This Still Isn’t Free Will!
The BBC recently published a story about some research about free will, and I am yet again struck by the naive conceptions of free will so many of us have. The article discusses research that as far as I can tell claims that animals, even simple ones, have a range of options available to them, and that the behaviors they engage in are more probabilistic rather than deterministic. Now, this is basically as much hard data as I was able to glean from the article, and yet the article is for some reason about free will. Having not read the original paper that this article is based on (link below), I’m left to draw my own conclusions about what’s gone horribly wrong here, so I’ll focus solely on what’s explicitly stated in the article.
The article discusses how rather than having one set deterministic behavior that will result from a given stimulus (if A then B, every time we have A, B will follow), animals actually have a range of options available to them (if A then B or C or D). Which action gets picked is somewhat probabilistic (B – 30%, C- 50%, D – 20%). It’s argued that this probabilistic behavior is evolutionary beneficial. Being able to behave in an unpredictable variable fashion is likely to confer survival advantages for predators or prey whose actions cannot be predicted by their opponents. The researchers also found that though unpredictable, the behaviors do seem to come from a fixed set of options.
I find every bit of that completely uncontroversial, but have to ask…what does any of this have to do with free will? You know what also behaves in probabilistic ways? Electrons. Does that mean electrons have free will? Probabilistic behavior is not a trump card in the free will debate, but simply an interesting aspect of behavior. I think there are two higher level conceptual reasons for these kinds of misunderstandings regarding free will, that are worth exploring before discussing the content of the article any more.
The first stems from a tricky aspect of human consciousness. Because of our human ability to reflect, to be self aware and self conscious, we are able to contemplate various possible choices in any decision. While we are making a decision we can choose among options, before we make a decision we can contemplate which option we will choose, and after we’ve made a decision we can contemplate which other options we could have chosen and how different things could have gone. This ability to imagine alternate sequences of events and the results that stem from them allows us behave in infinitely more intelligent ways than most other species. We can avoid novel mistakes and learn from past mistakes and do all sorts of other snazzy things. People often want to insert free will into this situation. The fact that we can contemplate a different course of action, these people say, means we could have chosen differently. Thus our choice was free. But these arguments fail to consider though is that we didn’t choose differently. We only chose one behavior. We did one thing. And just because we had the conscious experience of being able to contemplate other options in no way necessitates that the action chosen was itself not deterministic or that it was free in any way. We impose free will on this “could have” nature of conscious decision making, and there’s no good scientific reason for it. Even a computer can compare among choices and pick the one it determines to be best. Picking a choice among alternatives is not incompatible with determinism.
For the second conceptual problem I’ll use lower animals as an example. Take the fruit fly brought up in the article. Given our neuroscientific knowledge of how behavior is initiated in organisms, who or what are we actually bestowing the honor of free will on? Behavior is the result of various sub systems, all engaging in their own tasks. There is no little guy in the brain of the fly who gets all the input and decides, “lets go with behavior C!”. And similarly, there’s no little guy who flips a coin and decides what to do based on the result. Even if we grant that the behavior that emerges from the organism is truly probabilistic, a free action implies someone is actually making a decision to behave in a certain way. But we can program a robot to behave probabilistically, and no one would say it has free will. It’s not even conscious. Let’s not forget that the locus of evaluation of a being making a free choice must be a mind able to choose. And by grounding free will in the evolutionary adaptive probabilistic behavior of animals, the authors may have inadvertently argued against the possibility of free will in humans. The author even talks about “choices” basically just fitting a complex probability, but being perceived as conscious decisions. This is exactly right. Perceiving is not causing, and perceiving can be in error. Remember my post about the weirdness of consciousness? We perceive all sorts of illusions and hallucinations that don’t exist, might we also perceive free will when it is also just a trick of our brains?
All animals have some sorts of boundary conditions and constraints on their behavior that limits their freedom to some subset of ‘possible’ actions. I can’t fly, I can’t run 1000 mile an hour, I can’t morph into a lion, I can’t walk into a maximum security facility, I can’t walk through walls, I can’t experience pain as an orgasm, I can’t not feel sad when I see a dead animal, I can’t not love the people I love. I am not free to do these things. Whether it is because of my genetics, or my biological make up, or my experiences, I am constrained by my psychology and neurophysiology. But within these constraints I have a range of possible behaviors. This research suggests that science is currently only able predict with some probability what my action will be (well, not mine, but simple animals). But so what? That doesn’t imply that behavior isn’t deterministic, just that we can’t predict it yet. Whether the behavior that was chosen had a 80% chance of being chosen or a 20% chance, the choice happened for a reason. What was that reason? Why one choice rather than another?
The possibly not so obvious point that I am trying to make here, is that for an animal to evolve a way to choose among possible actions in a probablistic way, there has to be a neuronal mechanism that underlies this. A random number generator of sorts. But what does random mean? We have computers that have random number generators, but they aren’t truly random. What would that even mean in a computer? It’s not possible. when you roll a die, it might seem like the outcome is not predictiable, but that’s just a matter of complexity. The die obviously follows the laws of physics. And if you know it’s velocity, its rotation, its height, its physical properties, how much wind there is, etc…if you know all the variables, you could conceivably predict how the die will land. Any behavior, whether underlied by a choice or not, must have a reason for itself. That reason must have a causal explanation. If it has a causal explanation it’s deterministic (even if highly complicated). If it doesn’t have any causal explanation then we have to resort to quantum mechanical probabilistic explanations. And then it was random. Either way, the choice was not free. I did not exert free will. My behavior was simply unpredictable by science. And I had an experience of making a choice. If that’s the best science can do, it has yet to make a defense of free will.
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The original research paper: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/12/14/rspb.2010.2325
17 Responses
5:30 pm
I think I read that same article that you did and came to a similar conclusion. I think the author did argue against free will (inadvertently). Evolution and behavior are what makes an animal do certain things even if it looks like they are making a choice. The range of choices are not really choices. It just a range of behaviors e.g. the animal eats fruit a, b, or c, but not d, because d is poisonous. That really isn’t free will. Maybe some people call that instinct…but it is a learned behavior, otherwise the animal would most likely be extinct. I always thought humans had free will (religious upbringing), but the article and your review makes one think…do we truly have free will? Maybe that could be a new defense for trial lawyers…..
6:20 pm
Ahhh…the old “my neurons made me do it” defense. While you’re not going to find any strong defenses of free will here, I very strongly disagree with anyone who reaches the conclusion that we thus can’t be held accountable for our actions (not that you did). Our choices still matter. Our lives still have meaning. I still think we should be empathetic and caring towards each other. And I still think we need a justice system that keeps people from committing acts that harm others. Now, I also think that understanding more about the causes of behavior should alter the nature of how things like the justice system function (rehabilitation as opposed to punishment), but it doesn’t absolve responsibility in the way that we normally use it. Just like understanding that love is underlied by neuronal firing and chemical transport doesn’t minimize the value we place on it. And knowing the scientific cause of a rainbow doesn’t lesson the beauty of seeing one.
I too had a religious upbringing, but it was there where free will started being a problem for me. If God knows everything I will ever do, every choice I will ever me, how can I be free? How is the universe not deterministic then? As a child that bugged the heck out of me.
11:33 am
I found it helpful to note that if choice C has a 50% probability, it is still deterministic in the relevant sense. It -always- has a 50% probability, every time it is faced. An outside observer may not be able to predict an individual with absolute accuracy, but that doesn’t make the individual free on the inside.
That God thing should bug the heck out of you. If we do have free will, it has to be not-determinism. Not-determinism means that there is no fact of the matter about how you’ll behave at time (x) until time (x) in fact occurs. God can’t know things that aren’t facts. (A limitation we all suffer from…)
Which should make sense from the other direction; a real choice changes reality, it does not follow from reality, even probabilistically.
Ironically, I do flirt with the idea that electrons have free will. It’s just that their situation is so simple it reduces to being identical to normal probability. (No memory of past choices, for example.)
I should note they tried to measure a coin flip accurately enough to predict how it would land. The experiment’s been done. Robot hands and lasers and such. The most impressive predictions were 54% accurate.
12:37 pm
Hey Alrenous, can you clarify what you mean by “That God thing should bug the heck out of you.”
“If we do have free will, it has to be not-determinism.”
There are a large class of people who actually argue for the direct opposite. That determinism is necessary for free will, because otherwise choice and decisions stem from randomness, rather than the will of an agent. Then there are a lot of compatibilists who argue that determinism and free will are entirely compatible, but make no necessary statements on the relationship between the two. I take a different tract, I argue that both determinism and indeterminism are slightly besides the point. When really what we should be evaluating is the nature of the self, of agency, of subjective experience. We can only make meaningful statements about free will (assuming it’s even a meaningful concept) if there is an agent, a you, who can possess it.
“a real choice changes reality”
I would actually say that a real choice (or even a fake one) creates reality, creates the future. You can’t change the future by doing one thing or another, because only one thing happens, one future occurs. It is only the fact that humans can engage in counterfactual thought that implies the illusion of change.
3:58 pm
I can try to clarify, but all I can say is that it is normal to be bothered by blithe self-contradictions.
What if it turns out there isn’t a meaningful, coherent definition of self, and thus determinism/etc really is beside the point…but there is a close approximation? If there was no ‘real’ self, but there was still a collection of processes that made up a pseudo-self that regular English could refer to…would you find such an approximation useful?
6:23 pm
I think that approximation would be extremely useful, but I don’t think it’d be useful in service of any conversations regarding free will. I think it’d be useful in a broader conversation regarding ethics, responsibility, virtue, etc…
10:45 am
So if I asked the same question in regards to free will, would you respond that such an approximation would be useless, or that you believe no such approximation exists?
I take it you see little connection between free will and ethics, responsibility, and virtue?
10:56 am
I’d say it depends. In so far as what we’re talking about when we discuss free will is really a conversation about human cognition, behavior, and agency, then I think it has huge implications for responsibility, ethics, and virtue.
I think that most people’s common conception of the idea of free will actively hurts progress in certain moral spheres because of a mistaken view of agency and the self and how that relates to responsibility and virtue.
I wrote about some of this here: http://cognitivephilosophy.net/consciousness/what-we-miss-in-the-free-will-debate/
So on the one hand, it’s not so much that I think we don’t have free will, but rather that the concept of free will as normally discussed is a meaningless concept. And yes, whether we have this mythical free will or not, in my opinion doesn’t effect how we should interact with each other ethically, both on the personal level and the societal level. On the other hand, if we want to use this term “free will” as a meaningful term to describe certain types of behavior and choices we make I’m okay with doing so, as long as it’s done with some degree of knowledge of what we’re really talking about.
10:52 am
Does that mean you’d be fine with simply setting aside the term ‘free will,’ for clarity’s sake, in these fields? Perhaps use some other, more specific term?
Is there any field you think the idea of free will is necessary, either in any of its extant forms or as a repaired version?
12:39 pm
That’s a really tough question Alrenous. It’s something I’ve only thought about in a cursory way so far, and I haven’t come to any firm conclusions.
I think our misunderstandings of what free will is or isn’t cause more harm than good in how it influences our conception of human agency and behavior and how that relates to responsibility and ethics. How we view and treat other people and the kinds of social and political systems we believe are just. But does simply not using the word and telling the public that the concept is meaningless really help anything on it’s own? I don’t think so. Tell a group of people for whom the concept of free will is important that it doesn’t exist, and you’re left with a group of people who feel their lives and their actions and their choices have suddenly lost meaning. That we suddenly can’t hold people responsible for their actions anymore. Part of the responsibility in my mind is to not just pronounce the result, but to take people through the process of how that result was reached and how it plays into and influences all these other issues to do with agency and morality.
It’s a good question though. Do you have any thoughts on it?
8:29 pm
I was thinking of avoiding the term specifically in formal analyses of human agency, behaviour, responsibility, and ethics.
The public’s definition of free will is performing a meaning-granting function for them. I think you’re right that one shouldn’t try to strip that definition away…unless one has a replacement definition that performs the same function, but better. I also suspect they’re on to something. It’s tempting for philosophers and scientists to lightly dismiss folk wisdom. (I’m curious as to how this function works. I don’t assign meanings to my actions; I just attempt to fulfill goals.)
If you’re lucky enough to address the public, I think you should say free will is meaningless with regards to responsibility, because that’s true. We seem to agree that assigning negative responsibility is about reducing negative events; this means free will is superfluous. Being more specific, we reward great thinkers, because we want more great thinking. The one ‘responsible’ is just whoever we need to reward to get more thinking, regardless of whether the new thinking is unalterably determined or whether the new thinker can choose otherwise. (Though I know little about how best to convey the idea.)
Can you help me out with a concrete example of taking someone through the result? When you started to understand better how it influenced agency, did you start behaving differently in certain situations?
12:16 am
I’m not sure I can give a concrete example in a reply like this. I was referring to a more general process of education and development and knowledge acquisition, as opposed to a simple argument that conveys the idea. In general I would say it takes a more nuanced understanding of, and willingness to explore, ethics. I think a lot of what I do on this blog attempts to explore those ideas. If I’m thinking about things the right way it takes the integration of things we learn about consciousness, things we learn about agency, and ethics, more specifically, to what degree we can have warrant for making normative statements. If we can do this, and actually help people who aren’t philosophers think about these issues, I think that the way people think about free will and responsibility can change to a more fruitful conception of these terms and how they relate to ethics.
I have a paper where I flesh out some issues in ethics, including issues of responsibility and justification for values, I can send it along to you if you’d like. I actually argue for a different way of thinking about ethics than you describe. Your post strikes me as very utilitarian in nature, and I argue for virtue ethics. I think utilitarianism and virtue ethics have a lot of agreement, but there’s an extra step in virtue ethics that I feel has more (ontological) grounding.
On a personal level, I do think that my evolving view of human cognition and agency greatly affects how I interact with others (and the kinds of larger scale programs I support). It certainly makes me more compassionate. I also think that understanding the nature of synaptic change and psychological development, coupled with some other values that are part of my ethics, also affects further considerations of how to interact with others (again, both personally and on the societal level) to help them change and develop into people who actively lead more (ontologically) fulfilling lives.
9:23 am
Okay.
Sure, I’d like to see that paper. If you can’t just extract my email from the comment, it’s dkaralan@gmail.com, unless you’d prefer some other kind of communication.
(I’m always bothered by that use of ‘unless,’ but I can’t think of an alternative. It always makes me think; “If you can so extract, or would so prefer, my email is something else.”)
The synaptic change angle is new to me. Should I ask about it now, or should I wait for the paper, or did I miss you talking about it elsewhere?
10:59 pm
I might have discussed the synaptic change stuff elsewhere. The main point I’m making with that is really just that the current state of our neurophysiology determines the thoughts we think and the behaviors we engage in and the choices we make. Importantly, synaptic change occurs. What this means is that people can change. Understanding that this can occur, and understanding how this occurs, allows us to interact with people in ways that can help them change. I don’t mean neuroscientifically (though sometimes I’m sure surgery or drugs may be the only recourse to help someone with a condition), but psychologically. Through regular human interaction. Whether on a personal level, or in the systems we set up as society (education, etc…).
I sent the paper along. Sorry for the long time lag!
9:10 pm
That is sickening.
That error in (assuming that probability negates determinism) is so very prevalent these days.
5:06 pm
Hi Greg, I would be interested in hearing your defense of determinism against free will, because I suspect the argument would be equally un-winable. I agree with many points you make, but came to some problems in the last few paragraphs. Your concluding sentences read as follows:
“My behavior was simply unpredictable by science. And I had an experience of making a choice. If that’s the best science can do, it has yet to make a defense of free will.”
If you were to remove the ‘simply,’ the conclusion could so easily be reversed as an argument For free will. The fact that future choices are not, and may Never be predictable by science is (to me) the point. Examining the universe through the Quantum perspective, it seems to have evolved in such a way to make future predictions impossible. The ‘Observer Effect’ demonstrates this principle with particles as tiny as photons and electrons – put simply, by measuring or predicting the particle, we change it. Humans are perhaps too massive to be subject to the same laws, but are also Incredibly complex. It seems that this law of physics could relate to social principals – once the future action of an individual is predicted, would that person not change it? I probably would…
It might be imprudent of me to jump so drastically between complex ‘sciencey’ theorem to an argument about society and human perception, but essentially that is what we are all doing anyway. Many people who find free will naive, use properties of neuroscience and physics to ‘prove’ how our decisions are dictated entirely by our internal chemicals and environment. And yet humanity has just barely begun to understand the brain and non-newtonian physics. Scientists don’t even really ‘get’ consciousness, something which most definitions of free will are contingent upon. Probability equations get lost in chaos theory with predicting something as simple as the weather, let alone far more chaotic systems such as humans. You’re using science to uphold determinism, but the arguments only survive by drastically belittling the science it is using.
Although I don’t entirely disagree with determinism, I think that it is scientifically unprovable. Since we are not discussing scientific fact, the free will debate remains in the realm of philosophy. Which leads one to question, what is the point of determinism? How are my actions not free if nothing or no one (including me) can totally predict which way I’ll go? Is it helpful for society to believe that no one can help what they do? Does it make one happy and motivated to live a better life? In most cases, no. Your more recent article mentions the legal pitfalls that might stem from simplistic acceptance of determinism. It might be possible that free will Must exist, regardless of whether it does or not.
If you have any time to return to this debate, I am curious what benefits you and others see in a world that no longer believes in free will. Thanks for your time and patience. Cheers!
6:41 pm
Hi Jill, thanks for you comments. I think some of your confusion with my position stems from a misunderstanding of what I was saying. I actually wasn’t arguing for determinism in this post. In fact, part of what I want to say is that the truth neither determinism nor indeterminism is relevant to the question of free will, because the free will conversation has to happen at the level of persons making choices. That’s what I meant when I said:
a free action implies someone is actually making a decision to behave in a certain way
My point in this particular article was to say that just showing that behavior is probabilistic, doesn’t actually address the question of free will. If it’s truly probabilistic, then it’s not stemming from the free choices of an agent, and isn’t free will. If it’s just indeterminable by science, then it might not even be probabilistic. What arguments that cite indeterminism or probabilistic behavior as a defense of free will get wrong is that they are confusing probabilistic/indetermined behavior with “freely chosen actions”. One does not entail the other.
I also think you slightly misunderstand determinism. All determinism says is that all events in the universe are determined by states and properties of matter and the laws that govern their interactions. But many philosophers argue that free will and determinism are compatible positions (this is called Compatibilism and is actually the most popular position in the philosophy of free will), and some subset of those actually argue that free will depends on the truth of determinism, that only if actions are determined, i.e. – are chosen for reasons, can we meaningfully talk about free will. Any bit of indeterminism removes our ability to make real free choices.
In regards to what’s the point of the conversation, I sort of address that in the post I link to below. I mostly think the question is only interesting as an ethical question, not a metaphysical one. Partly because the ethical question is of real practical importance, and partly because I’m not sure the metaphysical question can be answered, or even makes sense.
http://cognitivephilosophy.net/consciousness/what-we-miss-in-the-free-will-debate/
Thanks again, let me know if that helps.