The Art of Knowing: Expositions on Free Will and Selected Essays – Revised and Expanded Edition (excerpts)

Three essays—out of sixteen—from Part I, II, and III.

The Art of Knowing: Expositions on Free Will and Select Essays (paperback edition)

Solutions for the Problems of Free Will, Good and Evil, Consciousness and God

For three chapters now, I've subjected you to merciless philosophical, neurobiological and mathematically-oriented disquisitions on free will, even arranging your involuntary participation in a virtual game show and a scientific experiment. As a reward for your long suffering, we'll now try to extract some momentous implications from the little thread we've got going. Specifically, we're going to show that free will definitely exists. Then we're going to explain that while this doesn't necessarily mean that human beings possess it in any immediate sense, there are good reasons to believe that they do. And then we're going to discuss a few important philosophical corollaries.

First, let's review the virtual reality game described in the last chapter. The point of introducing this 1- or 2-player Game was to provide a standard analytical framework for Newcomb's paradox and the Libet delayed-choice experiment. The Game has two control levels respectively inhabited by a “subject” and “programmer”. The subject inhabits a simulated world under the control of the programmer, who is able to fast-forward, reverse and replay the simulation at will. The first step toward winning the Game is to occupy the role of programmer and thereby gain control of the outcome (sadly, there are not yet any detailed instructions for doing this). The solitaire version requires that a lone player play both roles, making self-control, i.e. personal volition, the only possible object of the Game.

In addition, we defined a third “role”, that of the Game Designer who makes the rules that the player(s) must obey. These rules include the laws of causality that operate on each level, and the laws governing the relationships among control levels. Because the Designer in effect occupies a third control level, there are three control levels altogether. Control flows downward through these levels, from Designer to programmer to subject. Due to the quality and quantity of control associated with the role of Designer, the Designer has a clear theological analogue: God. In the context of the Game, denying the existence of the Designer would amount to asserting that despite the complex structural organization of the Game, it is random in origin.

Let's begin by reviewing a few historical viewpoints regarding the free will issue. First, we have the idea, dear to the hearts of most of us and especially to those who framed the U.S. Constitution and other rational codes of law and ethics, that human beings have free will. While we acknowledge that there are laws of causality that apply to everyone regardless of time or place – e.g. “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” – these are not sufficient to control our behavior, leaving us free to “make our own laws” when it comes to our personal preferences. This corresponds to the solitaire version of the Game, but with a tacit restriction on the fast-forward, reverse and replay options: they are usually considered to be exclusively “mental”, i.e. confined to our respective thought processes.

Then we have determinism, the idea that the laws of causality determine our every move. Determinism holds that we resemble billiard balls rolling around and colliding on a barroom pool table, bouncing off each other under the impulses imparted to us by environmental cue sticks. Like the cue sticks themselves, the internal impulses triggered in our minds and bodies by external stimuli are completely motivated by the laws of physics, reductively including the laws of genetics, biology and psychology. There is no causal gap in which free will can find a toehold. This corresponds to a version of the Game in which the Designer leaves no open controls for the programmer to use; the structure of the Game, as fixed by the Designer, absolutely controls the simulation and the subject. (While Laplace, widely considered the father of determinism, once remarked to Napoleon that a deterministic universe “has no need” of a Designer, he thereby left himself with no way to account for the mathematical laws of causality offered as a replacement.)

Juxtaposed to determinism is indeterminism or randomism, the idea that causality is only an illusion and that everything, including human behavior, is utterly random. This represents a bizarre mutation of the Game in which one or both of the following conditions hold:

1. The Designer is absent, dead, or out to lunch; the Game, and its rules of causality and interlevel control, exist solely by “chance”. An obvious drawback of this viewpoint is that it fails to account for the probabilistic laws of chance themselves.

2. The rules of causality do not exist at all; they are merely supposed to exist by the subject and break down where the subject's powers of self-delusion end, beyond which point chance rules openly. In other words, when a subject fancies that he is “making a decision”, he is really rolling the dice, and somehow, his sequential delusions of intent, action and outcome perfectly match the dice roll. This, of course, seems to give a whole new meaning to the term “improbable”.

In addition to free will, determinism and randomism, there is another doctrine worth considering: predestination. Predestination is the idea that God can look at a person, measure his or her tendencies towards goodness and/or badness, predict how the person will decide to behave in his or her particular setting, and consign that person's soul to heaven or hell on that basis. Where God's insight relies on the existence of laws that transform information on a person's innate tendencies and environmental conditions to information on behavior – these laws are ostensibly what He uses make His prediction – predestination amounts to determinism with a theological twist. Where God determines both the personality of the subject and the laws that determine his behavior, this boils down to the following scenario: God makes a person, sizes up His handiwork, says either (a) “Man, am I good!” or (b) “Screwed up again!”, and tosses His newest creation onto the pile marked “Heaven Bound” or “Born To Lose”. If you happen to be a Calvinist, this is your lot – or should that be lotto? – in life.

However, there is another strain of predestination, favored by (e.g.) the Roman Catholic Church, that does not rely on determinism. According to this version of the doctrine, God might instead do one of the following:

1. Scan the subject for freely-formed higher-order intent. As we recall, persistent higher-order intent is what the experimental subject generates in agreeing to participate in the Libet experiment and move his hand repeatedly at will. To capture the theological flavor of predestination, compare this to “what the subject generates in freely selling his soul to the devil and agreeing to commit a lifelong string of felonies and misdemeanors”.

2. Let the subject play out and determine his own simulation, then use the rewind control to back up to the subject's moment of birth and invisibly stamp him “Accepted” or “Rejected”. In this case, God is simply jumping forward in time to observe the subject's timeline, and then jumping back through time to affix the proper invisible label to its origin. This kind of predestination leaves room for free will.

Notice that where free will is absent, the mind is reduced to a mere byproduct of deterministic material reality. Consciousness, including the psychological sensation of intentionality and self-awareness in general, becomes a kind of meaningless sideshow compulsively played by our irrelevant “minds”, as we are forced to call them, to interpret that which they cannot affect. The idea that the mind is just a side effect of objective physical processes is called epiphenomenalism. One can, of course, split hairs over the question of whether the mind is truly intrinsic to our material brains and bodies, or just extra metaphysical baggage that is somehow tied to them by some kind of ethereal thread. But either way, if intentionality has nothing to do with the structure of reality, then matter and the laws of physics are all that really count. Our “minds” are just along for the ride.

We've enumerated the above scenarios to show that the cybernetic paradigm, involving feedback among layers of control, clarifies the distinctions among traditional approaches to volition. This is a bit surprising; while cybernetics is a respected branch of modern science, the position of the scientific establishment as a whole is evidently nowhere near as sophisticated. It is based on a naive understanding of causality which holds that with respect to anything not locked into a determinative causal relationship, randomness prevails. For example, modern physics characterizes reality on three scales: the overall cosmic scale, the macroscopic scale of ordinary objects, and the ultramicroscopic scale of atoms and subatomic particles, to which it applies the rules of relativity, classical mechanics and quantum mechanics respectively (where relativity is understood as a classical theory). Unfortunately, the dichotomy between “classical” and “quantum” reality is essentially the same as that between causality and randomness or determinacy and indeterminacy. It thus effectively excludes all of the above scenarios except determinism and randomism, leaving the existence of free will with no apparent possibility of scientific explanation.