of adopting a traditional terminology. Just as we continue to speak of "sunsets",
even though we know perfectly well that the sun doesnāt literally set, so we continue
to speak of "acting of our own free will", even though there is no such phenomenon.
One way to examine a philosophical thesis or any other kind of thesis for that matter
is to ask: "What difference would it make? How would the world be any different if that
thesis were true, as opposed to how the world would be if that thesis were false?"
Now, part of the appeal of determinism I believe is that it seems to be consistent with the way the world in fact proceeds, at least
as far as we know anything about it from physics. That is, if determinism were
true, then the world would proceed pretty much the way it does proceed, the only
difference being that certain of our beliefs about its proceedings would be false.
But if libertarianismāthat is, the thesis of free willāwere true, it appears we would
have to make some really radical changes in our beliefs about the world. In order for
us to have radical freedom, then it looks as if we would have to postulate that inside
each of us was a "self" that was capable of interfering with the causal order of nature.
That is, it looks as if we would have to contain some entity that was capable of making
molecules swerve from their paths. I donāt know if such a view is even intelligible, but it's
certainly not consistent with what we know about how the world works from physics.
And thereās not the slightest evidence to suppose that we should abandon physical
theory in favor of such a view. Well, so far then, we seem to be getting exactly nowhere in our
effort to resolve the conflict between determinism and the belief in the freedom of
the will. Science seems to allow no place for freedom of the will, and indeterminism
in physics offers no support for the freedom of the will. On the other hand, we seem to
be unable to give up the belief in the freedom of the will. So letās investigate
both of these points a bit further. Why exactly is there no room for the freedom of the will on the contemporary scientific view of the
universe? Our basic explanatory mechanisms in physics work from the bottom up.
That is to say, we explain the behavior of surface features of a phenomenon
such as the transparency of glass or the liquidity of water in terms of the behavior of
micro particles such as molecules. And the relation of the mind to the brain is an
example of such a relation. But we get causation from the mind to the body, that is, we get
top-down causation over a passage of time. And we get top-down causation over time because
the top level and the bottom level go together. So, for example, suppose I want to cause the
release of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine at the axon end-plates of my motorneurons.
Now, I can do it by simply deciding to raise my arm and then raising it. Here the mental event,
the intention to raise my arm, causes the physical event, the release of acetylcholine,
and thatās a case of top-down causation if ever there was one. But such cases
of top-down causation only work because the mental events are grounded
in the neurophysiology to start with. So corresponding to the description of
the causal relations that go from the top to the bottom, thereās another description
of the same series of events where the causal relations bounce entirely along the bottom.
That is, they are entirely a matter of neurons and neuron firings at synapses, and so on. Now, as long as we accept this conception of
how nature works, then it doesnāt seem that thereās any scope for the freedom of the will, because
on this conception, the mind can only effect nature insofar as it is already a part of
nature. But if so, then, like the rest of nature, its features are determined at the
basic microlevels of physics. This is actually an absolutely fundamental point in this lecture, so let me repeat it. The form of
determinism that is ultimately worrisome is not psychological determinism.
The idea that our states of mind are sufficient to determine everything we do is probably
just false. The worrisome form of determinism is more basic and fundamental. Since all of
the surface features of the world are entirely caused by and realized in systems of micro
elements, then the behavior of micro-elements is sufficient to determine everything that
happens. Such a "bottom-up" picture of the world allows for top-down causation--our
minds, for example, can affect our bodies-- but the top-down causation only works
because the top level is already caused by and realized in the bottom levels. Well
then, letās turn to the next obvious question. What is it about our experience that makes it impossible for us to abandon the belief in the freedom of the will? If freedom is an illusion, why
is it an illusion we seem unable to abandon? The first thing to notice about our
conception of human freedom is that it is essentially tied to consciousness. We only
attribute freedom to conscious beings. Suppose, for example, somebody built a robot which
we believed to be totally unconscious. In such a case we would never
feel any inclination to call it "free". Even if we found its behavior random and unpredictable, we would not say that it was acting freely in the sense that we think of ourselves
as acting freely. If, on the other hand, somebody built a robot that we became convinced had consciousness in the same sense that
we do, then it would at least be an open question whether or not that robot had freedom of
the will. The second point to note is that it is not just any state of consciousness that gives us the conviction of human freedom. If life consisted entirely of the reception of passive perceptions, then it seems to me we would never so
much as form the idea of human freedom. If you imagine yourself totally immobile,
totally unable to move & unable to determine even the course of your own
thoughts, but still receiving stimuliā for example, say, periodic mildly painful sensationsāthere would not in such a case be the slightest inclination to conclude that you had freedom
of the will. I said earlier that most philosophers think that the conviction of human freedom
is somehow essentially tied to the process of rational decision making. But I think thatās
only partly true. In fact, weighing up reasons is only a very special case of the experiences
that give us the conviction of freedom. The characteristic experience that gives us
the conviction of human freedomāand it is an experience from which we are unable
to strip away the conviction of freedomā is the experience of engaging in voluntary, intentional human actions. Now, itās that sort of experience which is the foundation stone
of our belief in the freedom of the will. Why? Reflect very carefully on
the character of the experiences you have as you engage in normal, everyday ordinary
human actions. You will sense the possibility of alternative courses of action built into
these experiences. If you raise your arm or walk across the room or take a drink of water,
you will see that at any point in the experience you have a sense of alternative courses of
action open to you. If one tried to express it in words, the difference between the experience
of perceiving and the experience of acting is that in perceiving one has the sense "this
is happening to me", but in acting one has the sense "I am making this happen".
But the sense that "I am making this happen" carries with it
the sense "I could be doing something else". In normal behavior, each thing we do
carries the conviction, valid or invalid, that we could be doing something else right here
and now, that is, all other conditions remaining the same. And this, I submit, is the
source of our unshakeable conviction in our own free will. It is perhaps important to
emphasize that I am discussing normal human action. If one is in the grip of a great
passion, for example, if one is in the grip of a great rage, one loses this sense of freedom
and one can even be surprised to discover what one is doing. Now, once we
notice this feature of the experience of acting, a great deal of the puzzling
phenomena I mentioned earlier is easily explained. Why, for example, do we feel that the man
in the case of post-hypnotic suggestion is not acting freely in the sense in which we are
even though he might think that he is acting freely? Well, the reason is that, in an important
sense, he doesnāt know what heās doing. His actual intention-in-action is totally
unconscious. The options that he sees as available to him are irrelevant to the actual motivation of
his behavior. Notice also that the compatibilist examples of so-called forced or
compelled behavior still in many cases involve the experience of freedom.
If, for example, Iām instructed to walk across the room at gunpoint, still part
of the experience is that I sense that itās literally open to me at any step to do something else. The experience of freedom is thus an essential component of any case of acting with an intention. Again, you can see this if you contrast the normal case of action with the Penfield cases, where stimulation of the motor cortex produces an involuntary movement of the arm or leg.
In such a case the patient would experience the movement passively,
as he would experience a sound or a sensation of pain. Unlike intentional actions, there
are no options built into this experience. To see this point clearly, try to imagine
that a portion of your life was like the Penfield experiments on a grand scale.
Instead of walking across the room, you simply find that your body is moving across
the room. Instead of speaking, you simply hear and feel words coming out of your
mouth. Imagine your experiences are those of a purely passive but conscious puppet and you will have imagined away the experience of freedom. But in the typical case of intentional action, thereās no way we can carve off
the experience of freedom. It is an essential part of the experience of acting. This
also explains, I believe, why we cannot give up our conviction of freedom. We find
it easy enough to give up the conviction that the earth is flat as soon as we understand
the evidence for the heliocentric theory of the solar system. Similarly, when we look
at a sunset, in spite of appearances, we do not feel compelled to believe that
the sun is setting behind the earth. We believe that the appearance of the sun
setting is simply an illusion created by the rotation of the earth. In each case, it is
possible to give up a commonsense conviction because the hypothesis that replaces it both
accounts for the experiences that led to that conviction in the first place, as well as explaining a whole lot of other facts that the commonsense view is unable to account for. Now, thatās
why we give up the belief in a flat earth and literal sunsets, in favor of the Copernican
conception of the solar system. But we canāt similarly give up the conviction of freedom,
because that conviction is built into every normal, conscious intentional action. And
indeed, we use this conviction in identifying and explaining actions. We can now draw the conclusions that are implicit in this discussion. First, if the worry about determinism is
a worry that all of our behavior is in fact psychologically compulsive,
then it appears that the worry is unwarranted. Insofar as psychological
determinism is just an empirical hypothesis like any other, then the evidence we presently
have available to us suggests it is false. So this does give us a modified form of compatibilism. It gives us the view that psychological libertarianism is compatible with physical determinism.
Secondly, it even gives us a sense of "could have" in which peopleās behavior, though determined,
is such that in that sense they could've done otherwise: the sense is simply that, as
far as the psychological factors were concerned, they could've done otherwise. The notions
of "ability", of what weāre able to do, and what we could've done, are often relative
to some such set of criteria. For example, I could've voted for Carter in the 1980
American election, even if I didnāt; but I could not have voted for George Washington,
he was not a candidate. So thereās a sense of "could have" in which there were a range
of choices available to me and in that sense, there were a lot of things I could've done, all
other things being equal, which I did not in fact do. Now similarly, because the psychological
factors operating on me do not always, or even in general, compel me to behave in a
particular fashion, I often, psychologically speaking, could have done something different
from what I did in fact do. But third, this form of compatibilism still does not give
us anything like the resolution of the conflict between freedom and determinism that our
urge to radical libertarianism really demands. As long as we accept the bottom-up conception
of physical explanation, and itās a conception on which the past 300 years of science is
based, then psychological facts about ourselves, like any other higher level facts, are entirely
causally explicable in terms of, and entirely realized in systems of elements at the fundamental micro-physical level. Our conception of physical reality simply does not allow for radical
freedom. Fourth, and finally, for reasons that I donāt really understand, evolution has
given us a form of experience of voluntary action where the experience of freedomā
that is to say, the experience of the sense of alternative possibilitiesāis built into the very structure of conscious, voluntary, intentional
human behavior. For that reason, I believe neither this discussion nor any other
will ever convince us that our behavior is unfree. My aim in these lectures has been
to try to characterize the relationships between the conception that we have of ourselves
as rational, free, conscious, mindful agents with a conception that we have of the world
as consisting of mindless, meaningless physical particles. Itās tempting to think that,
just as we have discovered that large portions of common sense do not adequately represent
how the world really works, so we might also discover that our conception of ourselves and our behavior is entirely false. But there
are limits on this possibility. The distinction between reality and appearance
cannot apply to the very existence of consciousness. For, if it seems to me that
Iām conscious, then I am conscious. We can discover all kinds of startling things about
ourselves and our behavior, but we cannot discover that we do not have minds, that they do
not contain conscious, subjective, intentionalistic mental states; nor can we discover that we
do not at least try to engage in voluntary intentional actions. The problem Iāve set
myself is not to prove the existence of these things but to examine their status
and their implications for our conceptions of the rest of nature. My general
theme has been that with certain important exceptions, our commonsense conception
of ourselves is perfectly consistent with our conception of nature as a physical system.
For me, he's completely convincing. The whole language of free will only makes sense if we humans are actually original causes of future states of being. I remember when I was in college, I told my Professor that, to me, free will is not compatible with determinism, and I was flat out told that I was wrong... but then I read Searle who argued for my point of view, and in absolutely clear, simple language that other philosophers could not match.
What I wonder is, if at some point we come to a consensus that there is no free will, what effects that will have on, for example, the judicial system. The concept of "punishment" might not make sense anymore, although disincentive to commit crime, would.
That was very well worth listening to.
I am not sure that I agree with Searle, however, that compatiblism leaves us with only a shell of free will, though I will grant that it's only a shell of some idea of free will maintained by Searle. Compatiblism's essential point is that our own reckonings are among the causes of future events, and very often, they are the chief causes. That is a kind of free will, and according to compatiblism, that's as much free will as you're ever going to get. If you consider it a "shell" of some version of free will that you would rather have, well, life is tough.
I think that the capacity for decision-making is better understood if analyzed as a result of evolution. If I may proceed metaphorically, evolution speaks the language of organic chemistry, not of particle physics. Its job is to encode in this language, on a genome of limited length, all of the information necessary to constitute the individual and facilitate its future reproduction.
Encoding a set of rules about what to do in every "expected" case works quite well for plants: Mother Nature's automatons.
When it comes to animals, however, something much more sophisticated is needed; animals must respond efficiently in a multitude of different critical situations. Therefore, their genetic code must produce mechanisms for perception and for producing actions appropriate to a very wide range of perceived situations. The only solution to the latter problem so far seen in nature is, a brain.
Judging from evolutionary results, both learning and consciousness are useful components of the organic decision-making systems. How much decision-making is really conscious and how much unconscious I consider unimportant. The important thing is, we have within ourselves a mechanism, partially self-programmed, for affecting future outcomes.
What does it mean to say that I could have decided otherwise? It means that there are no definite circumstances of which I am aware that would have prevented my decision-making apparatus from yielding a different result. When I talk about my decisions, I am talking about their operative aspect, not about the alignment of physical particles in my brain.
It's interesting, because, coming from a Buddhist perspective, the illusion of free agency, whether it's libertarian or even compatibilist, is a source of suffering insofar as we cling to it. Pretty much every Western philosopher does and the whole argument around supposed "free-will" continues as a sort of battle to claim as much power of freedom as we can reasonably justify for ourselves. How utterly miserable. Where's the not-freedom? What else were you planning on doing if you didn't do the thing you ended up doing?
When a philosophical question is argued back and forth by intelligent minds for such a long period of time with little resolve, I start to assume the question itself is flawed.
I tend to see three major flaws that contradict my own perspective:
-Defining concepts from experience -Applying concepts to experience -Wavering your dimensional perspective
First, the question demands we define what it means to have free will vs pre-determination, and let's also remember (the most frequently overlooked concept in philosophy imo) that definitions are non-absolute descriptions used to categorize and relate experiences. Arguing semantics of a definitions we made up seems to obfuscate most philosophical debates.
Second, we assume it is impossible to both have free will, and a predetermined path. Our experience of "now" seems to be an extremely balanced split between a completely indeterminate future whose state is a finitely determined past. Our experience defines the boarder between determinism and free will. Everything in our past is ever determined, and everything in our future is ever undetermined (excluding debatable concepts such as whether the future can change the past). This means from the human perspective a person may have been pre-destined to make a free-willed decision.
There are many reasons we confuse this in most arguments; the most notable, from my perspective, is my perspective. Arguments often jump from an individual's defining the state of human perspective, and then is contrasted by a view that looks at all of time from an objective perspective. Trying to describe the human perspective from an higher dimensional view can confound arguments even further. Even if the universe is completely determinable, from our perspective, the universe would be a process of defining determinism itself. From (arguably) a 5D perspective of the completed universe, it may appear the universe was set to be one way all along, but that is a time-object in which its shape is a determinately predictable shape made up, partially, from 4D beings free decisions.
Can not forget the fact that we are the subject in question. I think philosophers grip on to rational objectivity, and instead deny some degree of observing their perspective as a case-study.
Free will and determinism are not reconcilable concepts. The video says that "free actions exist in the corners of a deterministic universe" what? That literally makes no sense. It's like trying to have your cake and eat it too
This whole "could have chosen something else" is such a hogwosh. Assuming that would be true it would mean that you have no agency over your choices. You chose the thing you chose because you considered it the best cause of action in that given situation and you would of course repeat that choice in the same situation, because it's the best action you can think of. Thus Free Will doesn't give you freedom, instead it removes your agency and as it forces you to make different choices that go against your own judgement.
Pretty worthwhile for me. Posted on Facebook. Searched up him on Google. Then bammmm... found out he is at my school (UC Berkeley).