When I have conversations with people about free will, and I tend to have a lot of these conversations, those I talk to seem to have a very specific idea in mind: unpredictability. This is to suggest that free will is in some way unpredictable. No matter how much I know about a person, their personal history, their genetics, their environment, or anything else, I will NEVER be able to predict or determine (with perfect accuracy) what decisions or choices they will make. This, people tell me, is because free will prevents such a possibility. This third alternative understanding of free will is what I will discuss today.
In order for free will to be unpredictable under all circumstances, it has to fall outside the causal chains of determinism. That is to say that no amount of information regarding a being will be sufficient to accurately predict their choices. While it is true that I, being human, have my limits, this description goes beyond those limits I have. Of course I cannot predict a being’s choices, as my own limitations would definitely prevent me from acquiring enough information to be able to calculate a choice perfectly. I cannot even hold a small fraction of all the information that comes to me in my own life. I cannot even truly predict my own behavior, let alone the behavior of others.
This is my limitation, and a limitation that I believe virtually all humans have. In fact, I might argue that it is just this limitation that allows people to believe in the possibility of a free will of the sort I am describing in this post. As Alastair Reynolds suggests in his short story “Zima Blue,” the fallibility of memory is a significant part of what allows for beings to, in some sense, go beyond their normal limitations. (It should be noted here that the short story covers these ideas much better than the Netflix’s version that was released in “Love, Death & Robots.”) In this post, the sort of free will I am describing would still remain unpredictable, even if somehow a being were able to overcome these limitations.
It is true that delving into this realm of idea is entirely impractical. If no being could truly overcome such limitations, then no being ever could truly predict with perfect accuracy the decisions of other beings, no matter what flavour of free will we might be describing. However, I argue that it is still important to consider, because there is a world of difference between a deterministic process, confined to the realm of causality, and a process that exists beyond causality entirely. Perhaps not entirely though.
Even our best science could never detect or uncover such a process. Science itself starts with the assumption of determinism. To determine if a peer’s theory may be correct, one must repeat their procedure and see if the results remain the same. If every time I drop a stone from 3 feet off the ground, it always accelerates downward, toward the center of the Earth, and if all of my peers observe the exact same behaviour when they follow my same procedure, then we can all suggest, with a reasonable amount of confidence, that something like gravity exists. But it is the fact that we all perform this same procedure repeatedly, and observe the same observations repeatedly, that allows us this confidence. Whenever we create the conditions of the cause, we seem to always observe the same effect. If in some instance, for one of us, the stone instead remains stationary or accelerates in some other direction, we generally wouldn’t suggest that some other process is taking place that breaks from the deterministic structure we have assumed exists. Instead, we would suggest that some part of the experiment was conducted incorrectly, or perhaps we might suggest that gravity itself is not what we think it is.
The point I am making here is that science cannot help us in our endeavor with free will, especially the sort I am describing in this post. This sort of free will is outside the deterministic structures we seem to observe in our world. This description of free will is unmeasurable. This free will, at least in part, falls outside determinism. I say in part because there is clearly a part that does touch determinism. Free will may itself not be caused, in the sense we understand cause and effect, but it certainly causes effects to take place. After all, if it did not do this, then free will would be performing no observable work whatsoever.
I often refer to this sort of free will as an “uncaused cause,” a term that is often understood as Aristotle’s “unmoved mover.” Whereas for Aristotle (and others), the uncaused cause would be the initial thing that began ALL causal chains in existence (essentially the thing that began the universe as we know it), a version of free will as I am describing it would be constantly occurring to perpetually introduce some amount of seeming randomness into an otherwise causally connected world. Free will, of this sort, would introduce significant error into our calculations rooted in determinism over time. The more free will is expressed, the greater the error would be. I am starting to sound like the Architect from The Matrix Reloaded.
It is for all these reasons that I have significant doubts as to the existence of this version of free will. If free will of this sort exists, and if we assume that all humans possess it, then I would expect there to be significant problems with all of our scientific claims and formulas. That is, any formula that we have created and have significant confidence with, would always be found to be in error a portion of the time, as a result of the influence of free will altering the deterministic outcomes of the events being measured. As we seem to find many of our formulas and theories seem to work most of the time without too many problems, it seems unlikely that free will exists.
Of course the strongest support for there being some thing beyond our deterministic universe is the same argument Aristotle (and others) proposed above. If everything is deterministic in nature, and all actions are caused by previous actions, how does one resolve there being a first action, a first uncaused cause, an unmoved mover? One might argue that there is no first, and it simply leads infinitely backward, but that is similarly difficult to explain.
Having given all of this much thought, I have a suggestion as to one possible manifestation of free will of this sort: faith. The sort of faith that religious zealots express as support for their particular flavour of deity. Faith, it seems to me, is an example of an uncaused cause. Or perhaps more accurately, a belief held by an individual that cannot have any sort of evidence or reason supporting it. If it does have evidence or reason supporting it, then it is no longer faith, it is a supported belief. To be faith, it must be unsupportable.
Putting this another way, in philosophy, knowledge is sometimes referred to as being Justified, True Belief (JTL). That is, for something to count as knowledge, it must be true of the world, it must be supported by evidence, and the individual must actually believe it. Suppose faith is similar to knowledge, but without the justified element. Just that it is somehow true of the world and that the individual believes it. How would we differentiate it from random lucky guesses? This, it seems to me, should be the topic for my next post.