The problem with denying Free will
Some thoughts on the problem of attention
The debate on free will gives us a good example of where philosophical thinking can go astray. I have encountered this debate online starting a few years back and find the lines of argument on both sides interesting. In full transparency I do believe the term free will to be the best description of our day to day reality. The argument for free will I am presenting is not unique, but more than just arguing from the Pro-free will perspective I want to explain why it is that arguments about things like free will even come up in the first place. Discussions like the free will debate while interesting in their own right also clue us in on deeper philosophical problems that can often prevent us from developing a clear understanding of the world.
Sam Harris has been one of the more influential of the anti-free will proponents on the internet through his own podcast and various appearances on others. I believe Sam’s views on the subject are representative enough of the wider debate that we can use his views to establish a representative anti free will position. Sam says that it's not that free will is an illusion, there is not even an illusion of free will. Like the necker cube there is the appearance of an illusion but when you pay closer attention you can see that all the lines are just flat. As a corollary to this, when we pay closer attention to our own thoughts we can see that we don't decide when a new thought comes to us. It simply pops into existence, outside of our control and it's a complete mystery as to where it came from. Our experience is completely compatible with a person somewhere else typing our thoughts into a computer. If we had a device that could predict someone's thoughts based on neuron activity in their brain then we could see their decision before it even entered their conscious mind. If each of our thoughts is just a spontaneous conscious event with some unconscious event preceding it, which has its own event preceding it, etc, etc. then it would not be logical to claim we have free will. The anti-free will advocates have a compelling case for determinism. All of physics starts with particles hitting other particles, our thoughts and brain activity are simply one piece of that causal deterministic chain. If we follow the above argument then using the term free will appears to be completely illogical as there is no room for non-determinism. However It's important to keep in mind that the above arguments started with examining the origins of our own individual thoughts and then making logical statements based on these origins. What might happen if we turn our attention to some other scenario as a starting point?
Lets focus on the concept of free will in relation to legal responsibility by walking through a thought experiment. To help understand this concept I want you to imagine yourself as a member of a ten person jury who will be voting guilty or innocent on a few different criminal cases. The jury requires a unanimous verdict in order to convict and the other 9 jurors are all strong proponents of the concept of free will.
For the first case you will be hearing about a bank teller who is being prosecuted for robbery. While at work, a masked man with a gun walks into the bank and tells the teller to hand over all the money in the vault. She complies and the man walks away with a bag full of money. The prosecutor wishes to charge her with the robbery. During jury deliberation all 9 of your fellow jurors vote that she is not guilty, as her decision was not made freely but under duress. It was not her will that the vault be emptied but someone else's. In this scenario I don't believe anyone would vote guilty on either side of the free will debate. As the bank teller is released from custody the prosecutor prepares the next case.
In the second case we have another teller at a similar bank but in a slightly stranger situation. This time a man walks into the bank who is a normal customer looking to make a withdrawal. The teller hands over all the money in the vault unprompted and the man seizes on his good luck by walking out of the bank. The prosecutor is charging the teller with the robbery of all the money handed over. In response the defense calls a local detective to the stand who testifies that the same day of the bank incident he arrested a barista of a local coffee shop for putting LSD in all his customer’s coffees. The bank teller had purchased coffee from that shop the morning of the incident at the bank, the mishandling of the money and general lack of situational awareness were all caused by her altered mental state. During jury deliberation all 9 of your fellow jurors vote that she is not guilty. While it was not someone else’s will that the money be taken from the bank the teller wasn't mentally competent enough to understand what she was doing. Therefore she isn't responsible for the theft of the money. Again I think both sides of the free will debate are voting innocent here. As the teller is released from custody the prosecutor brings in the third and final case.
In the third case the prosecutor is charging another teller for theft from a bank. This time there is no use of force or mental illness, the teller simply wants the money from the bank and commits the theft. When questioned on the stand the teller is completely unremorseful and says she would commit the crime again if given the chance. Upon Deliberation the 9 other jurors all vote guilty. Now we have an interesting vote to take. I'll assume that anyone reading this voted innocent on case one and case two. Given those votes a guilty vote here raises questions regarding the concept of free will and an innocent vote has troubling implications for our legal system.
If you are pro free will then you likely voted innocent on case three and there won't be any confusion about your rationale. In case one and two the tellers weren’t exercising their free will due to other forces, while the teller in the third case was. But If you are anti-free will and voting guilty I think it's fair to question why? What's the difference between the three cases? From my perspective In the first two cases the free will of those individuals has been undermined or restricted but not so in the third. But this shouldn't matter to someone who is opposed to the term free will, the third case is the same as the first in that the conscious decision of the individual is not the cause of their actions. In one another individual and in the third the causal deterministic nature of the universe. The second case also causes contradictions if you don't prescribe to free will. From the free will perspective the teller’s altered mental state means that we wouldn't consider them in control the same way we would a typical person, we treat them the same as a malfunctioning machine. But if you don't prescribe to free will then there isn't any difference between someone with an altered mental state and someone without, everyone is just the result of random particles hitting random particles. If both are just malfunctioning machines in the sense they have done something wrong, then why is one malfunctioning machine responsible while the other isn't. It's possible someone might object to this line of argument by saying that while the teller doesn't have free will, they might have ‘agency’ or some other term that implies responsibility. We should reject such arguments as they ultimately just substitute some other term for free will. There is no more room for ‘agency’ in the causal chain of deterministic physics than there is for free will. We are seeking to gain clarity about how we should think about human beings and ourselves, not just find new terms to describe the same phenomenon. We aren't forming a more coherent worldview if the argument is that human beings can’t control where our thoughts come from and thus don't have free will, but we do have some vague ‘agency’ where we are in control of our actions and responsible for them.
It's possible that you don't believe in using the term free will and still agree with everything I've stated above. Therefore you may have voted innocent on case number 3. There isn't anything inherently contradictory with that vote, you believe that there is no such thing as free will, no such thing as someone being responsible for their actions and therefore no such thing as a guilty verdict. But the implication of such a belief is the abolishment of our entire justice system. You can believe this and be logically coherent but we started off the free will debate with the idea that we were seeing through some great illusion and now we're letting criminals walk away free. I would hope that someone might question whether they were actually heading into a more logical worldview if the end result is the complete end of any real justice and I suspect no one would actually support this in the long run. If the result of a ‘logical’ argument is a worldview that we won't be able to consistently commit to then we haven't made any real progress intellectually. Again we might try and play games to get around this argument, we could say that “we are only trying to put an end to the retributive justice system, we should simply invent some pill that fixes the issues in their brain!” This is a silly argument as we didn't need to invent some new mind altering pill in examples one and two in order to justify an innocent vote, we would still be acknowledging that something is different in the third case. It is also true that there is no pill or other automatic technique that exists today, but there are people committing crimes and there are people determining whether they are innocent or guilty. People are actually facing choices like our thought experiment and must have terms and concepts that make sense so that they can take action.
So we had a philosophical concept in free will that appeared to be an illusion when we were focused on the lower level of an individual's brain activity. But when we turned our attention away from the lower level to a higher level such as an individual’s legal responsibility, we found that there was no illusion and in fact the suggestion of an illusion caused all kinds of other logical inconsistencies. In order to understand what happened here and how we can improve our thinking to avoid such issues in the future, we can look to past philosophical discussions like Zeno’s paradoxes. Zeno was an ancient Greek philosopher who proposed a number of paradoxes in support of his teachings, one of the most famous being that of Achilles and the tortoise. Zeno proposes that in a race between Achilles and a tortoise with a head start, that Achilles can never overtake the tortoise. This is because the pursuer Achilles must first reach the point where the tortoise started at, by which point the tortoise has moved forward some amount. This sequence repeats and any time Achilles reaches the spot the tortoise has been he still has more distance to go before he reaches the tortoise. We can of course observe with our own eyes any race between competitors and see that participants overtake each other all the time. There have been later philosophers and mathematicians who have broken down where exactly Zeno’s logic breaks down but we didn't need them to notice that the argument was incorrect in the first place, just to explain why it was incorrect. It's not as if when presented with Zeno’s argument that our immediate conclusion should be to agree that movement is an illusion. We should note that Zeno's argument is clearly incorrect as we can observe it failing to explain our reality and then work to find what assumptions or logic flaws led us to an incorrect conclusion. Similarly we shouldn't take our observable notion of free will as an illusion simply because we feel the casual and deterministic nature of particle physics presents some tension with the concept of free will. Both Zeno’s argument against motion and the arguments against free will suffer from what I think of as ‘attention fallacy’. The maker of the argument has paid attention only to one particular logical thread while ignoring other larger observations that might invalidate their argument. Their attention is not in the right place, narrowing in on one perceived logical inconsistency like free will doesn't cause us to have a more coherent and logical world view. It simply causes us to trade one perceived inconsistency for several other inconsistencies which we aren't paying attention to when making the argument.
There are other statements from Sam which show that attempting to invalidate free will causes logical inconsistencies elsewhere. He says that we shouldn't be fatalistic, I think it's fair to ask why not if we are simply the result of deterministic physics? Where is the room for non fatalism? In other debates he says that we should still try to improve ourselves and that effort is required. To make a statement such as there is no free will but you should still exert effort is in no way a logically coherent statement. What does ‘effort’ mean if we have no control and are simply experiencing the deterministic nature of the universe. This is again all a result of what we called attention fallacy. Grabbing onto a random logical statement devoid of context and then building arguments off of it isn't enough. Philosophy is about constructing a broad and comprehensive view of the world that can survive sustained contact with life. We are not impartial observers, we don't get to watch human beings as if they were on a movie screen and derive cold calculations from our observations. We have to live with our own statements and we should construct philosophies that we can actually walk around with and live by.
I believe free will is the best description of our day to day experiences because it leaves me with the most coherent worldview out of all current alternatives. It's crucial to build a philosophy that can survive when the need for human action is taken into account. The biggest takeaway from the free will argument isn't just the concept of free will but the risk of our thinking leading us into the ‘attention fallacy’. Where our attention is focused on one narrow area and ignoring the larger world we inhabit. We can avoid this by taking a particular philosophical statement that we are mulling over and applying it to other areas to see if it still appears logical. Bringing the need for human action into a philosophical debate like I did with the jury example is a great way to stress our philosophical propositions. IMO it's the best way to avoid attention fallacy. Sitting in a room meditating and trying to find where individual thoughts come from is a poor place to create a philosophy from. The right place to ‘pay attention’ is our rationale for our actions, not just our observations. Similar to the question of Achilles and the tortoise, if you still feel there is tension between the deterministic nature of physics and the concept of free will then you need to resolve this tension by developing a new explanation that treats free will as an equally true concept. You can’t write off free will as an illusion anymore than you would write off motion as an illusion. If you're an anti-free will proponent and still not convinced then I would ask you to consider the following questions.
Do you agree with the respective verdicts in the bank teller scenario, if so why?
Do you believe that our fates are determined, that fatalism is the proper response to a lack of free will, if no, why?
Do you believe that “people should try to improve themselves” and “there is no free will” are logical coherent statements? If so, why?
If you answered yes, no, yes to the above questions, why do you still feel that not using the term free will is the best language to describe the world we live in?
They aren't simply rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely interested in understanding the anti free will side better even if I don't agree with them.