The riddle of free will has haunted theologians, philosophers, and psychologists for at least 2200 years, yes, even the biologist E.O. Wilson, who recently presented us with an explanation of everything, in the spirit of the French encyclopedists of the 18th century.
In the second century BCE, Alexander
of Aphrodisias wrote On Fate, in which he defended the
concept of free will against the Stoic doctrine of the predetermination
of human action.
Lest you think that the issue was settled
for the theologians 1580 years ago, here's the thunder of the
Rev. Harold Taylor, pastor of Allegheny Baptist Church here in
Blacksburg:
"Depraved, controlled by a fallen nature, having no spark of divinity, no burning coal of goodness to fan into flame, man is under the rule of the evil and left to be his own authority in all things. Every man practices what is right in his own eyes and he is the sole determinate of what is right.
"This was the tragedy of Pelagius and Arminius. In exalting man they jettisoned God and his Sovereign control over the whole of His creation. They, in cowardly fashion, without respect for truth, except as they perceived it, promoted a heresy which leaves man hopeless and helplessly doomed. These men and their offspring are today confined to a worldly order devoid of any heavenly wisdom with their satanic lies."
But wait. There are the "Free Will
Baptists," whose belief system includes the generous admission
that "a saved individual may, in freedom of will, cease to
trust in Christ for salvation and once again be lost. This they
hold in distinction from those who teach that a believer, once
having accepted Christ, may not again be lost."
For Pelagius and all who have upheld the concept of free will, the issue is moral responsibility. If we cannot choose freely between right and wrong, between good and evil, then we have no responsibility. This is the defense from insanity in Anglo-American jurisprudence.
Why are we so concerned about
"free will?"
The fundamentalists reject it, denouncing
Pelagius and Arminius. The humanists cling to it. What is this
all about?
We easily see why the fundamentalists
feel the way they do. For Augustine and Taylor, and all like them,
the issue is one of God's omnipotence. By asserting free will,
they claim, we are denying the absolute sovereignty of God. Here
is the Rev. Taylor again.
No mere man has ever possessed absolute sovereignty over anyone or any thing. Such is reserved for God alone. He alone has authority over body and soul. This is denied by those mentioned earlier [Pelagius and Arminius] and in our present day as well.
They insist that man has sovereignty, ultimate power to break the dominion of Satan or sin (if indeed they acknowledge either as declared in the Word of God) which, in Adam, was mankind's own choosing.
Does this mean that poor Adam, before
he knew right from wrong, did have free will? Incidentally, if
we don't have free will, how can we "choose" Christ?
Indeed, the fundamentalists denounce the humanists and free will
because, if we have free will, they say, "anything is permitted.
There is no morality."
On the contrary, we say, only if we
know right from wrong, only if we have eaten of the fruit of the
tree of knowledge of good and evil, only if we can choose between
good and evil, only if we "break the dominion of Satan and
sin" of our own free will can we be morally accountable.
But are we right? Can we be morally
accountable and not have free will? We want to avoid the trap
of determinism; if causality prevails, where then is free will?
So we (i.e., our philosophers invent "agent causation,"
a sort of ghost in the machine, all the while denying that they
are dualists.
The philosophers have tried to save
their day by postulating a hierarchy of "causes," or
"agents," and on the top a second level agent that is
not subject to causality, and that is where the free will ultimately
resides. One of them wrote: "A free act is one where the
agent could have done otherwise if she had chosen otherwise,
and in such acts the agent is morally responsible, even if determined."
(Well and good, but she didn't choose otherwise!)
Another has suggested that if determinism
were known to be true, no one could ever rationally deliberate
about any type of action.
Deliberation, it is said, makes sense only if genuine alternatives are available to us. If I deliberate about whether or not to raise my arm, my deliberation is rational only if I am able to either raise it or not to raise it. If determinism is true, only one course is genuinely open to me. So, it is alleged, my deliberation is irrational."
These philosophers are really dense.
Suppose that I am terribly angry with somebody, and that at the
end of my raised arm will be a clenched, menacing fist. The deliberation
is part of the causal process, that may eventually cause me not
to raise my arm (fist). On the other hand, my anger may be such
that I can't "deliberate," I act on (the causal) angry
impulse. It seems to me that the philosophers' causality is simplistic.
They neglect the psychological causality; they identify events
in the mind with this mysterious second level "agent."
By relegating psychological events to the realm of the uncaused,
in order to preserve free will, they are committing the "sin"
of dualism.
Or they invoke quantum mechanics and
Heisenberg, to introduce unpredictability from which they "derive"
free will. I believe that the fundamental motivation for trying
to save free will is just this issue of predictability. Like the
mechanists of the 17th through early 20th
centuries, they believe that if we know the present state of every
particle, we could predict the entire future of the universe.
In the present discourse, it would mean that if we knew all the
sensations and thoughts of a person at this moment, we could predict
what they would do next. And that is unacceptable. The thought
that we are predictable is abhorrent. And there would be no moral
judgement, no accountability.
From the time of Newton to the first
decades of the 20th century, the universe seemed totally
deterministic. It consisted of little hard objects, called atoms,
that bounced off of each other like billiard balls. Once given
the initial push by the "prime mover," nothing could
happen by chance. Determinism in human affairs was the philosophical
corollary of Newton's physics. And it strangely echoed Calvinist
(and Augustinian) predestination.
Only by invoking some remnant of the
notion of soul could free will be saved, only by a dualistic mind-body
philosophy could something be found that could intervene in human
behavior.
In a recent interview of E.O. Wilson,
the biologist, the magazine The Skeptic touched on his
view of the problem.
Skeptic: How about free will?
Wilson [modestly]: I spelled out how the free will issue can be handled in Chapter Six of Consilience: "The Mind." To very briefly summarize, free will exists insofar as the ambit of ordinary human thought reaches. Perhaps a super-computer simulating the action of virtually every molecular system within every neuron of a person's brain might be able to predict in advance how that person is going to act. But that is a theoretical construct so far beyond what is practical, that effective human action cannot be determined.
One hundred and eight years ago, the
great American psychologist Will James wrote: "the most that
any argument can do for determinism is to make it a clear and
seductive conception, which a man is foolish not to espouse…that
prediction of all things without exception must be ideally, even
if not actually, possible." Wilson is not very original.
But then James, 110 years ago, goes
far beyond today's Wilson:
When scientific and moral postulates war thus with each other and objective proof is not to be had, the only course is voluntary choice, for scepticism itself, if systematic, is also voluntary choice. If, meanwhile, the will be undetermined, it would seem only fitting that the belief in its indetermination should be voluntarily chosen from among other possible beliefs. Freedom's first deed should be to affirm itself….The utmost that a believer in free-will can ever do will be to show that the deterministic arguments are not coercive.
Wilson's statement is a copout! He states
that while the future is unknowable in practice, it is predetermined.
On the eve of the overthrow of Newton's billiard-ball universe
by quantum mechanics, James, while thinking that the future may
be deterministic, in which case it would be unknowable in practice,
accepts that this might not be the case after all!
I believe that the problem is not, as
Wilson says, in the computational impossibility of prediction.
It is in the physical impossibility in principle of prediction.
We cannot even predict which radioactive nucleus in a very small
collection of atoms will fission next, nor when. The physical
dimensions of neural synapses are such that they are subject to
quantum uncertainty.
But even more. The brain is not a closed
system. Not only are there macroscopic events impinging on it
constantly through the sensory systems, both internal-the endocrine
hormones-and external, but microscopic, in the form of energy
fields and even particles, such as from cosmic rays. Rare though
they be, neutrino interactions may intervene in triggering a synaptic
event a split millisecond sooner-or later-than it might have triggered
without that, or even not at all. A neutrino emitted by a star
in a galaxy 10 billion light years away could play the role in
this scenario of the Brazilian butterfly flapping its wings in
the chaos theory of meteorology.
Do quantum uncertainty or the effects
of other random events imply free will? A British Marxist philosopher
at a lecture in London around 1936 had this to say.
You believe that the uncertainty in knowing both the momentum and position of an electron is at the foundation of your free will. OK. Suppose that tomorrow morning half of you will be in Calcutta and half of you in Rio de Janeiro. Suppose further that at this moment none of you knows where you'll be tomorrow morning. Tell me that you have free will.
So much for finding free will at the
level of quantum events.
Sigmund Freud and Will James, each in
his own way told us about the enormous work going on in the unconscious,
the subconscious mind, the vast expanses of the brain to which
we have only fragmentary contact. In that region, subject to unfathomed
deterministic and yes, random events, we can never know
what causes us to choose what we choose, in principle.
Knowledge is stored in the brain and
influences our actions. Our entire experience from birth, including
explicit and implicit moral training has its effect on our unconscious
memory. This is Freud's super-ego. Genesis 3 has it right. We
have eaten of the fruit of the "Tree of the Knowledge of
Good and Evil."
Psychological, or mental, events are
no less real and causal in our actions as the unconscious action
caused by the tickling of a fly on our forehead, leading to a
reflex head shake or hand gesture to chase the offending critter
away. For me, "mind" is something the brain does. And
the neurophysiologists, in particular, armed with recent brain
imaging technology, are learning more and more how the mind works
in the brain.
A remarkable series of experiments,
reported recently in the journal Science, has actually demonstrated
the neural substrate of consciousness-where in the brain we are
conscious of certain stimuli, and where in the brain similar stimuli,
presented at the same time, may be processed without our being
aware of them. If we believe that mind is simply something the
brain does, we are on the threshold of knowing what is consciousness
and what is the unconscious mind.
In short, it is not predictability of an event that would deprive us of free will. It is not the computational impossibility of prediction that allows us free will. But in the final analysis, Wilson gets it right when he says: "At the common sense level of an individual being able to follow a wide range of intentions, free will certainly exists." We feel that we have free will. That's "as good as it gets." But that's good enough. OK?
Copyright 1998, Morton Nadler; Commercial Duplication Prohibited
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