Free Willfully

It seems to me that one of many odd tensions on social media concerns free will. On the one hand, people insist that most wrong actions are the result of innately awful people. The default assumption seems to be that people act malevolently, choosing to cause harm for the sheer delight of it, and not out of simple ignorance.

On the other hand, science activists on social media tend to deny that anyone can ever make a choice at all, that everything must be either predetermined, that the laws of physics are really immutable Laws that cannot ever be circumvented - or at most that there's an element of pure randomness to it all, but that actual deliberate choice is something weird and mystical.

Why this insistence against common sense ? I'm not sure. But Malcom Gaskill's marvellous books on witch-hunts have left me wondering how much of the old Calvinist mindset has persisted into the subconscious of modern America. Even those who actively reject religious beliefs cannot escape their cultural influence pervading wider society. Certainly the inherently conflicted nature of those beliefs does strike a chord with me when I see some of the abject lunacy coming from across the pond. 

Might it be that a belief in determinism is a manifestation of this, a holdover from a much earlier era of Calvinist puritanism ? It does often feel like people want to attack other people for the sake of it; rather than correcting their mistakes they just want to remove them from the arena altogether (as though they're locked in to their behaviour and incapable of change), even when those same people are actively trying to redeem themselves. 

But I digress. Personally I think free will is very much a thing; whether there is some "mystical" component to it I don't know, but I don't think there is any real need to invoke something supernatural to explain it (more on that in the next post). 

As I see it, not everything can be quantified or even measured. Yet the mind is, by some as-yet unknown process, capable of accessing this non-physical aspect of reality. I don't see anything especially "mystical" about feelings like guilt or sensory experiences like yellowness, but these things are not physically measurable. There doesn't appear to me to be any obvious need to say that because we can experience boredom, and particles of boredom don't exist, we need to believe in voodoo or the Tooth Fairy. It points to a gap in our knowledge, but nothing more than that. Anyway, by being able to act on something unphysical, this allows for the prospect of choice which defies determinism, since the information we act on is purely mental and not external to us.

So I'm gratified to have come across a couple of recent articles which are at least more sympathetic to the prospect of free will than most seem to be. The first is this short piece from The Conversation. It has quite a nice (but very brief) description of determinism, but the main take-away point for me is :

Suppose again that determinism is incompatible with free will. If so, when you freely moved your finger, that event was not fully determined by the initial conditions of the Universe and the laws of nature. Does it necessarily follow that it’s random? On the face of it, no. To be random is one thing; to be not fully determined is quite another. There’s a logical space between determinism and randomness, and perhaps free will lives in that space.

Making a choice doesn't mean you act randomly or entirely unpredictably, because that's clearly not what people are like : if I start voting Tory, my identity would have to undergo a seismic shift, and this is not at all the same as saying I had a choice. Rather, what I believe is going on is (in part) that I act on those inner mental worlds which for me define the concept of a mind. It's not external, physical reality that dictates my actions but my inner life : if I see a symbol and interpret it as meaning "five", I act differently to if I read it as "seven", regardless of what the symbol actually is. 

And the choice I make is not a compulsion. If I make consistent choices it's because my desires are consistent. Sure, you can predict this based on my past behaviour, but this will never be 100% accurate, because you can never truly know what my inner world is really like. Even I can't, because some of this is subconscious. Again, this position in between randomness and determinism is nothing weird. A Galton board, though purely deterministic, is a pretty good analogy to this : the behaviour is statistically predictable but nigh-on impossible to get it 100% accurate for individual runs. The either/or options of randomness or determinism are a false choice when it comes to the issue of free will : it's neither of those things.

The second article is from Scientific American. It says that something I've suggested for years is true : that when you make idle, inconsequential decisions, you experience different brain activity than when your decisions really matter. So the way you make those decisions involves fundamentally different processes, and that even if you can predict them through brain scans (about which I still reserve skepticism), this may only be because you're not actually making a choice in those instances. Rather the brain is just selecting something at random on your behalf, with no need to trouble your conscious mind about it. 

The other point from the article is that even from a materialist perspective (which I don't share), you can still be said to be making a choice :

When experiments have found that brain activity, such as the readiness potential, precedes the conscious intention to act, some people have jumped to the conclusion that they are “not in charge.” They do not have free will, they reason, because they are somehow subject to their brain activity. But that assumption misses a broader lesson from neuroscience. “We” are our brain. The combined research makes clear that human beings do have the power to make conscious choices. But that agency and accompanying sense of personal responsibility are not supernatural. They happen in the brain, regardless of whether scientists observe them as clearly as they do a readiness potential.

Even though I think the idea that brain activity = mental activity is nonsensical, I find it interesting that the materialistic view has more in common with my own opinions than I would have guessed. If I can tear myself away from Tolkien for long enough, expect a fuller write-up on this at some point. But coming next : the supernatural. Wooo-ooooo !