Free will feedback

How to kick the medieval free will superstition, and embrace your place in the machine.

This is a bonus piece: prompted by Erik Hoel's recent book, I revisited my “understanding” of consciousness and free will for the first time in roughly three decades, and wrote three articles about it. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.) There were some nice arguments in Hoel's book, which clarified a few things, particularly around the idea that we are responsible for our actions, and it was fun to think again about these heady topics. But in the end it was a bit of a downer. Nothing has changed. We still don't know how consciousness works, or even agree on a definition of what it is. Free will continues to be ill-defined — or, perhaps worse, endlessly re-defined over and over by philosophers and other hangers-on desperate to salvage the idea — and the scientific picture is still, for all intents and purposes, determinism.

That said, whenever I previously tried to build a consistent world view without free will — and without getting a splitting headache — I would fail. Now, finally, I think I can do it. Here is my attempt.

First off, let's dispense with ethics and morality. If you accept a purely material universe (no souls, no gods, no spirits), and you ditch free will as a meaningless concept, then it's difficult to make a case for objective right and wrong. Stuff happens. You can like it, or dislike it, but don't try to claim a loftier justification for your opinions.

This sounds fine when we're being abstract and philosophical, but after a few moments you might say, “Hey, but I get quite upset about the war in Gaza, and racism, and the environment, and economic inequality, and I would really rather people were respectful and kind to each other, and not lying mean-spirited shits. Is that all just my opinion?”

Yeah. Sorry.

You might then respond, with admirable restraint, “But, Mark, does that mean you have no problem with being a lying mean-spirited shit? Maybe you are one yourself?”

Well. It's not for me to judge how nice I am, but I can say that I also regularly get incensed about injustices in the world, and I have wistfully thought to myself, “Why can't people just get along?”, quite possibly as often as the next person.

I'm afraid my resolution for all this would be a dreary speech about societies evolving to adopt particular norms, and how shared principles are a practical necessity for a functioning society, and so on. Yes, all our ethical views are made up, but without them we would have anarchy. That's why behavioural norms are emotionally baked into us from childhood. There is nothing intrinsically, objectively “wrong” with being a dickhead, but it's in everyone's best interests that we discourage such tendencies as much as possible.

Going beyond “behavioural norms”, that's pretty much what our legal system does, too. The obsolete notions of punishment and revenge lurk behind a lot of it, but there's also a large dose of practical efforts to reform criminals, to deter law-breaking, and also to take into account in sentencing the circumstances that caused a criminal's actions. It wouldn't hurt to cleanse the whole thing of any superstitious talk of free will and moral judgement — such notions should be as embarrassing as coming across long-forgotten statutes on exorcism or witch-hunting — but in practice this would likely be more tweaks than wholesale rewrites. If our laws would acknowledge that they are entirely made up and subject to our weird and variable societal whims, that would also be nice.

Parenthetically: it's interesting to me that there is a sizeable chunk of purportedly intelligent people who will claim, on the one hand, that scientific truths are purely subjective and socially constructed, but on the other that their favourite social and political causes are obviously, naturally, and unquestionably correct. Reality is the reverse.

Ok, maybe that's not so interesting. Logical reasoning does not come naturally to the human brain, and stupidity is endemic. Let us continue.

My real concern here is: how to reconcile the absence of free will with, well, actually living your life.

It is commonly stated¹ that a belief in free will makes you happier and more successful. After all, how are you supposed to drum up the enthusiasm to lead a revolution or pioneer a major new industry, or just get out of bed in the morning, if you're nothing but a cog in a machine? In his book Hoel tells the story of William James, who was crippled by depression for three years because he doubted free will. James’s solution: conclude that the question of the reality of free will was impossible to answer, so he may as well just believe in it.

We can do better than that shameless cop-out!

It is easy to accept determinism in the past. In fact, isn't that what we do by default? We look back on past decisions, and we find reasons why our brain made them. We can even see that there were decisions where there was no obvious reason, and the brain appears to have just flipped in one direction. “I had wanted to give up smoking for years, and I could never do it, and then one day, for no obvious reason, I just decided and did it.”

That's all fine. It's when we think about imminent decisions that things go haywire. “Which job offer should I accept?” If I start trying to peer into my brain and observe the workings of the decision-making, while it is happening, thinking to myself, “I wonder which outcome will emerge from this fascinating biological process”, then it is going to be extremely hard to make a decision.

Isn't this just a feedback problem? It's like those old sci-fi movies, where the evil robot is thwarted by being asked a logically inconsistent question. It cannot compute, and its brain explodes. This is how it feels when I try to use my mind to think about what my mind is doing, while it is doing it. It creates a painful feedback loop. It's a cognitive singularity. It just doesn't work.

Captain Kirk kills a robot with logic. (Thanks to Hugh Jones for uncovering this clip. Footage of exploding robots turns out to be surprisingly hard to find.)

A lot of people go through this process and conclude, “Well, then I guess I must have free will!”

Not at all. This is just a blind spot in our mental processes and, let's face it, that's hardly surprising. It's also not a big issue. It's perfectly fine to accept, intellectually, that your brain is going through some extremely complex but ultimately deterministic process, and then to put that aside and just get on with thinking about your decision. If you have some insight into how your own mind works, maybe you can play tricks to help you in the direction you prefer — this is what is supposed to happen when you go to a motivation seminar — but that's just one part of the process applying an amplification technique to another part.

It's not especially hard to consider all of this as a deterministic process so long as, as I said, it doesn't scramble the actual decision-making process.

You might say, “But if it is scrambling the process, you'd say that this was also determined, and there's nothing I can do about it. So why are we even talking about it?” And I would respond that your brain has just fallen into exactly this trap. I would also respond that you are very lucky to be reading this right now, because my explanation will likely spring you from that trap. You're welcome.

Ultimately, isn't this the Jamesian cop-out disguised with some sophistry? Not quite. We are still accepting that free will is a myth and the universe is essentially deterministic. We have also realised that pondering free will versus determinism while making decisions is woefully unproductive.

One final point. A lot of people wind themselves up talking about our sense of agency, and are likely very happy to read Hoel's argument that the most significant causes of our decisions are our own brains. I think they perceive this as an anti-deterministic argument precisely because of the feedback loop I talked about above. The fact that we feel like we are making decisions — and that this feeling is likely an essential part of being conscious — is quite separate from whether the universe is in reality deterministic. As I noted in the previous piece, it may one day be possible to simulate, predict, and control human minds, in which case our personal sense of agency, which will still be as powerful as ever, will afford us a particularly unsatisfying form of free will.

This is how I think about living in a deterministic universe, and my view (arbitrary and personal as it is) is that the human mind would function better, our lives would be better, and our society better, if this view became standard.

That does not mean, of course, that this is how the universe really is; I'm just not aware of the slightest bit of evidence to the contrary. For those who wish to pretend otherwise, the “debate” continues — meaning, people saying the same things again and again and generating nothing but hot air. And that being the case, I will stop here.

(I still welcome comments, though…)

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I really am done now with this free will stuff. Honestly. In a few weeks it will be back to some fun fiction. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you definitely should, because the fiction is going to transform your life and produce levels of joy and wonder you never thought possible. And you will absolutely want to tell all your friends about it, because you want them to be happy, too.

1. I see this in lots of pro-free-will articles, and it's in Hoel's book, too, but I can't be bothered checking for references to real studies. Anyway, aren't all those psychology case studies debunked by the replication crisis, so we can just call it all hearsay and urban myth, and move on?