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votes
The clockwork universe: A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist
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- Title
- The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?
- Authors
- Oliver Burkeman
- Published
- Apr 27 2021
- Word count
- 6173 words
I've never been convinced that it matters if we have free will or not, and this article didn't help. The logical leap from "there is no such thing as free will" to "therefore no one should be held responsible for anything" makes no sense to me.
For example, if a salesman never makes any sales, they can't defend their future employment by saying "it's not my fault, neither I nor my customers have any free will." That's bollocks. Of course your employer must let you go at some point. Just because, on a cosmic level, you had no free will does not mean your every action gets a free pass.
What convinced me of a position not unlike yours is the question: Does it matter?
Does it matter that in every parallel universe given the same situation I would make the same decision? Nahh. The only other alternative is that I would be a stochastic process that produced genuinely random actions.
Does it matter that I have no other choice, physically, but to decide this or that way? No, because the decisions I make are not forced upon me by an external power, but by my own wants and reasoning. I act this way, because I want to, which is what matters. The fact that my wants were always going to be this or that is of no import to my happiness. (This of course applies only to restrictions of my actions based on e.g. physical determinism as opposed to e.g. slavery. Slavery is markedly different because my decisions are necessarily distorted from my wants.
Does it matter that the murderer had no choice? Well, not really. The point of consequences isn't merely to punish people for making shitty choices. It's also a deterrent to others (and prevention of reoffense) and a protection from people who do more harm than the rest. All these still work. A person who is held to account will be less likely to reoffend because this will factor, on a physically deterministic level, into their decision making process the next time. Seeing other people held to account will do the same. (the discussion how effective each of the components mentioned are, is an entirely separate one, albeit very interesting too.)
Coincidentally, in last week's On the Media, they invited a scientist on the show who had as part of his arguments criticized scientists who were working on publishing papers expanding upon theories like the multiverse theory or string theory, saying basically that they're low-hanging fruit that scientists enjoy because it's entirely theoretical and they cannot be proven wrong. And likewise, I think that determinism is just philosophical masturbation, because there's no way that it possibly matters.
Say we were to hold up an object in the air and release it. The laws of physics say that the object will fall. It's predetermined. Now imagine that the object has been suddenly granted both sentience and the knowledge of basic physics that lets it know that it is predetermined that it will hit the ground. What is the difference in that situation? Effectively, nothing.
Which leads me to my next problem with determinism; when you bring human beings into the situation, it's basically a glorified nihilism. Determinism essentially makes every other branch of philosophy meaningless. Choice has no meaning. Being has no meaning. Thoughts and feelings have no meaning. Even if you were to buy into the philosophy hardcore and literally kill off your ego, it wouldn't mean anything to determinism; you were predestined to do so. Determinism is against the entire concepts of happiness and humanity because it reduces them from ideals and goals to being mechanisms that force you to act, which ultimately means that there is no reason to hold on to them.
I also find the idea of determinism causing people to be more kind to be shaky at best. Determinists who find themselves acting kinder don't realize that the thoughts that they are having regarding other people's choices to be the very mechanism of empathy, which does not require you to reject free will. The difference for before and after is the personal decision to consider other people's feelings and thoughts.
Well, the "depressing" part is that the employer doesn't have free will either. No one is making a truly free choice where it can go either way. The employer might fire the salesperson, it might be justified, but at no point did anyone exercise free will according to the proponents of this point of view.
...So? Why does it matter? That may or may not be their opinion, but does it matter and does it change anything?
I'm not sure I understand what you are asking. Are you asking why considering whether free will as a concept is meaningful? Are you asking why the absence of free will in the employer is relevant? Something else? Whos opinion are you referring to?
The reason I brought up the absence of free will in the employer is that I interpreted the parent post to mean that the employer had a choice. I think the thesis is there is never any choice to be had. Hence nothing can be meaningfully justified...
My argument is, that even if the clockwork scientists find irrefutable proof that they are right, does it honestly change anything? My guess is no, as the world simply will keep ticking on no matter what we think about it. In the end you can debate action and reaction until you starve cause you forgot to hunt for food, but it simply won't change anything. Everything we do is based around the idea that humans can choose, it is simply too fundamental to give up at this point. There is no revolution going to happen if a few scientists come up with this. Hence my statement if free will is a social construct or not is irrelevant, because even if the backing physical force or object disappears (like it once did with money), the construct remains and the world keeps going.
If no one comes into the place of business (thus denying them the choice to make a sale or not), the salesperson can hardly be held responsible.
The philosophy that works best under these conditions is one that eliminates the concept of blame or guilt. Firing a salesperson that has no sales isn’t a punishment. You’re betting that no sales now means no sales later.
Repercussions for a criminal aren’t (or rather shouldn’t) be about some mystical sense of righteousness. The repercussion should either deter the crime or reform the criminal. It is a means to improve society, not harm a wrongdoer.
I was a bit frustrated with the article for the first half as it presented what I'd describe as the naive take, but then finally the article described the compatibilist position, the idea that there's no inherent conflict between clockwork physics and making decisions. But then the article fails to follow any of the ideas to their conclusions and instead sets up a false dilemma.
It seems like any conflict between "free will denialists" and "compatibilists" is just a matter of definitions. Free will denialists as described think (at least partial) determinism rules out "free will", yet compatibilists don't think determinism rules out "free will". But free will denialists use "free will" to mean something like "if you wound back time, would things be able to happen a different way?", and compatibilists use "free will" to mean "the choosing process that happens in our brains". ... So if we taboo the phrase "free will", you have one group that thinks determinism means if you wound back time, things would happen the same way, and then another group that thinks determinism is either unrelated or important for the choosing process the happens in our brains. There's no disagreement there! The only disagreement is what the phrase "free will" should mean.
Why would people argue over what "free will" should mean? Are people actually arguing that one of these two angles should be considered by society more? I think the article is on the right track to bring up the topic of punishment for wrongdoing: there's a common logic that goes "people should be punished for bad things when they did it in their own free will", so following that makes it important to figure out what exactly should be meant by that last phrase. If we taboo the phrase again, the question is what should go in the blank in "people should be punished for bad things they did when ___".
A very popular answer to fill in that blank with is "...when, if you wound back time, a different decision could be made". I think the problem is in how literally people take that phrase. If it's the case that we're in a fully deterministic universe and you had a time machine that you could go back in time with and observe a past event from a safe distance without affecting it, then it's true that you will always see people in the past make the same decisions again. But we're not in a world with time machines or any obvious consequences of full determinism or not! So why should our moral theories depend on what would happen if you used a time machine when none exist? If we thought we had an answer about determinism, and then came up with a different answer, would we really expect our moral theories to need to be updated? If the operators of the matrix pulled you out of the simulation and told you that our universe has a switch labelled "determinism" that they liked to flip just for fun every once in a while despite the results not being noticeable at all to any humans on the inside, then would you think that the humans in the simulation ideally should update their moral theories every time that switch was flipped despite it being unknowable to them? It seems silly to think that our moral theories should be at all dependent on the existence or nonexistence of determinism, a likely unobservable aspect of the universe.
A very similar answer to fill in that blank, one that's usually promoted by compatibilists and comes up with similar results while completely avoiding depending on epiphenomenal aspects of the universe, would be "...when the punishment is relative to the degree that the perpetrator had alternate choices available to consider". A murderer that had been brainwashed to consider no options but committing murder deserves no punishment (besides what's necessary to keep them from hurting others). A murderer who had a ton of unconstrained options for what to do for the day -- options that they were able to fully consider, that they hadn't been unusually conditioned away from -- may deserve actual punishment. ... Or maybe they don't deserve punishment, maybe they deserve therapy or resources to fix why "murder" was ever an unusually-prioritized option in their mind. (The article put this specific answer as the position of compatibilists, but that's ignoring that plenty of other answers also work with compatibilism.) ... Or maybe that's an easily-abusable rule, and they do deserve punishment, as a way to discourage people from ever taking that route for benefit. ... Regardless, there's a full range of possible moral frameworks here, all without any dependence on whether or not the universe has the arbitrary quality of determinism.
In short, I think anyone having a crisis of morality hingeing on whether or not it turns out the universe is deterministic is overlooking a whole range of answers that still add up to normalcy regardless of determinism.
Personally, I've never thought that whether or not I have free will particularly matters, unless having or not having it has some measurable impact on my life.
Dostoevsky's Underground Man said it best, in my opinion:
Just throwing it out there: John Conway and Simon Kochen have a really interesting "Strong Free Will Theorem" in which they prove that free will of experimenters is related to free will of particles. It's really very compelling, and suggests that the world is not deterministic.