In defence of free will

Contextualisation

There is, on the Psience Quest forum (see here and here), as on its sister forum Skeptiko (see here), an ongoing debate over the existence of free will. This debate arises naturally out of the core subject matter of Psience Quest, parapsychology, in that the findings of parapsychology challenge physicalism, on which it is difficult to give an account of free will. On a physicalist account, consciousness is either non-existent or fully reducible to the physical, and thus cannot be meaningfully free in the sense required for the exercise of free will.

This page attempts to summarise the debate from the perspective of a defender of the existence of free will. Psience Quest's free will skeptics are invited to create their own page summarising their case against free will should they care to.

Presumption

Whilst there do exist those who claim that they cannot introspectively confirm their own free agency, or even that their own agency appears introspectively to not be free, they seem to be a minority. Too, the existence of free will is assumed in Western (all?) legal systems and is the common-sense view amongst the general population. For these reasons, this page starts with a presumption of free will, and places the burden of proof on free will skeptics. It then critically analyses and refutes the primary argument against free will presented by Psience Quest's free will skeptics.

Refuting the argument from incompatibility with a mutually exclusive dichotomy

As the notion of quantum indeterminacy from quantum mechanics has become more entrenched, the science-loving hard determinists of old have had to give up the notion that reality is fully deterministic. Many free will skeptics though have simply adapted the argument from the incompatibility of free will with a deterministic reality into an argument from the incompatibility of free will with reality's mutually exclusive dichotomy. Colloquially, that argument goes something like this:

Events in reality are either deterministic or indeterministic. If they are deterministic, then they had to happen, and thus they aren't free. If they are indeterministic, then they are random (arbitrary), and thus beyond the control of any agent. In both cases, they are incompatible with free will. Ergo, free will does not exist.

Superficially, the argument seems persuasive. Let's take a closer look though to see why we shouldn't be persuaded.

Notice that the dichotomy between "deterministic versus indeterministic" events has been translated into a dichotomy between "events that had to happen versus events that are random (arbitrary)", or, in other words, "necessitated versus random" events.

Now, by basic logic (the law of excluded middle) and syntax it is easy to see that "deterministic versus indeterministic" is a genuinely mutually exclusive dichotomy, however, a little insight leads to the conclusion that the dichotomy "necessitated versus random" is not. It has a gap in it - a gap into which a third option compatible with free will slots. Something has gone missing in translation.

That missing third option covers those events for which we can say that although the event happened due to some cause, it did not "have to" happen because of that cause; it simply "did" happen because of that cause. A suitable term for this third option, borrowing from its definition in logic, is "contingent". In logic, a proposition whose truth is "contingent" is one which, while true, is not true necessarily; it "just so happens" to be true. Here, we apply "contingent" not to logical propositions but to causal relations. We also borrow from the everyday sense of "contingent" as "dependent [on something prior to it]". Note that we specifically and explicitly exclude the everyday sense of "contingent" as "subject to chance". Indeed, we contrast our use of contingent against that concept, especially insofar as it refers to the same arbitrary "randomness" of the above argument, which is typically understood to represent an event without a cause: our "third option" of contingency explicitly requires that effects have causes; those causes, however, simply do not necessitate their effects.

We might make the following analogy:

• Event governed by a necessary causal relation <=> Necessarily true proposition.
• Event governed by a contingent causal relation <=> Contingently true proposition.
• Event not governed by any causal relation (a random/acausal event) <=> False proposition.

Why accept contingent causality?

Initially, this possibility (contingent causality) might seem difficult to accept. It might be tempting to ask: if an effect is an outcome of a cause, then shouldn't that cause always and necessarily produce that effect? How could there be such a thing as a cause that doesn't have to produce a given effect?

These questions are tempting to ask because of the triumph of science in modelling reality to the extent that we have been able to, such that we have developed highly sophisticated, and, more importantly, highly reliable technology based on our models of reality. You can't build reliable technology unless predictable outcomes are in some sense guaranteed or necessitated.

The sense of necessity implied here though is nomological: that is, "lawful" necessity. This is a weaker sense of necessity than logical necessity, and it leaves open an interesting question: in virtue of what is any lawful causal relation necessitated? For logical necessity, we have a ready answer: in virtue of its being true in every possible world, or, in other words, in virtue of its negation entailing a contradiction. We do not have a similarly ready answer for nomological necessity.

We seem, then, to have only half of the story: we have some "physical stuff" which is "forced" to behave in a certain way, but we don't have any account of why it is forced to behave in that way or what forces it. Our tempting skeptical questions have led to equally skeptical questions in the reverse direction. One potential resolution to this second set of questions is suggestive:

If we return to our common-sense understanding of agency, we can identify a potential enforcer of nomological necessity: conscious agency. We know from our own experience that we and others, as conscious agents, are capable of "making things happen"; of implementing and enforcing laws. It is then possible that physical reality owes its existence to one or more conscious agents who - by choice and force of will - provide "the laws of physics" with their reliability and apparent nomological necessity.

So, whilst contingency might be hard to accept when we are conditioned by technology to see the world in terms of lawful necessity, that very necessity itself might owe its existence to contingency. In other words, in asking our tempting questions, we might have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick.

Regardless, though, of the nature of the relationship between contingency and necessity: as intimated in the Presumption section above, we do have good reason to believe in the existence of contingency as a "third option" which makes free will possible, in that most of us experience our choices as neither forced nor arbitrary, and yet as meaningfully causally connected to both our person and the environment - both external and internal - in which our person exists. Such (freely willed) choices can readily be accurately described as causally contingent. In other words: whilst the effect of our choices is both caused and conditioned by both our person and the environment in which our person exists, the effect of our choices is not necessitated by either of those factors; we could in a meaningful rather than merely hypothetical sense have (again: contingently) chosen differently.

But how does it work?

A (set of) question(s) that often comes up at this point is:

But how are these choices made? In the case of determinism, we can explain how any given deterministic process works by breaking it down very exactingly in terms of the laws of physics, and for randomness, even though we can't exactly break it down like that, physics does give us a good reason to believe that in certain contexts it is applicable, and why. Can similar explanations be offered for how a free will choice is made?

A plausible answer is that just as a deterministic causal process can be broken down into a set of - themselves irreducible - laws which explain how the process works, freely willed choices and behaviour can be broken down into a set of - themselves irreducible - reasons which explain how the choice or behaviour were willed by the agent who willed them.

In this sense, reasons and the discipline of psychology are to free will choices what (respectively) laws and the discipline of physics are to causal determinism.

We might observe, for example, that in making choice C, person P took the steps S1, followed by S2, and then S3, in which S1 was a consideration of the options available, S2 was a narrowing down of options, and S3 was the - potentially provisional - commitment to one of the options - the choice itself. Though it might not be apparent to others (and sometimes not fully understood by P either), P had some reason or set of reasons R1 for undertaking S1, and some reason or set of reasons R2 for undertaking S2, and so on for not just S3 but C as well. In considering those reasons, we might find that although to an extent they can be broken down a little into "reasons why the reasons hold", at some point they become irreducible: P, given the full context of his/her situation, simply holistically and contingently chooses C for the given reasons. At that level, the choice cannot be broken down any further.

A full accounting of free will allows that these reasons are to an extent themselves freely (contingently) chosen, and thus neither the choice nor its reasons are necessitated. In other words, we are, to an extent, free to contingently "choose why we choose what we choose". There is a sense of circularity or endless recursion to this, but that is why the word "holistically" from the previous paragraph is especially relevant.

It is also worth noting that because there are not necessarily any overarching, time-independent "laws" applicable to the suggested contingent causality of free choices - the only time-independent "laws" are those reasons (in the form of principles) for his/her choices which an agent freely chooses to apply more generally - for any contingently causal chain such as the one described above by S1 => S2 => S3 (comprising C) it could often also be the case that a unique, specific reason (or set of reasons) applies at any given instant in the chain.

Now, even though, hopefully, the preceding has opened up to some readers the possibility of contingent events (choices in particular) compatible with genuine free will, an external resource which might also be of assistance in this respect is:

• Lecture Notes on Free Will and Determinism by Professor Norman Swartz.

Other refutations

The following external resource refutes the general argument from neuroscience:

• What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves. Debunking the tropes of neuromythology by Raymond Tallis.

The positive case for free will

A positive case for free will has also been presented in debates on the forum. For now though, this page simply refers to an external resource which makes that case. Other members are invited to fill out this skeletal section if and as they see fit.

• How Can I Possibly Be Free? Why the neuroscientific case against free will is wrong by Raymond Tallis.