Free, or Not-So-Free, Will

Beyond the semantics

In #articles

I felt compelled to write this post, for some reason.

Reading an interesting article about free will has gotten me thinking about it again, despite the fact that doing so makes my head hurt a bit. It is easy to go in circles with this. I have given my initial perspective elsewhere, and this article doesn't really sway me from that.

Roy Baumeister in the above article states:

These arguments leave untouched the meaning of free will that most people understand, which is consciously making choices about what to do in the absence of external coercion, and accepting responsibility for one’s actions. Hardly anyone denies that people engage in logical reasoning and self-control to make choices. There is a genuine psychological reality behind the idea of free will. The debate is merely about whether this reality deserves to be called free will.

There is no need to insist that free will is some kind of magical violation of causality. Free will is just another kind of cause. The causal process by which a person decides whether to marry is simply different from the processes that cause balls to roll downhill, ice to melt in the hot sun, a magnet to attract nails, or a stock price to rise and fall.

He states this with no support whatsoever. He presents some analogies, like:

No number of facts about a carbon atom can explain life, let alone the meaning of your life. These causes operate at different levels of organization. Even if you could write a history of the Civil War purely in terms of muscle movements or nerve cell firings, that (very long and dull) book would completely miss the point of the war. Free will cannot violate the laws of physics or even neuroscience, but it invokes causes that go beyond them.

It is true that we don't typically describe things like the Civil War in terms of the underlying physics, but that is a practical limitation of human knowledge. If we had infinite faculties for such descriptions, then one could even get the "point of the war" from the "muscle movements or nerve cell firings". In just the same way that we use the concept of entropy when we cannot specify the locations and speeds of all of the molecules of air in the room, we use the concept of free will to summarize and label our ignorance. It becomes real, as entropy is real, but doesn't mitigate the ultimate determinism of the system.

Finally, he gets to the topic of agency with

The evolution of free will began when living things began to make choices. The difference between plants and animals illustrates an important early step. Plants don’t change their location and don’t need brains to help them decide where to go. Animals do. Free will is an advanced form of the simple process of controlling oneself, called agency.

So, when a flower opens in the day and closes a night, or even follows the sun, how is that different than the animal "choosing" to run toward rewards and away from punishments? It isn't different, except in complexity, but complexity alone does not elliminate fundamental determinism or produce freedom.