Readers join Stephen Cave in discussing the age-old conundrum of free will and determinism, in response to Cave’s popular Atlantic essay “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will: But we’re better off believing in it anyway.” If you’d like to join in, send us a note: hello@theatlantic.com.
Stephen Cave sparked a ton of reader discussion with his essay “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will,” and you can wade into the robust comments section if you’re determined to do so. Here’s one of the more fascinating findings in Cave’s piece:
Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.
For an in-depth interrogation of that idea, here’s a video of neuroscientist Sam Harris (whom Cave quoted extensively in his piece) on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and it opens with Harris defending the sort of research pioneered by Libet:
Nick Clairmont—our bright young Politics fellow who wrote his master’s dissertation on the philosophical concept of semicompatibilism—contributed his own note to our discussion and took Cave’s title a step further: “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will and Determinism.” Nick addressed a number of reader emails, as did Cave in a followup note, “Free Will Exists and Is Measurable”—which introduced a new concept, FQ:
We already have tests that assess people’s reasoning skills, creativity, self-control and the likes, all of which are essential components of psychological free will. In another essay, I have suggested that we could therefore meaningfully talk about a “Freedom Quotient” or FQ, which would allow us to rate your or my free will, and identify ways in which we could make it even freer.
Several more readers are joining the philosophical fray. Here’s David in Tallahassee with “my case against free will”:
You don’t decide where you are born. You don’t decide whether you win the lottery of birth, and you don’t decide whether you are born a minority and/or with certain abilities/defects of the brain (ADD or something on the autism spectrum, for better or usually worse). For the most part, you don’t decide your diet and the interactions you have with adults and peers (in your most formative years). Add all of this to the fact that our actions and the way we see the world are governed by chemicals in the brain.
“Free will” is a concept usually thought of in the micro sense, but this heuristic applying to everyone in the world, one begins to wonder how little control we have over large macro world trends and forces. Can we really blame war criminals, domestic offenders and fraudulent
bankers? Or does policy and society have a responsibility to be intervening as doctor (rather than punisher) on behalf of the very worst parts of us, which we do not control?
That analogy—doctors intervening with patients—resonated with me because I’ve long considered prison to be a sort of quarantine. If criminal actions are essentially deterministic, criminals might be absolved from any moral culpability based on free will, but of course that doesn’t mean we should allow violent criminals to roam free, spreading violence to others. Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku touches on the criminal factor in this clip:
A reader in the military, Robert, has a tough question:
I am about to lose someone dear to me. If I have free will and the ability to choose, why can’t I stop the sadness?
I lost one of my closest friends to brain cancer a few years ago, and I think I would be sad if that sadness completely stopped, because that would mean I stopped thinking about him.
This next reader also delves into some bleak thoughts:
One thing to remember about the lack of free will is that if it really doesn’t exist, it implies much, much more than mere lack of choice. Remember that we are talking about the idea of reduction of the mind to a mere machine—a complex machine, but no more than that.
When you reduce the possibility of a soul or something operating in the same conceptual space, you take away much of the significance of not only our actions but also our reactions. I stab you—it wasn’t my choice. You feel pain, but the pain you feel is an illusion, no more real than my idea that I had any option not to cause it. Remember: complex machine, but no more significant than a computer programmed to light up a sign that says “suffering” when kicked.
I don’t care when I break a glass, and under a non-deterministic mindset, it’s just as illogical to care when a person bleeds or starves. It makes no more difference then how many times a dropped tennis ball happens to bounce.
If someone pushes a button and destroys all life on earth in a nuclear holocaust, you might think it bad, but your feeling was predetermined as well. The universe itself doesn’t care about our presence or absence, and can’t. When the meaning is stripped from choice, it’s necessarily stripped from human existence itself.
If you’re interested in another recent Atlantic piece on this subject, check out Julie’s “Regret Is the Price of Free Will: Feeling in control of your life is good for you, but it can also lead to heartbreak over mistakes and lost opportunities.” One reader has a thought:
Julie writes, “While too much upward counterfactual thinking (and regret) has been associated with anxiety and depression, it also plays a key role in problem-solving, achieving goals, and improving behavior.”
I agree. I believe it also has something to do with frustration, the negative emotional reaction to not getting what one wants or needs. A stalking tiger that misses its prey simply moves on, waiting for the next chance, even if it ends up starving to death. But in early humans, that missed chance must have eventually resulted in frustration and anger, with the brain developing the need for planning and hence advanced thinking. Perhaps emotions like regret, frustration, and anger also led to consciousness itself.
For a more robust take on those mysteries of the mind, check out the recent piece Michael Graziano wrote for us, “A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved.” If you want to grapple with any of these ideas, on free will or consciousness, drop us a note and we’ll weave it into the discussion.
I’m delighted that so many people have felt irresistibly compelled to read, share, and comment on my Atlantic article “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will—But we’re better off believing in it anyway.”
Quite a few of those readers have assumed—understandably, given the article’s title—that I don’t think there is such a thing as free will. But that’s not the case. I report on the idea that free will has been wholly refuted, but I don’t endorse it. I argue that this view is spreading—for example, into courtrooms—and I quote Sam Harris, who defends this view eloquently, and I explore what might happen if this view continues to spread further.
But as I say, it’s not my view. There is, however, one important variety of free will that I do reject: the one that has it as an unearthly power; some kind of mysterious force standing outside of science as we know it, and allowing us to make choices that are not caused by our brains. A significant number of those who commented on the article seem to subscribe to such an idea of free will, including the best-selling author Eben Alexander, who, in a blog post, claims that:
The physical brain does not produce consciousness, so much as serve as a filter that allows primordial consciousness to trickle into our awareness in a very limited fashion, which is the “here-and-now” that we experience in normal waking reality.
As I have argued elsewhere, I think this view is wrong: There is a great deal of evidence that consciousness—and therefore all our decision-making processes—stem entirely from the brain. I’d therefore be happy to say that there is no such thing as that kind of free will, the kind that posits such fancies as free-floating minds or primordial consciousness-transmitters.
On a different note, Alexander and some other commentators point out that quantum mechanics demonstrates that the world is not straightforwardly deterministic. In this, they are right: quantum indeterminacy implies that physical reality has an irreducibly probabilistic nature. Other readers have pointed out that even classical physics does not always allow us to accurately predict what will happen: According to chaos theory, any of an incalculably huge number of tiny differences in initial conditions can lead to radically different outcomes. (At least, that’s the excuse weather forecasters use for getting it wrong.) This too is a fair point.
But neither quantum indeterminacy nor chaos theory give us free will in the sense of a special power to transcend the laws of nature. They introduce respectively randomness and unpredictability, but not free-floating minds that cause atoms to swerve, or neurons to fire, or people to act. So you could read instances of the term “determinism” in my article as meaning roughly “the belief that human action is the product of physical laws” and all the points would remain the same.
The kind of free will that I do think exists is one that is actually entirely compatible with the laws of nature as we know them. This kind of free will doesn’t happen at the level of quantum events, or even of individual neurones. It happens at the level studied by psychology—the level of decisions, deliberations and imagination.
Careful readers will note that this is the view defended by the philosopher Bruce Waller, whose ideas I favourably report towards the end of the article. Professor Waller argues that animals evolved the capacities we associate with free will in order to survive—capacities like generating options for themselves, deliberating over which is the best option, and having the will to then stick to their choice. We humans, with our massive brains, have all of these capacities in abundance.
Seeing free will in terms of these psychological capacities has the interesting implication that it is in principle measurable. We already have tests that assess people’s reasoning skills, creativity, self-control and the likes, all of which are essential components of psychological free will. In another essay, I have suggested that we could therefore meaningfully talk about a “Freedom Quotient” or FQ, which would allow us to rate your or my free will, and identify ways in which we could make it even freer.
There would be many practical applications of such a FQ. One is illustrated by the comments of an Atlantic reader who works as a psychotherapist. A therapist assumes causal determinism, according to the reader, in order to understand a person’s behaviour: “My methods are totally deterministic. I seek explanations for behavior that are both biological and environmentally based.” But, at the same time, the therapist’s goals are to increase the patient’s autonomy and ability to direct their lives:
My goal, as a therapist, is to give a person a greater sense of control of their lives, and to allow them to feel they're capable of making better decisions… [and] to create new experiences for the patient, experiences that will allow her/him to develop the skills to alter his/her behavior in the future.
Or, as we might say, to increase their FQ.
The free will debate is such a hardy perennial because these two levels of explanation appear to contradict each other: On the one hand, seeing humans as part of nature’s causal chain; on the other hand, seeing humans as autonomous, creative, deliberating beings. But we are slowly moving towards a better understanding of both levels, and this—more than any fanciful ideas of free-floating consciousness-transmitters—will help us eventually to become the best we can be.
It’s no surprise that Stephen Cave’s story in our current issue, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will,” is one of the most read and hotly debated Atlantic pieces this month. The galaxy of philosophical issues called “free will and determinism” is where morals and physics come together. In other words, it’s a subject that genuinely matters, and one that’s a hell of a lot of fun to argue about.
The relationship between physical laws and moral laws is intuitive to most people. If the rules that govern the universe that exist outside of ourselves and before we’re born apply to our actions, how can we be responsible for those actions?
But it’s worth taking a closer look at this, as some readers are already doing. This one states the case that a purely deterministic universe rules out the possibility of free will:
Conscious or sub-conscious, if our choices are governed by chemical interactions in the brain, then they are not choices or free will at all—just the result of inherently predictable and deterministic interactions governed by laws of classical physics. The only potential for free will is quantum interactions in the brain, which may or may not exist (no proof yet either way).
According to this line, the jury is out on whether we have free will, because it depends on the forthcoming findings of physics as to whether there is randomness in the decision-making processes in our brains. At its core, the claim here is that in order to be responsible for doing something—in order to have done it freely—we need to have been able to do something else. We need multiple options, or alternative possibilities.
But the following reader looks critically at why indeterminism would justify moral responsibility:
How does randomness lead to free will? Let’s say at every possible decision point in my day—coffee or no coffee, take the freeway or surface streets, place a comma or don’t place a comma—that instead of making a choice (or being causally forced into a choice), I instead have to stop and flip a coin. Heads I do one of the things, tails the other, and it’s perfectly random.
Is this anything like free will? If I landed heads and had coffee, tails and took surface streets, and tails and placed the comma, did I choose those things in any meaningful sense of the word?
Taken together, we can see the germ of an odd but appealing idea here: Perhaps neither determinism nor indeterminism leads to the kind of moral responsibility and free will we have such a strong intuitions towards. Maybe if we can be morally responsible, it’s for some other reason entirely.
I wrote my dissertation a few years ago arguing for this idea, which is called “semicompatibilism.” It’s gaining ground in philosophy circles due largely to its greatest champion, a California philosopher named John Martin Fischer. For now, it’s still a fringe view that hopes to overturn millennia of accepted wisdom about one of the oldest and most important issues in philosophy.
It gets technical fast, but the justification is simple: We have a strong intuition for moral responsibility. And if something does justify moral responsibility, it’s probably something that actually happened, not something that might have happened but didn’t. Moral responsibility is immune to the question of whether the universe is or is not determined.
Think about it for a moment: The notion that we are morally responsible for something because we could have done otherwise even though we didn’t is actually really weird, isn’t it? It’s the disingenuous logic of insurance salesmen. And to paraphrase Fischer, should our deepest senses of ourselves as moral agents really be hostage to the arcane discoveries by theoretical physicists of more and more accurate equations that describe the universe? The physics questions are a discussion of a different type, and it doesn’t seem like they should matter one way or the other.
As another reader puts it:
Why do so many people equate “free will” with “non-determinism”? Just because our choices are predictable, it does not mean that we do not make choices.
Well, why do they? If you have any thoughts on the matter, or Stephen Cave’s piece more generally, let us know: hello@theatlantic.com.
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