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 outcomes or processes. Note that we specifically and explicitly exclude the ordinary sense of "contingent" as "subject to chance": indeed, we contrast our use of contingent against that concept (as well as against the concept of "necessitation").
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? We have a person and that person's environment as "cause" (eliding for convenience the distinction between causes and conditions), and then we have the choice's outcome as "effect". Surely, though, there is some sort of process by which the choice is made; some way of breaking it down into a series of steps?
One plausible answer is that, whilst a decision often can be broken down into a series of steps (as introspection reveals), at a certain point, the decision simply becomes irreducible. In this sense, the decision is simply an holistic function of a person's will given the context in which s/he finds him/herself. 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. In considering S3, we might find that although to an extent it can be broken down a little, at some point it becomes irreducible: the person, given the full context of his/her situation, simply holistically and contingently makes the choice. At that level, the choice cannot be broken down any further.
Notice that whilst that irreducible choice itself could have been made otherwise (and thus is not necessitated), it is also not disconnected from the context - both inner and outer to the chooser - in which it occurs (and thus is not arbitrary): indeed, unless the chooser freely chooses to make an explicitly "random" choice, the decision is made in part on the basis of - and thus is causally (though, through the person's will, in a contingent rather than a necessitated sense) connected to - that context.
Another point worth making is that on this view, S1 and S2 are themselves contingent expressions of the chooser's free will, and are thus themselves free choices (which break down, too, into fundamentally irreducible free choices), and, in this sense, are no different in nature than S3 and (the abstracted aggregate) C.
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:
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.