Free Will?

Is there such a thing as free will? Free will versus determinism is an old conundrum in philosophy, one that continues to puzzle. Proponents of determinism state that all our mental experiences, including every choice we make, occur as a result of the functioning of the brain. They argue that this in turn, is subject to cause and effect, like every other physical entity. Hence all our thoughts and choices are causally determined by pre-existing conditions. So free will is an illusion.

Quantum physics offers a possible loophole. Mechanistic causality has been rejected on the smallest scales, and even on the macro scale, in some cases. At the subatomic level, chance and uncertainty rule the day. However, does quantum uncertainty allow the entry of free will at the biological level? I think not. If our decisions are determined by chance, that is not freedom of will. It means being subjected to a lottery rather than to the necessity of cause and effect. So it seems that if we adopt the perspective of physics then we must conclude that free will is an illusion. However, there is a way out.

The determinist view suffers from level confusion. It reduces consciousness to the neuronal or brain level, which I believe clouds the issue. In my view, subjective experience and neuronal activity are not linked by cause and effect. They are simply the same phenomena but viewed at different levels of description, mental and physical respectively. In other words, physical processes take place in the brain and these are mirrored as experiences within the mind. Yet neither is the cause nor the effect of the other.

It is equally valid to say that
(1) Consciousness undergoes experiences, which have their expression as physical events taking place in the brain.
as it is to say that
(2) Physical events in the brain are expressed as experiences in the mind.

Mental experience and physical processes are two distinct levels of description and neither can be reduced to the other. We can find correlations between the two, and each level can help explain what is happening on the other. However, neither level is reducible to the other. The view that consciousness is "nothing but" the firing of neurones is reductionism gone wrong. It is a contemporary version of the stimulus-response reduction of mental activity, once popular in academic psychology, which Koestler aptly summed up as "ratomorphism".

Brain activity and subjective experience occur simultaneously, but they are phenomena on incompatible levels of description. A useful analogy is with the pages of a book. We can see the text as marks on paper or as meanings expressed in language, but it does not make sense to say that the physical marks cause the meanings, or vice versa. They are simply two different ways of describing the printed page.

Another analogy is the computer. Does the hardware cause the computer to do things, or is it the software? In the case of the computer it is obviously both. The mind is like the software running on the hardware of our brain. Yet this analogy should not be pushed too far. Software and hardware are the two basic components of a computer, whereas the mind and brain are not two components of a thing. Instead they are two quite distinct ways of seeing that thing.

A musical piece can be seen on the physical level, ie as sound waves. It can be viewed on the technical level in terms of the technique required to play it. It can also be seen as something to give pleasure and entertain. Further, it can be regarded from an esthetic or spiritual point of view. At the physical level, a Henry Moore sculpture, is just a lump of metal or stone. It can also be seen as a representation of something. Going further, it can be interpreted as having a meaning, or even a spiritual dimension.

These different levels of viewing a musical piece or artwork are quite separate, though they are inter-related. We can view the same object from entirely different viewpoints, and in no case is seeing the object at only one level the full story. The point is that we should not confuse the different levels, nor seek to reduce a high level view to a lower one. For instance, a measurement of the wavelengths of light given off by an artwork is not relevant to esthetic considerations.

I believe that level confusion is the answer to the free will versus determinism conundrum. In other words, determinism is a valid explanation on the physical level of description of a human being, but it makes little sense on the subjective level. It is implausible because it goes against our deeply-held notions of being an independent agent. I think that even die-hard determinists cannot live their daily lives as if they believed they had no free will. It is like the joke, "Of course, reality is just an illusion, but it's the only place you can get a decent cup of coffee." The determinists aspire to the belief that their own free will is an illusion, yet they live according to the illusion of free will because they want their coffee.

A person who truly believes that free will is illusory is obliged to abandon all notions of right and wrong, since it is absurd to talk about moral principles if everything we do is simply the inescapable result of the laws of nature. A determinist cannot rationally praise or blame themselves or anyone else for any action, crime or achievement. Yet they will do so anyway, since according to determinism, they are fated to do so, just like the rest of us. In effect, determinism is an irrelevant belief. Even if it is true, it cannot make any difference. Indeed, according to determinism, no belief - including determinism itself - can make any difference to anything. In other words, determinism proclaims its own irrelevance.

However, our subjective conviction that we have free will is no more than a plausibility argument. It is hard to see how one could come up with a convincing argument for or against free will purely within the subjective domain, ie without recourse to our notions about the physical world.

We live in an age of reductionism. Mind stuff is continually being reduced to the workings of matter. Yet we tend to forget that all this activity - speculation, explanation and theory - occurs at the subjective level. It is nothing other than thoughts occurring in human minds, no matter how logical or persuasive they may seem. It is ironic that when someone argues in favour of determinism, their mental activity is trying to reduce its own workings to a theoretical construct, ie to their understanding of how the physical world works.

The crux is that the subjective world of thought and sensation is primary. All theories and explanations are nothing but a super-structure erected on top of this foundation. It does not make sense to explain the basis of all thought by recourse to a high-level mental construct, such as causality, that thought itself has created.

All our notions about physical interactions are just that, notions held within human minds. They in turn, are built on perceptions and thoughts. So there is a circularity in trying to see the basis of all mental activity as arising out of this superstructure we have built up called science. It amounts to unwarranted reductionism, because we are reducing the most basic functioning of the mind, thinking, consciousness and volition, to something that the mind itself has laboriously constructed.

It can be argued that every philosophical statement contains implicit assumptions. We assume that the words used refer to something intelligible and correspond to aspects of the real world. We presume that we are making meaningful statements about reality, not just playing with words, which are seductive and malleable. The statement, "Free will is illusory" contains the key phrase "free will", which is tricky to define.

Free will can be defined as the ability to make choices that are not externally determined, the outcome of which cannot be known in advance. It means we could have done otherwise. To say that we could have done otherwise sounds reasonable but it is unverifiable, since once we have chosen we cannot make the alternative choice. A choice being unpredictable in principle does not make it free, eg deciding what to do based on flipping a coin is not free choice. As for "externally determined", it is unclear what this means. The workings of our own neurones are "internal", but this gives rise to the determinist position discussed above.

So it is difficult to define free will clearly enough to discuss it rigorously. Perhaps this entire discussion is little more than a word-game.

This raises the question of the status of language. Language is arguably the greatest intellectual achievement of our species, making the rest of civilisation possible. Language has been laboriously constructed by millions of people over thousands, or even millions of years. We need to remember that it was created based on the subjective phenomena we now call perception, feeling and thought. Thus language itself, just like science, is a super-structure fashioned from these primary materials. It in turn, makes science, philosophy and other intellectual activity possible. I conclude that, given that language is a high-level construct of human thought, we should be wary of using language to explain the very basis of thought itself.

Although thought and sensation are prior to theory and philosophy, that does not mean we need to accept solipsism, the notion that there is no external world. The essential point is that subjective experience is primary, and that whatever we express using language, including our scientific theories, is nothing but a secondary structure built on top of this. It is a map, whereas what we directly experience is the territory. The determinists reduce our mental life to ideas derived from our scientific theories, which are expressed in the artificial medium of language. This amounts to seeing a map as being the primary given and the terrain it describes as a secondary phenomenon. Let reason not be so proud!

Postscript
The eminent neuroscientist, Vilayanur Ramachandran, stated, "Our mental life is governed mainly by a cauldron of emotions, motives and desires which we are barely conscious of, and what we call our conscious life is usually an elaborate post hoc rationalization of things we really do for other reasons."

I believe that where we stand on the issue of free will vs determinism, and other philosophical questions, derives from our personality and is shaped by emotion. We feel that something is right and this causes us to seek a rationale to justify our view. We elaborate our rationale and shape it to make it as persuasive and rational as possible. Yet the motive force driving this process is our pre-existing belief, which is emotionally determined. In effect, rationality becomes a tool to justify what we believe.

We can see this at work in the genesis of the myriad "proofs" of God's existence. I also see it in myself, in that I believe something and then seek to justify it rationally. To me, free will appears as a "given", hence I seek to find arguments in its favour.