Free Will

'I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir,' said Alice, 'because I'm not myself, you see...
I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'

The obvious argument for 'freewill' is that we seem to have it. I seem to want to write this and I consciously strike these keys. Even though I know that this is actually driven by brain processes in my subconscious and conscious brain; even though this structure is the outcome of my biology, my experiences and my knowledge, set in my present context, it is Me that is doing it.

From our earliest childhood we are held responsible for our actions. If we deliberately broke or stole something, and got caught, we were usually punished; if we did something good we were often rewarded. Because we choose to do things, most of us feel we have freewill; that we are able to make decisions about the future.

If you tell me that I'm not able to decide to have a coffee; stay up late; or cross the road when I see an opportunity; I will reply that you are wrong. I regularly make these decisions and a thousand more. I experience the freedom to choose and indeed sometimes choices are difficult to make and I might ponder before deciding.

But as I discussed early in this essay our experience, and the intuitions we draw from it, is notoriously faulty. It is counter intuitive that a feather and a cannon ball fall at the same speed in a vacuum, that white light is made up of many coloured lights or that magnets attract or repel at a distance and right through other materials.

So our experience needs to be extended by these wider experimental observations.

After the basic equations of physics were first described by Newton, the view that everything was determined from the beginning of time became widely held. Newton showed that the planets move around the sun in a predictable way and these fundamental rules (Newton's laws) of motion seem to apply to everything and allow all physical movements to be predictable.

People became concerned that this meant that 'freewill' could not exist. If every decision we make could in theory be predicted it is just an illusion that we make choices; because each choice is the one we are bound to take. Our decisions are the ones we must make in the circumstances, given our inherited genes, the ideas we have, what has happened to us in the past and the stimuli of the moment; none of which we personally control:

Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as 'free will' in the composition of any human being that ever lived.[83]

If our decisions are those that we inevitably make; the ones that could be predicted, knowing us sufficiently well; then freewill is an illusion.

The idea of 'free will' is closely related to our concept of time, discussed in more detail later in this essay.

If I steal that book the future of the Universe is irreversibly changed to a lesser or greater extent.

Thus asserting we have 'freewill' is the same as asserting that each of us can choose to change the future of the Universe.

But can I really 'choose' to change the future?

In one view (philosophers call this the Block Time view), time is an equivalent dimension to say length and we are simply passing through a pre-existing landscape like the frames of a movie passing a lens. All you will ever do is already predetermined and 'freewill' is an illusion, due only to complexity.

Or possibly the future is contingent upon our immediate decisions and all creatures capable of making a 'free' decision create it as we go (I will call this the Naïve Realist view).

I discuss ways in which alternative futures, that permit freewill, may be possible in a later chapter. But can we tell the difference? After all, any theory of time relies on common perceptions (data) and each theory fails if they do not yield the same perceptual result. In other words a theory doesn't even 'make it to first base' if it predicts an outcome that is not consistent with our experience (the perception that we have free will).

If I can't tell the difference between: making a decision because it is my nature and destiny to do so; or because I genuinely have a choice; is 'freewill' the issue at all?

Some scientists (and some religions) think that it is our belief in a 'self' that is the illusion and so the question of 'freewill' is irrelevant. There is evidence to support this.

As I discuss again later, psychologists and brain scientists have demonstrated that a decision is often made subconsciously, many seconds before we are consciously aware of it. Our conscious process is one of justification after the event. The conscious 'me' is not 'me' but a sort of public relations department. Of course I can now 'decide' to write a line of 'aaaaaaa' or get up and have a cup of tea. But who is 'I' and could my action be predicted in the circumstances?

Can this 'I' be held morally responsible for my actions?

When we play with a dog we might have a ball or a stick and pretend throw it. Sometimes the dog will be tricked and go rushing off but other times the dog will be 'on to us' and wait. The dog seems to be making a decision. She weighs up the situation and decides whether we have really thrown the ball on not. On other occasions the dog might steal something from the kitchen and we punish her.

But we don't punish her because she is evil, we punish her because she is the dog and unless we teach her the correct thing to do, she will steal something from the kitchen again. We know that dogs are pack animals and we must establish a higher 'pack order' than the dog, otherwise the dog will try to control us, possibly by growling and biting the hand that feeds it. We know this is a dog's nature.

When a Rottweiler or a Doberman kills a child we 'put it down' and the media says: 'These dogs are dangerous and no one should breed them.'... 'It is the nature of Rottweilers and Dobermans to be vicious and the people who are attracted to them must have an underlying psychological problem and probably mistreat them.'

There is there is an assumption that dogs do what they do because of their nature or how they have been treated; that they have no 'freewill'. Dogs are constrained by their breed, how they have been trained and treated and what accidents or experiences have befallen them since they were puppies (they might have been the runt of the litter, run over by car or attacked by another dog).

Yet, it is very difficult to distinguish the dog's moral choices and actions from those of a child. The same things will govern the child's behaviour: whether he is tall or swarthy, strong or stupid; how he was brought up and what he has learnt; and the accidents and circumstances of life, like birth order or who he happens to meet. If the dog has no freewill then why does the child?

In society we punish thieves and murderers; so that the prospect of punishment is one of the things that they and others consider when deciding to steal or kill; or in some cases to reform them by changing their character; or simply to remove them from society so that they can't do it again. In this view, laws are conditions that have evolved in our culture to modify the decisions that people make. They impose the social will on individuals.

The law and primitive societies is often driven, instead, by rules of revenge. Sometimes this leads to running tribal feuds that can go on for generations. The, often overwhelming, human desire for revenge is an inherited animal emotion that may have lead to a survival advantage in primitive societies but does nothing but exacerbate the problem of crime in modern ones. In civilised societies we try to avoid or circumscribe the calls for revenge that may come from the victims of crime, their relatives, 'shock jock broadcasters' or political demagogues.

Revenge and a belief in freewill seem to be closely connected. In the case of a child killing Rottweiler, seldom do we hear that the dog should be painfully tortured before being killed. More often we hear appeals to put the dog down humanely or not at all. And if there is any desire for revenge it is often against the owner or breeder.

Yet if an abused young man commits the same crime there will be calls for revenge against him, often involving pain or torture. There is seldom any call for the young man's parents or teachers to be whipped. Presumably, this is because the young man is supposed to have freewill and the dog has not.

The issue of 'freewill' is of serious concern for Religion. Punishment in religions, that have their roots in primitive societies, often embraces this desire for revenge. But if we do not have 'fee will' why would God punish sinners or unbelievers, particularly after they are dead and can sin no more? They are just responding to their 'God given nature', the things others have taught them and circumstances over which they have no control. If they choose not to believe, or to repent, it is not their doing; it is because of things they have been taught, events they have experienced or genes they have inherited.