Free Will - a Post on Medium.com

From a discussion on the subject in Medium.com

Debates about free will are fun but, like arguments about the existence of God, they are fun because the subject doesn’t exist. It’s like arguing over whether Santa is fat. I’m not saying free will doesn’t exist. I'm saying the idea of "free will" is part of our religious mythology. The concept makes no sense in the world we happen to inhabit. To be more precise, human behavior is inexplicable in principle. The “explanation” that it arises out of a sum of deterministic laws of nature doesn’t survive close examination.

Boiled down to essentials, the argument against free will is saying that a given individual, faced with situation “A” will do exactly the same thing again if faced with exactly the same situation “A”. However, it is clearly impossible to specify “situation A” precisely. To mention just one tiny part of the problem, it is impossible to specify the “state” of a synapse precisely due to Quantum Mechanical restrictions. This is not about what we know, but whether the state can be said to exist. We never put our foot in the same river twice (Heraclitus). 

The idea that the “laws” of the Universe are deterministic has been dead for a century at least. Almost all physical phenomena are governed by the rules of chaos. That includes what happens in our brains. Some philosophers have not got the memo. This means that even dead rocks cannot be put through the “same” situation twice.

Sapolsky is undoubtedly worth reading on this subject (“Behave” is a classic). But his arguments actually prove the opposite of what he claims about free will. He shows that it is hopeless to “explain” behavior precisely. He does this by giving us a dozen different ways to “explain” behavior and showing that none of them is exact and all of them together produce a black box. But then he pulls a rabbit out of the hat by claiming that because we can’t explain behavior, it is somehow utterly determined from some God-like perspective. Shame on you. Robert.

So have your fun.

----------------------

This may be similar to knowing the position and momentum of a proton. It is not possible to know both of these quantities with arbitrary precision. It’s not just about “knowing” — in fact, at a certain scale, the idea of position and momentum don’t apply. Does this mean that, at our scale, position and momentum are meaningless? Of course not.

In the case of “free will”, I’d say that a person’s behavior cannot be reliably predicted, even by himself. On the other hand, there are situations where the individual has clearly made a considered choice and others where he will say “I have no idea why I did that”.

Society can deal with this by eliminating perverse incentives and situations where the individual is forced to choose between starvation and obeying the law. We can provide a “menu” of choices, which assumes that the individual is free to choose. "Punishments" will always be on that menu. But anyone who has ever had an unruly child will know that "punishment" (negative reinforcement) is only one tool in a wise parent's arsenal.

At the fine level of day-to-day behavior, the fact is that we run “on automatic” almost all the time. 

Many of our “crimes” are due to a simple lack of attention.