Benjamin Libet found that the conscious decision to press a button is not the beginning of the causal sequence that initiates the process, but there is first a certain pattern of unconscious or subconscious brain activity, and he interpreted this as a challenge for free will. These arguments have considerable force. Or maybe we must redefine what we mean by alternative possibilities. It might be that I was always going to choose coffee rather than tea, but if hypothetically the world had been a little bit different, I would have made a different choice.
I am quite happy to concede that free will requires intentional agency, alternative possibilities among which we can choose, and causation of our actions by our mental states. I think the mistake in the standard arguments against free will lies in a failure to distinguish between different levels of description. What do you say to those who consider the idea that humans are beings with goals and intentions, and that we act on them, a prescientific holdover? If you try to make sense of human behavior, not just in ordinary life but also in the sciences, then the ascription of intentionality is indispensable.
Suppose I ask a taxi driver to take me to Paddington Station. The next day, I tell the driver to take me to St. Pancras Station. Now the driver takes me to St. If I look at the underlying microphysical activity, it would be very difficult to pinpoint what those two events have in common. If we switch to the intentional mode of explanation, we can very easily explain why the taxi driver takes me to Paddington on the first day, and what the difference is on the second day that leads the driver to take me to St.
The taxi driver understands our communication, forms the intention to take me to a particular station, and is clearly incentivized to do so because this is the way for the driver to earn a living. The neuroscientific skeptic is absolutely right that, at the fundamental physical level, there is no such thing as intentional goal-directed agency. The mistake is to claim that there is no such thing at all. Intentional agency is an emergent higher-level property, but it is no less real for that.
Whenever our best scientific explanations of a particular phenomenon commit us to postulating certain entities or properties, then it is very good scientific practice to treat those postulated entities or properties as genuinely real. We observe patterns and regularities in our social and human environment, and the best way to make sense of those patterns and regularities is by assigning intentional agency to the people involved.
The term has lost its power to evoke the unimaginable. The beasts that terrorized the mental lives of our ancestors The jury is out on whether the world is fundamentally deterministic—it depends on how we interpret quantum mechanics—but suppose it is. This does not necessitate that the world is also deterministic at some higher level of description. Indeterminism at the level of psychology is required for free will and alternative possibilities. That is entirely compatible with determinism at the fundamental physical level.
Think about weather forecasting. Meteorologists are interested in higher-level patterns and regularities. In fact, the very notion of weather is a higher-level notion. At the level of individual air molecules, there is no such thing as weather. Perhaps the system at that very fine-grained level of description would indeed behave deterministically according to classical physical laws, but as you move to a more macroscopic description, you abstract away from this microphysical detail.
That is not driven by ignorance on our part, but by the explanatory need to focus on the most salient regularities. When you consider the macroscopic weather states, the system is not deterministic, but stochastic, or random. Multiple different trajectories are entirely possible. Likewise, to describe the complete state of a human agent, we do not describe the full microphysical state of every elementary particle in the brain and body. That would be the wrong level of description. If you ask psychologists, cognitive scientists, and economists, they will give you different theories of how human choice-making works.
But they all treat human beings as agents who are faced with choices between different options, so all these theories assume alternative possibilities.
I want my decisions to flow out of my deliberations, not to be the product of chance. This is subtle. There are different forms of indeterminism.
In statistical physics, indeterminism is associated with randomness. But in the social sciences, we use a different kind of indeterminism based on option availability. In decision theory, we draw a distinction between the options an agent could choose and the option the agent will in fact choose, based on maximizing expected utility or some other criteria.
They are available to me right up to the moment of my choice. If physics says the microscopic world is deterministic, we should accept that, at least provisionally until some better theory comes along. If psychology says humans have genuine choices, we should accept that, too.
It would not be very principled to say that fundamental physics is deterministic based on what our best theories of fundamental physics say, while rejecting that weather systems, for example, are indeterministic based on what our best theories of meteorology say. We need to define what we mean by causation.
In the sciences, we test for causation by looking for systematic correlations that remain in place even when we control for other factors. The way in which causal modelers now tend to think about causation—in fields such as statistics, computer science, probability theory, and the philosophy of mind—captures this aspect of scientific methodology. This approach is called the interventionist theory of causation.
To say one particular variable causes another is to say that, if we were to intervene on the first variable by changing its value, we would bring about a change in the other variable. There is no conceptual reason why sophisticated AI systems could not qualify as bearers of free will. What should we cite as the cause of this particular arm movement? My intentional mental state—namely, my intention to drink—is very systematically associated with my actions.
If my mental state changes, my resulting actions change as well. By contrast, not every change or variation in the underlying physical states would give rise to a change in the resulting act. If you believe in God and yet deny the reality of free will, you have to wonder why the Creator would hard-wire us to be so thoroughly self-deceived. The Incoherence of Ordained Morality.
I would argue that the association of moral responsibility and free will is not only deeply intuitive, as the article suggests, it is also logically necessary. That is, I would argue that denying the association of moral responsibility and free will results in incoherence.
For a concept to have meaning it must have some rooting in our experience, at least by analogy. A concept for which there is no analogy in our experience is a vacuous concept. Yet, after decades of asking, I have yet to find anyone who can provide an analogy by which we might give meaning to the concept of an agent being morally responsible for what God ordained them to do.
Determinism is Self-Refuting. If free will is an illusion and everything is predetermined, then the ultimate cause of why a person believes that free will is an illusion and everything is predetermined is that they were predetermined to do so.
The snow falling outside my window right now is due to the fact that preexisting conditions determined it to be so.
Refuting Determinism By Action. For example, I am this moment deliberating about what to work on when I finish this blog. Should I work on a peace essay for a book collection that is due at the end of this week or should I finish reading a book by Andrew Sullivan that I started two days ago?
As I weigh the pros and cons of both possibilities, I cannot help but manifest my conviction that I genuinely could opt for either one of these alternatives and that it is up to me to decide which I will choose. In other words, I reveal a deep rooted conviction that I am free as I deliberate, and the same holds true for every deliberation anyone engages in. There simply is no other way to deliberate. People may sincerely think they believe in determinism, but they act otherwise, and must act otherwise, every time they deliberate.
The great American philosopher Charles Pierce argued that a belief that cannot be consistently acted on cannot be true. If we accept….
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