Concerning the Free Will Debate
Jason Stuart Ratcliff, © 2007
The debate surrounding free will and determinism is one of the most difficult philosophical questions that exist. On the one hand, we cannot conceive of events without causes, whose causes for causes eventually get beyond the person. Nor does it seem right to us that in a world made up of at least in part by material existences (whether that be all to the world or not), some vaguely-conceived nonmaterial entity called Mind can direct motions and events that are material. There are many, many ways to argue for hard determinism, and very few escape routes by which we may conclude that the will is free. And yet it is inescapable and nearly incontrovertible that I may type here an A or an E, and am perfectly at liberty to decide whether I shall type A first or E. The experience of choice is incredibly convincing; I still feel, and remain perfectly confident, that I have complete power to choose whatever letters I presently care to type. Let us begin with a couple somewhat novel ways to argue for determinism.
Supposing that I’m walking by a restaurant whose sushi I enjoy, and I am faced with a decision of whether to eat there, or save money and eat something at home. I’m walking by the sushi restaurant faced with this choice: either I will eat at the restaurant or not. Suppose now that I choose to eat there. Now my choosing to eat there is an event, and one would expect that if I choose: “eat there” this choice is not really free, unless I choose to choose. If I do not choose to choose, then my original choice has its origin as an event in something outside of me: I did not choose to choose, therefore I had no control over what I would choose. I chose to eat there, but I did not choose this choice; thus the choice is an event that was never under my control. And if I did choose to choose? Well, I did not choose to choose to choose--it winds up as an infinite regression, which at some point comes away from my voluntary control, since my mind is not capable of infinite actions.
Take another tack to argue determinism. Now suppose that the sushi restaurant has come under a new owner, and their sushi now is distasteful to me. I’m walking by that restaurant, and I have absolutely no motive to eat there and spend valuable money, when I don’t even like the food the new owners serve. Am I really at liberty to eat there? I have no motivation to eat there; it has nothing about it to tempt me; I have no desire to eat there, and will only waste money if I do so. It is certain, then, that I will not eat there. But is this choice and decision something under my control? It was not my choice that caused there to be a new owner; it was not my choice that the new owner’s sushi is distasteful to me. The only motivation I could possibly have for eating there has been negated by events that I did not choose, nor did I control. And yet what all these events that I did not control conclude in is the choice of me not eating there. I will not eat there because I have no motivation to--it is all cons and no pros for me; but what set up this situation whereby my motive to eat there was negated was never under my control. I did not choose to dislike the new ownership, but having simply come upon the state of affairs that I dislike it, I now have no motivation to eat there; and this lack of motivation, whose origin is beyond my control, is the primary cause of the event of my action of not eating there.
In other words, I can choose to act in one way or another, based on internal motivations--but for the most part, those motivations themselves, what their nature will be and what they make me sympathetic toward doing--the nature of those motivations are not subject themselves to my choice. I may grow to dislike a given restaurant’s pizza, and therefore will have very little motive to frequent the place; but I did not choose to dislike it, though this disliking it is the primary impetus that influences my choice not to frequent it. I have no control over what my drives and motives may be, and these drives and motives are the primary basis upon which I make decisions and choices. Are the decisions and choices then taken out of my control?
I find it a bit anachronistic to discuss laws of material substance as if the human organism were subject to them after the manner of a billiard ball. In the Enlightenment it was common to discuss a problem of human volition whereby we had to explain for free will in a world whose matter--including human brains and bodies--was strictly subject to laws of motion such as gravity, centrifugal force, inertia and so on--the laws that guide the motions of inorganic material the same as those which guide the organic. I find no problem with totally negating the laws of motion and events in matter when it comes to the matter of the human body and its motions. Human beings are not in fact subject to the same strictness of physical laws of motion that determine things like the billiard balls on the table. This is simply evident fact: take an effigy of a man and cast it into a river; it, being inorganic, will simply flow wherever the water takes it. But have a living man jump in a river and he will make motions that are even impossible for an inorganic effigy to make; he will swim, make for the shore, tread water and so on: these motions are physically impossible for the effigy, but living creatures have totally different rules for the events and actions of their material substance than inorganic matter. Even salmon swimming upstream is a plain example of how organic material is capable of motions physically impossible for stones or sand. The laws that guide the motions of animals and people are not nearly as predictable, definite, or strict as those that guide inorganic material. The influences that guide the motions of people in particular must come under the heading of a very general, guideline-like instead of law-like, psychological models rather than us appealing to gravity, mass, velocity and other things we use to explain the motions of inorganic material. Just as the study of genetics does not apply, nor explain for, the motions of geologic material in case of earthquakes, so too are purely physical laws (gravity and the rest) when it comes to human choice and behavior inapplicable to that arena. The proper “laws” that govern choice and the movements of human, organic creatures, are the “laws” of psychology, put in quotes here to suggest that they are not nearly as strict nor predictable in their governance of motion in human beings as the speed of light, gravity and so on, is strict when it comes to inorganic material and its motions.
But this alone does not salvage freedom of the will. All it means, perhaps, is that the laws that determine what human choices may be are much poorer understood by us. Yes--psychological rather than physical models are the proper investigational paradigms we need to predict and explain human choice; but the mere fact of this study being much less precise, predictable and law-like, may very well just boil down to a poorer understanding of psychology, given the incredible complexity of its object, the human brain.
Let us try for a moment to define what a truly free act would be. As most probably understand, any act caused by events beyond the control of the individual should not be considered a free choice. Nor, as most also understand, are causeless actions really “free”--merely lacking a cause just boils down to an event being totally arbitrary or random; but we do not suppose our choices random.
Suppose now that I have contrary motives. I agree that smoking cigarettes is irrational given the long-term health effects. I am also certain that there is nothing I can benefit from continuing to smoke, and that things would be on the whole better for me if I quit, in both short-term and long-term. But I have the drive to smoke, I still enjoy cigarettes; I have both a physical addiction to give me cravings, and an emotional enjoyment; and the idea of going without cigarettes is painful to me. Suppose now that there are three times in my life when I tried to quit, Time P, Time Q, and Time R. (There may be many more such times--the following will apply no matter how many.) So the last time I try to quit is Time R, and this is the time I succeed. I would hold that, if determinism is true, then all psychological influences that drive me to smoke and convince me to quit--all these influences, drives, weaknesses and strengths must line up exactly such that Time R is the most favorable given the balance of drives for me to quit. I do quit in Time R and I failed in Times P and Q. So it must be that if we have pro-quitting influences X and anti-quitting influences Y, the time I do in fact quit--Time R--must be at an instant in which there is the highest ratio of pro-quitting influences toward anti-quitting influences. I have many contrary drives as concerns smoking. Those drives, if determinism be true, must always balance out to where Time R has the most pro-quitting influences proportionally over anti-quitting influences. And the contrary is true as well--if we hold that Time P could possibly have the highest pro-quitting influences versus anti-quitting; and yet Time P was where I did not in fact quit, Time R being when I did quit (but with a less favorable ratio of influences notwithstanding), then we must hold that this is a case of free will. If all visible and invisible influences make Time P a better time to quit then Time R, and if we have the fact of me quitting at Time R rather than Time P, we must hold that human beings can make decisions as true agents, influences influencing, but not determining.
What we have here is free will negatively defined. It is an event (or decision) that came about at a given time with a less favorable proportion of visible and invisible drives, and did not come about at a more favorable proportion. This is what would be happening all the time in human life if there be such a thing as free will. The intellect recoils from this, however; if the event was not an outcome of either internal nor external influences, just what led to that outcome? We know what did not lead to it (the simple tallying of internal and external drives), but have nothing to put in its place. It did not arrive as the mere sum of influences; but to define what led to the choice and event will send us back to determinism--this new sort of influence that was in fact the determinant will become the new cause over which we have no control all over again. Every time we fix an idea of what led to a given choice, we end up taking that choice out of the person. We do not therefore put anything there; we simply observe that such is the case (if it is): that choices are not the simple arithmetical outcome of the tallied opposing drives. If there is free will, it means a choice can be made independently of strictly tallied contrary drives; what this independence itself rests upon, what its nature is, we deliberately do not explore. If it be any thing, then we lose hold of being the cause of the choice ourselves all over again; it becomes some thing and at that point we lose precisely what we claimed--that there is independence over drives in us; that we, rather than drives beyond our control, can be the agent in a choice. If there is free will, we know what that free will is not; we know that our actions are not the results of simple tallying up of contrary drives. What the nature of that independence is, if it be true independence, we cannot define and make a “thing”--or we will take it away from the freedom of agency once more.
It would seem on the face of it that this is the evident case (that choices are independent of a tallying up of contrary drives). Take a man who smokes for twenty years, then he quits successfully. This is obviously incredibly hard to do, but he accomplishes it. Then, a year goes by; suddenly he has an urge for a cigarette which can only be an incredibly slighter urge than he felt a year ago; but nonetheless, after a year off cigarettes, one day he simply picks up a cigarette and begins smoking all over. Such events as these are not rare in this world, and their existence would suggest that what I said above was in fact the case: that there is an agency in our choices that is independent of internal and external drives. It would seem on the face of it that the drive to smoke after a year without cigarettes is much less than it was a week after quitting. And yet a week after quitting this man stays off cigarettes; then a year later, though his urge to smoke must be radically diminished, he simply picks up a cigarette and smokes. Of course it is not certain that this is a case where the choice is made independently of an arithmetical tallying of contrary drives to arrive to the fact of a choice. We may consider it perhaps that the man’s resistance was fatigued by all that time rather than strengthened by distance from his last cigarette a year ago. Or we may simply appeal to the incredible complexity of the human brain, and say there are bound to be choices that bewilder us; but this does not make them independent of drives for or against the choices--it is just the nature of the brain to have its actions variegated and complex. So free will has been given a definition here, but it is not proved.
But let us examine now the experience of choice, and try to hash out whatever conclusions we may arrive to from the fact of the experience of choice. The determinist quite simply calls choice an illusion, but the experience of choice is much too palpably felt to dismiss it thus lightly.
I would say that there are distinct experiences regarding choice with distinct qualities. Take the case of the sushi restaurant, where I do not want to waste money on food that I do not like to begin with. I have no motive, no reason, no inclination to eat there; but yet it is there before me. I have a very real feeling that it is in fact in my power to eat there. This is not the case with, say, leaping up over the restaurant with superhuman strength, or any such act that is impossible for me. To leap over the restaurant I feel and know to be impossible for me. Between the act of my flying through the air, which is totally impossible for me, and an act like eating in the restaurant: there is a definitive qualitative difference between them. The one--flying through the air--I feel I could not do no matter what motive I had to accomplish it. And the other, eating in the restaurant--I feel it is in my power to do so, whether I have any motive to do so or not.
There is a qualitative difference between these two, and that difference remains the case so long as a decision is not reached, either by a real choice or by default. Before the fact--when I’m walking by the door--it does not matter whether I have or have not the slightest desire to eat in that restaurant: it is a distinct experience I have that it is within my power to eat there. But later, after not eating there and going home--this is the only time it is at all convincing for me to conceive that it was fated, and that all along I would not eat there, and in fact could not have done so. Looking back on my choice not to eat there, it seems different now: the distinct experience that it was in my power to eat there is now gone. I did not eat there, and it is suddenly possible for me to conceive that I could not have done so, simply because I was fated not to. It is only after the fact that it is possible for me to consider that it was not I after all that was the agency that determined the event.
Determinism says that whatever we choose, it’s not merely that whatever action we take was always fated to be taken by us; but there must be some sense in which choosing to take an action means it is not within our power not to take it. The determinist must believe that whatever we choose, we are powerless not to choose; and that the feeling of power is all illusion. But we still have unexplained the experience of power; for though I am totally divested of a motive to eat there, as I pass by the restaurant, I feel zero diminution of the power to eat there. Why is it that this visceral, palpable, incredibly convincing feeling of the power to choose to eat in that restaurant--how is it that this does not decrease in the slightest as my drives and motives make it increasingly unlikely that I should eat there? If my drives and motives--things beyond my control--are what determine all my actions, why is not the feeling of freedom, the sensation of the power to choose, not diminished also in proportion to the drives and motives?
Suppose now that I have contrary motives. I am deciding whether to take a job offered me in Colorado or finish my degree at UCLA. I am in Colorado and if I do not start driving to return to California within 12 hours I will not be able to register for classes in any case; and I’ll have to take the Colorado job--the decision will be made by default. I have 12 hours in which to decide, and I feel equally torn by both options.
Does anyone suppose, in such a situation before the fact of choice, that there really is no choice? Does anybody suppose that between the job in Colorado and college in California--that only one of these is possible for me to choose, the other impossible, not even within my power? Many argue just for that proposition; but if I am at the point of deciding, is it possible for me to conceive that there is no choice here, when that choice is precisely what I agonize over, flip-flop in my mind? Could anybody in such a situation possibly believe that there really is only one option within his or her power to take?
Certainly there is nobody anywhere who, in such a decision, actually is able to abscond from decision-making totally, and simply leave it up to whatever is fated. The determinist will say that whatever ends up being the case as regards the decision was fated to be the case; and so I am not really deciding. But the decision is not yet made. I say, “I will do whatever is fated”--but this helps me not, for I have to make my choice! I have to decide what I shall henceforth call fated--only to forget that it was I who decided! I have no choice--I must choose! It seems to me equally within my power to take either alternative. The very existence of my sitting down to deliberate what to do seems explicit proof that either alternative is possible for me. I find it impossible, in fact, to conceive that there is only one option fated for me. If there weren’t any choice involved, what am I doing in such deliberation, why am I agonizing over the thought of this option or that, if there is after all only one option possible?
The determinist must somehow say one or the other of these alternatives is fated to be, and has forever been thus fated. But here I am--I must choose, and at this moment it is incontrovertible that I am the agency that acts. Perhaps I act on behalf of events and motives beyond my control. This must be what the determinist means when he says I am not free to choose in this case, not the agency that creates the outcome. Very well--I shall let the motives and drives within me determine what I shall do--I will sit and let my nature, my motivations, my desires determine what shall happen. I myself will leave it be, leave it up to my motivations and drives, since I cannot decide it as an agent anyhow. But then they will not decide for me--the task is still there, the choice must still be made, and I must make it. Is it conceivable to maintain that there is only a single alternative that could ever be selected? Which one, then? Ah, but I have not yet decided which one--not only do I decide, I must decide!
But then comes the decision. Now I have gone back to college instead of taking the job. Now, and only now, am I able to even consider it plausible that I was forever fated to go back to UCLA. The reason for this is that I cannot change what I chose. It is there firmly fixed in what is real. There is no longer an ontological possibility for me to choose the job. UCLA is chosen; there’s no changing the choice; there are no longer two possibilities, but one; and so only now am I able to conceive that there was a lack of free agency in my choice.
I would hold that it is only possible to experience deliberation about a choice if either alternative is not only epistemically, but ontologically possible. It is ontologically impossible for me to leap forty feet into the air, but to take the job in Colorado?--this is truly and ontologically a possibility. How then to explain that after the fact I am able to consider that my choice was always fated to be what it was? What at the point of choice was inconceivable--that one or the other alternatives was fated to be and beyond my control--is now conceivable to me: that the UCLA alternative was fated from the beginning.
Obviously this is because of the nature of time. What has happened already is not possible to change. What the future will be--there are always equally possible alternatives, ontologically speaking. Ontologically, at the point of decision, it is still possible to take the job in Colorado. But once the choice is made, it is now in the past; there is no choice anymore--ontologically there is one series of events that make up the past. This is just the nature of time--there are a multitude of mutually-exclusive possible future alternatives, but only one past. When the choices are arrived at and made, once they become past, their contrary alternatives are no longer ontologically possible to be the actual reality. There is one past, one history that leads up to where we are; but as for the future, there are always--ontologically speaking--contrary alternatives, each ontologically possible to the exclusion of the others.
I hope the reader will sympathize with me enough to support my contention that the process of deliberation could only have the character of freedom it does if ontologically, both alternatives are possible. Sometimes the most intuitively-correct contentions are the hardest to defend; forgive me for leaving my thesis of freedom not quite proved, I hope I have shown at least that the experience of choice really leaves us with the best defense of freedom there could be. On the metaphysical side of free will, we just hold like Sartre that there is an ontological difference between the nature of the past and the nature of the present/future: there is one series of events that is past and many mutually-exclusive futures that are ontologically possible. This explains on the one hand how it is that choice is independent of necessity--there being no single necessary, but many contrary, and contingent, possible future actualities. And at the same time explains why it is that we are able to look back on our actions feeling they were fated, but are unable to feel them fated when the choices were being made. Looking back, all those possibilities have been swallowed up by the single chain of events of the actual; while in the moment of deliberation between alternatives, we can sense that ontologically it is yet undetermined which of the contrary possible futures will come to pass. Come to pass, with our participation in choosing which of them will be actual to the exclusion of the others.