To what extent, if any, is free-will compatible with determinism
Warning: Another badly formed essay. Again, may be revised.
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The question of metaphysical freedom has plagued philosophy since the development of consistent theories of a causally-closed physical reality. If, for every each physical event there is a direct physical cause, then the system is casually closed. Furthermore, a system where the effect that a generated by a specific set of conditions is always the same is a deterministic system. The current scientific model is both deterministic and casually closed and, therefore, should be completely definable for all time given only the initial conditions and the causal rules.
In a system such as this, all events are determined; regardless of whether conscious life can exist or not, it will either evolve or not. Moreover, once consciousness exists, it is still bound by the determinism of the reality, and so all of its actions are predetermined, and it appears to be stripped of all free will, and therefore that they would have no moral responsibility for their actions. Without this responsibility, and the ability to make choice, people are not really agents in the reality.
The simple resolution to this problem is compatibilism (forms of which were supported by both Hobbes and Hume), where the apparent discrepancies between the notion of Free Will and a deterministic reality. A resolution can be achieved by thinking about the concept of freedom in a different way.
Hobbes view, which comes from a person finding “no stop, in doing what he has the will desire, or inclination to do”, is built of a two components which allow for an agent in a deterministic system to have freedom of action. There is the positive component, that the agent still has wills and desires in some form, a fact that is apparent from our own experience. The second is the finding “no stop”, or that action is unimpaired. Although here the freedom of the agents action is clear, whether they actually have freedom of will is less clear, as the desires that we perceive would still be wholly determined by reality and, therefore, perhaps our perceived desires are determined by the choice that we will make.
Later philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett and Harry Frankfurt, have proposed forms of compatibilism that freewill still exists even if an agent’s actions are impaired, creating a version of compatibilism called the "hierarchical mesh". The principle is that agents have both desires, and meta-desires – a person’s will is then the represented by both the first and second order desires of the desire which they act upon.
For example, consider a group of people addicted to a particular drug. They all about to take some of the drug, but have conflicting desires about doing so, meaning that they’re primary desire is not to take the drug. However, some (the ‘willing addicts’) have higher order desires to take the drug, and so will eventually do so; they have freely followed their meta-desires. The ‘unwilling addicts’ will follow their original desire, as it is backed by their meta-desires, and will be able to rise above their addiction. The third group, who have no meta-desires relating to the desire upon which they are acting, are called the ‘wanton addicts’ and it is this group that Frankfurt assigns no freedom of will.
Overall, this theory leaves much to be desired, as it still remains a somewhat clunky hypothesis based upon making a compatible system, without really regarding what we currently observe in the system we are trying to describe – quote how meta-desires would map onto my cognitive processes seems difficult to explain.
The primary opposing view is that of incompatibilism, which comes in two main forms: either denying determinism or denying the existence of free will. The former, commonly known as indeterminism, is the conclusion that is steadily being drawn from the now probabilistic view of physics created by the discovery of quantum mechanical interpretations of the universe. As the resultant event from a set of causes is the sum over possibilities of all the possible events, a degree of freedom is introduced to the system. Given that the current state of mind of an agent in this reality is a causal node for the system, their state of mind will affect the probabilistic event which results. In simple terms, the desires of agents affect how the universe progresses, giving a freedom of will.
The other form of incompatibilism, hard determinism, allows for no freedom of will due to a complete lack of flexibility in a deterministic universe.
Although it may seem simple enough to accept either some form of compatibilism or incompatibilism, both have major problems. Denying our free will is, as Sartre put it, an act of bad faith; it seems unjust to abandon our claim to the freedom we perceive. Denying the determinism of the universe also appears as a bad idea. Fortunately, there are a number of other positions within the free will / determinism debate, the formulation of which are more less obvious from the initial premises. These include the more mainstream theories Agent-Causation, Three Worlds Pluralism, and also the primarily fictional formulation of Psychohistory. Psychohistory is a fictional theory which originates in Isaac Asimov’s novel ‘Foundation’, which transfers the statistical theory associated with systems such as kinetic theory or quantum mechanics into a sociological situation. Similar to the model of a gas, although no model can accurately predict the behaviour of one individual particle, or person, the response of the whole system can be accurately modelled over larger periods of time. This translates to the reactions of a free individual being unpredictable, but the response of humanity as a whole is unaffected. The unpredictability caused by the inherent uncertainties in physics may allow for this type of individual freedom, while still allowing for clear, predefined points in social history. Although this thought exercise never took off in philosophical circles, nor in and situation outside of Asimov’s writing of the series, it still creates a nice parallel between quantum mechanics and an agent’s freedom.
Better know is Popper’s three world pluralism. The first ‘world’, the physical plane, consists of all of the physical matter and events. However, unlike most dualist hypotheses, the mind-stuff is across two worlds – the ‘second world’ of psychological states and events, the thoughts and desires – and also the ‘third world’ – containing the meaningful content. By making the clear distinctions between the psychological will and desire, and the metaphysical meanings, a clearer picture of the meaning of freedom of will and freedom of action can be drawn.
However, perhaps some of Popper’s other commentary on the free will debate requires closer attention; his attack on the lack of review of ideas between pure determinism and pure chance. His previous arguments against this dichotomy which “seems to hold good for the quantum-theoretical models which have been designed to explain, or at least to illustrate, the possibility of human freedom” lead to a two stage model, partially based around an analogue with genetic evolution.
This is not too dissimilar from the functional concept of agent causation, although they have been formulated from completely different starting points in completely different ways. The defining feature is that the agents cause a series of deterministic events, without the agent’s action being decided in a completely deterministic fashion.
All of these theories agree on a number of points: that a hard deterministic system is not compatible with a true freedom of will; that a probabilistic system of causation gives a degree of freedom, which can be construed as freedom of will. This forms the first major conclusion we can reach: in their strictest forms, determinism and free will are not compatible.
However, when we observe either in the real world, we can successfully ‘fudge’ the definitions to allow for both within our reality. By their very definition, compatibilist theories will allow for compatibility between free will and determinism. The range of theories available do this to greater and lesser extents depending on how the meaning of free will if interpreted; the Hoobes/Hume formulation that was discussed presents a firm argument for freedom of action.
Some of the other forms discussed are unable to give much more – Asimov’s Psychohistory does not actually present a case for personal freedom, but merely suggests that any freedom we have is unable to have any overall effect on the overall deterministic system. However, it is fundamentally different from the forms of the incompatibilism / determinism which remove all possibility that we have anything more than the illusion of freedom.
Of course, the illusion of freedom is, in many respects, all that in all other kinds of freedom – we are always free to take any course in the domains of political and social freedom, but we only follow certain paths, bound by the perceptions of right and wrong. Perhaps, therefore, the deterministic nature of the universe is nothing more than the cosmic arbiter , which decides what it is right and wrong for us to do at any time.
The final logical theme is the inclusion of freedom by statistics; agent-causation, similar to the statistical freedom which is drawn from the quantum mechanical interpretation of physics, gives a wholly resolvable view of freedom, based on probabilistic fluctuations.
And so, the soft-conclusion, which deals with soft-determinism, can be drawn: Unlike in the case of hard determinism, where freedom of will can be shown to be non-existent, reality is much more complex. The additional degree of freedom added by the rules which define physics being non-resolvable for all time gives the possibility that the feeling of free will that we possess is not an illusion, but instead that freedom of will is possible in a soft-deterministic system.