Free Will vs. Determinism
By a strange coincidence one of my friends has recently been harping on about free will shortly after I had been thinking about the very same subject. Perhaps it was something in the water, or subliminal messages via the TV. Come to think of it, it was actually a few months apart and not really that surprising. Never mind.
But despite coming up a few times, no one yet has been able to answer my question or even come close. If free will does exist, how does it work? If I make the decision to turn left or right, and that decision is not determined by a product of my current state and the environment, where did that decision come from?
If you’re confused, perhaps you will permit me to humour you with a more detailed, hopefully simplified explanation. I’ll go through it quite slowly just to make sure we are all on the same page and using the same definitions.
Removing yourself from the context for a moment, consider being given the following list of numbers and asked to find a pattern:
55, 15, 54, 30, 86, 75, 82, 34, 18, 41
You would probably come to the conclusion that they were random. They are, however, derived from the following formula:
floor((tan i2 - floor(tan i2)) * 100)
Where floor returns the integer value of the input (10.54 = 10, 9.3 = 9 etc.) and i is the set {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}
The numbers appear random at first because you do not know the underlying mechanism as to how they were created. Yet however often you put the set through the algorithm you will always get the same series of results.
This can be represented pictorially thusly:
Now choose a series of random numbers for yourself. Don’t try and be clever, just pluck them out of the air. Here’s mine that I’ll use in my illustrations, but you can replace these with your own whenever you read them:
10, 15, 26, 91, 14, 62, 25, 78, 43, 56
We can adapt the diagram we used above to represent this new situation:
We are concerned for now only with what is in that box with the question mark. Not why, or any other philosophical style arguments. Simply, for now, with what.
In order to do this we have to make the assumption that it can indeed be represented by a function. This function may include elements of free will, it may be filled completely with free will, but even the uncertainty of free will can be incorporated into this broad concept of a function – an input produces an output, a question prompts an answer, a snide comment triggers a retort, a predicament produces a choice etc.
The deterministic theory, as is my understanding of it, states that this middle box is a function of the current state of the person and the environment.
“Current state” isn’t a technical term, but it is one that I feel adequately sums up what I mean. “Current state” is the personality of the person, the mood they are in at the time, whether they are in pain etc. It incorporates their brain, their personality, aspects of their soul (if it is split from the mind), how they are likely to react to situations, all of that.
The environment represents all the external influences, such as temperature, a fork in the road, who is present etc.
If you are still slightly unsure, let me clarify with an example. The environment consists of my friend. It also consists of the fact he has just insulted me. My current state is that I am a person prone to violence1, I am in a bad mood because I’ve had a bad day and that my friend has been annoying me muchly of late. These two factors, the environment and my current state, leads me to hit my friend.
The determinist philosophy can be extended further though. How does the current state arise? What determines the current state? Ignoring questions about the origins of the universe, let’s go back to when I was born. My current state started when I was conceived, when my genetics were determined. Shortly after that factors such as the environment in my mother’s womb start to affect how I develop. There has been much medical research to suggest what your mother does while she was pregnant with you has a large effect on how you develop. Exactly how these environmental factors effects me is again determined by my current state, traceable ultimately back to genetics.
Fast-forward back to the violent encounter with my friend. The fact that I punch him has an effect on his environment, and will affect what he does next. Most likely deal with the pain then get back at me somehow, verbally or physically. But of course, how he reacts is defined not only by the fact I punched him (his environment), but by his current state (what he thinks about me, is he a violent person etc.). In this way you can see how our actions affect the environment, and ultimately the decisions of others.
But it doesn’t just have an effect on him. It also has an effect on me. It may lead to me feeling relieved, it may justify the outburst in my head and condition me to react violently more often, or it may make me feel guilty and thus begin to apologise. Again, just how it affects me is determined by my personality, or more generally my current state.
We can, then, extend our diagram to include this concept along with the feedback loop:
The outcome of the decision effects both the environment and the current state of the person, meaning that even if the same input was given, i.e. “Chose some random numbers”, the output wouldn’t necessarily be the same.
The determinist theory extends this rather obvious higher level of determinism down to the base level of biochemistry. Our neurons follow physical laws, and thus can be turned into a function that will always give the same output for a given input.
Now to come back to my question. If free will is involved somewhere in the process, the idea that the function will not always give the same output for a given input, what determines what the output actually is? If it is the personality, or the soul, how is that personality or soul developed? Surely going down that road drags us back to determinism?
As far as I can see it, the only other explanation is that there is an element of complete randomness, perhaps derived from quantum physics or some other element. But then, is free will not just the gods throwing dice to determine our fate? This certainly isn’t the same definition of free will as used by many, I am still in no more control over the outcome of my decisions than in determinism, indeed it would seem even less.
All this has possibly interesting implications in accountability and law. If what I do is not my choice, but is determined by the environment, why should I be punished? It’s not my fault. However, as I see it, it should not change how we punish people, only how we perceive them.
If a person does something wrong we should pity them because society, their parents, their friends and their genetics made them that way. But should we punish them for their ills? Of course we should. How else would we keep order within society? It is the deterrent of punishment, of the repercussions that keeps me on the straight and narrow. I don’t actually punch my friends (that was just an illustration) because I would get into trouble and because they would retaliate.
Prison isn’t a punishment; it hasn’t been for a long time (or at least shouldn’t have been). It is a deterrent and a correction centre. It is a mechanism for us to keep society on track and not running amok.
One area that it does have serious implications, however, is religion. Take, for instance, the Christian faith. In order to get eternal life in heaven rather than in hell I must make the decision to accept that Jesus is my saviour and that he died for my sins. Some arrive at this decision by careful deliberation; some have grown up in an environment that teaches this, while others have had miraculous experiences. But what about all those people who haven’t had that extra bit of push that leads to that epiphany? Is it fair that just because the environment hasn’t yielded the right conditions for them to be able to make that step of faith that they must be condemned to a Godless life? I know I’m placing human ideas of fairness onto a spiritual idea, but it’s certainly one to think about.
1 I don’t consider myself a violent person, and I very rarely hit people. This is just for the purpose of the illustration.
Comments
I love your illustrations, you've done a brilliant job of explaining this clearly. I generally understand and agree with what you say, but I am still unsure of whether I agree with you. But then I don't have any problem with things being completely abitrary and random. I do not know if I even think that's possible. I haven't really sorted out my ideas in this area.
Personally, in my grappling with free will vs determinism, I am on the deterministic side, but on the side of SOFT determinism. The element of randomness I see is prettymuch straight taken from chaos theory. I know, many people think the butterfly effect is a complete crock, but there's something there.
For instance, take two seeds from the same apple: they have the same genetic material. Take soil from the same bag. Two pots cast from the same mold of the same material. Water from the same source. Same sun, same shade. Will you get exactly the same tree? No. The branches will fork off differently for each tree. What influenced each branching, specific splitting of cells, drawing this molecule of water as opposed to that one? The reason is there.
Now, instead of soil and water, imagine you live in a bustling city. Sitting next to someone on the bus as a child and overhearing something said could completely change how you view people. Say you're white and you hear a black person talking about drugs. You may forever be wired to have a suspicion of every black person, even though you've logically known that this isn't the case for every black person. And the worst part is, you may not even remember having seen this. It's just in there, acting on your perception of reality, affecting your decision to double-count your change from the cashier because their skin is dark.
If you want a mechanism to go in that box with a question mark, it may never be given to you. If there is a pattern, you may never see it. I think that's the beauty of life. It gives us room to breathe, to think that things are within our control when they're not, and that things are beyond our control when they're not. The best part about this is the flexibility it allows us. Human experience is consistent with both free will and determinism, and whichever side starts arguing will always be right (depending, of course, on the arguer).
A quote I read from Simon Blackburn kind of sums up how I feel about this whole thing.
"[Our] awarenesses, our capacities to think of alternatives, our evaluations of them, and our eventual behavioral routines [encoded in the brain] might have been highly inflexible. But the evidence suggests that they are the reverse. People can quite naturally grow up caring about a whole variety of things. It is quite difficult to detect any universal pattern at all: flexibility rules. Human beings can grow to make killing fields, or they can grow to make gardens."
It's a nice description you have given though, and much appreciated. Good quote too.
Have you heard of Chaos theory? I think that would be a pretty good definition of how humans make choices. We are determined by our causes, but those causes are nearly infinite. Any tiny change in your past will change your decision drastically. So much so that no two people have ever made the same set of choices.
But does that even matter for free will? Don't we *want* our choices to come from our character? This view does encourage us to pity those of us who fail, but that doesn't mean they are absolved from moral responsibility.
We have the freedom to be ourselves.
As far as Christianity goes, I don't believe exclusivism is a valid tenet of the religion at all. But then, I get in trouble for saying that a lot. ;)
Yes, we have the freedom to be ourselves. But the argument would be that we are not free to chose who "ourself" is. But in order for society to function, indeed for individual lives to function we must view it from a higher more abstracted level.
*copies and pastes from facebook*
and *punches air* i DO have a valid contribution to make: http://en.wikipedia.org/wi
in regard to your colossal internal struggle.. im afraid im going to be boring and go with a combination of free will and determinism (there is a name for it but i cant remember it.. *blushes*)
people act a certain way, each person differently, and if that person has free will then, like you said, the combination of factors that compel a person to, for example, punch a friend (any history of violence in the family, any history of violence in your upbringing, a tendency to bottle things up and so eventually overreact/ a tendency to overreact anyway, the consequences of any omg ive run out of room :s)
at this point i had to go out and try and get back in again ^^
oh crap i was actually getting quite insightful, believe it or not >:@ and now i have NO idea what i was saying.. -_-
yes.. well.. hmm.. err so if you DO punch your annoying and insultuous friend then that action is a result of you and your environment, neither of which you have much control over, so like you said that basically brings you back to determinism, but at the same time, if you do not punch your annoying and insultuous friend because you discover that you have slightly more tolerance than you thought, you still could have punched him, and the fact that you didnt cannot really be considered as a source of frustration. if, to avoid getting onto theological ground and using up another comment, we call someone mr X, and mr X gives andrew january a certain sensitivity to being called, say, mr potato man, coupled with very DAMN ive overrun again this is utterly pointless wish i could delete this comments see you on vox!!
Hi, me again, and Im so so sorry i cant even leave a comment without it being screwed up..
so basically, long story short, andrew january doesnt like being called mr potato man, has a moderate puttingupwithit threshold and has very powerful x-men type fists.. o_O hmm.. i was going somewhere with this.. ah yes, andrew january AT THAT TIME has the free will to choose whether or not to punch his friend. he has the capacity to be the bigger man, but also the capacity to be the smaller man but have a warm fuzzy feeling of sudden self-esteem. which is basically the point its taken me half an hour to ^^
and now mums having a rant at me and basically doesnt seem to believe in my right as an individual to express my opinions at 23.34 on a school night..
so i shall end here