Free Will vs Determinism ...

"Since actions and performances are not wholly in our power and since nothing is really in our power but our will - it is on the will that all the rules and duties of Man are based and established." (Michel de Montaigne, 1572)

Free Will vs Determinism

The question of free will vs determinism has been one of the most intensely fought battles in theology and philosophy since the days of the earliest Greek philosophers. There is little doubt that humans have a perception of choice in our daily lives. We believe we make choices; that we are not mere puppets of either the gods nor the blind forces of the universe.

But do we?

It is important to define to some extent what we are talking about. The question is one between absolute determinism on one side, and the absense of determinism on the other. Thus, for this debate, I will use the term "free will" to mean that there exist situations in life where we make genuine, unforced choices, and that when we choose A, we could, even circumstances being similar, also have chosen B.

Free will does not mean without influence, coersion and pressure from the environment. Hopefully, there are more or less rational reasons why we chose A over B, and among these there may be influence from society, upbringing or knowledge that the choice B would have undesired consequences.

A brief history of the debate about free will

While humans like to believe we do make genuine choices, it has indeed been hard to justify this belief rationally, for both theological and scientific reasons. Thus, it will not be an exaggaration to say that the majority of influental philosophers and theologists in the past have argued that free will does not exist.

For theologists, free will have been argued to interfere with the omnipotence of God. In one of the oldest (and longest) debates in Christian thought history, Augustine strongly rebuffed Pelagius when the latter argued that human beings can themselves approach salvation through personal choice. Pelagianism and later semi-Pelagianism were both condemned in the Roman Catholic Church. It still lived on, however.

In the 16th century, the debate flared up again, when the philosopher Erasmus attacked Luther for his belief that the human will was totally bound, and that only God has any influence on a person's salvation. Luther condemned Erasmus for being worse than Pelagius.

While Calvin is the one most known for being a proponent of absolute determinism, Luther was indeed the same. But in Lutheran circles, many have been uneasy about this position, which is no doubt the reason Erasmus chose it as an avenue of attack.

This is the theological background for the philosophical debate about determinism vs free will.

Science, also, grew out of theology, at least in one sense. If God had created the universe, it was argued, the universe would have to follow universal laws, since God is not a god of disorder. Philosophers and scientists in the Enlightment set out to find these Divine laws. This is the historical reason why the general systematic principles that guides the universe, as described by science, is still called laws, even though laws otherwise are normative, while natural laws are descriptive. You can break a law of society (and face consequences), but you simply cannot break a law of nature. That is a distinction we will get back to.

A strictly ordered universe poses serious logical problems for a belief in a free will.

The one best known for formulating what had been understood as the death blow to the concept of free will is the 19th century scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. He proposed that if there existed a mind that knew, to the minutes detail, everything about every particle in the universe at any given point, then that mind would also be able to predict, with absolute accuracy, what would happen in the future. Given the knowledge of all that is, we would know all that could ever be. It thus follows that the entire course of the universe was laid out at its inception. There is, in this, no room for a free will.

Unwary free will proponents may try to launch the following counter-attacks on this position.

1) A monotheist, who would be forced to believe there indeed exists such an all-knowing mind, could argue that as long as God did not consciously decide to fully "calculate" the outcome of reality, its inhabitants still had a measure of free will.

2) A non-theist could argue that such a mind did not exist, thus making the whole gedankenexperiment futile. Thus, humans could still possess a free will since such a calculation was infeasible, if not theoretically impossible.

These arguments are both flawed for the exact same reason. Whether the calculation is actually done is irrelevant. If it is even theoretically possible to know in advance what you will do tomorrow, then you have no free will. If I have a note in my pocket saying that you will have cereal for breakfast tomorrow morning, and this note is 100% reliable, the fact that I chose not to look at it still means you cannot chose to have any different breakfast the next morning.

These arguments were understood by most philosophers and intellectuals, thus seemingly dooming humans to simply live under an illusation of having free will. The whole existence is a theatre. Even though we actually feel we make choices, this is an illusion. When you choose A, be it such a trivial thing as what to eat for breakfast or a more life-altering decision, there really was no possibility, the universe being exactly as it was at the time, for you to act differently.

These (apparent) facts really have stunning implications for ethics. We punish lawbreakers at least partially as a deterrant against crime. However, if there is no free will, then a murderer or rapist really had no choice whether to commit the crime or not. Moral culpability is only meaningful if there is a possibility for choice. In fact, the whole of human society, including the legal system, is built on the implicit assumption of free will and the possibility to make moral choices.

A philospher who is a determinist will have to find him- or herself living a total paradox to argue it is in any way meaningful to strive for a better life, to avoid accidents, to punish wrongdoers for their crimes, and indeed at all behave like there is anything to gain from making any initiative for action.

To this, the determinist will just have to say that when he makes an (apparent) decision, wants to punish criminals, etc, this is also a result of the predetermined makeup of the universe. Logically consistent, perhaps, but most will find this fatalistic system deeply disturbing, if not emotionally destructive.

Thus, we find that logically, free will seems impossible to reconcile with the order of the universe. A mechanical universe has no room for actual choice.

On the other hand, we find that the consequences of actually believing in determinism are so absurd that people have to pretend that they actually have a measure of free will to function in society. While not strictly a fully valid reductio ad absurdum against determinism, certainly it is a powerful argument.

The surprising - at the time - solution is that the idea of the deterministic universe is probably wrong.

This conclusion came out of the physicist Heisenberg's work with quantum mechanics. In 1927 he published what has become known as the "uncertainty paper," in which he described his work with trying to determine the position and the momentum of a particle simultanously, and concluded:

"The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa."
Contrary to what many argued, this was not due to any fault from the observer. Simplified, we can say that this imprecision is due to an actual fuzziness in the fabric universe itself, at the quantum level.

It actually follows from quantum mechanics, solidly confirmed by experiments, that on the quantum level, the universe is not at all deterministic. Events happen according to a statistical distribution that comes out of quantum equations. Given an elementary particle, if it can go zing or zong, it is actually inheritably impossible to determine with certainty which it will do either, only the statistical probabilities.

While Einstein, and even some contemporary physicists, argue that there must be an actual underlying deterministic system to quantum mechanics, this system has never been found, and little evidence available now suggests it ever will.


Conclusion: Affirming a Free Will

It will be a gross exaggaration to say that free will follows as a result of the equations of quantum mechanics, but it remains a fact that it does away with a deterministic universe. The actual state of the universe at any time is absolutely unknowable, even theoretically, and thus its course cannot be accurately determined or known in advance. You can still have your breakfast of choice tomorrow morning.

The deterministic argument against free will can also be refuted at another level. It can be argued that saying that strict, unchanging and unbreakable natural laws prevents the exercise of free choice.

However, this argument stems from a misunderstanding of what a natural law is, as we mentioned initially. The law is merely an inductive generalisation of the past, and the argument that since this is how the universe has behaved up to now, it will continue doing so. It is not a normative law created for the universe to follow; that would be putting the cart in front of the horse. Thus, the events that are described in natural laws, are not different from the events that you initiate and the actions you do. It is a subtle misunderstanding to say that the laws of nature really constrains your choices. On the contrary, they simply describe what happens, and that includes every action you make. Every time you make a choice and act on it, you create another tiny subset of a universal "law of nature". To even talk about "breaking" the laws of nature is absurd; these laws describe everything that takes place in the universe, including what you do.

Thus, the weight of the evidence suggests that the human free will is not an illusion, but that we really are able to make choices. There are situations in life where we can genuinly choose between either A or B. We have a free will.