Free Will - a Post on Medium.com

From a discussion on the subject in Medium.com

Debates about free will are fun but, like arguments about the existence of God, they are fun because the subject doesn’t exist. It’s like arguing over whether Santa is fat. I’m not saying free will doesn’t exist. I'm saying the idea of "free will" is part of our religious mythology. The concept makes no sense in the world we happen to inhabit. To be more precise, human behavior is inexplicable in principle. The “explanation” that it arises out of a sum of deterministic laws of nature doesn’t survive close examination.

Boiled down to essentials, the argument against free will is saying that a given individual, faced with situation “A” will do exactly the same thing again if faced with exactly the same situation “A”. However, it is clearly impossible to specify “situation A” precisely. To mention just one tiny part of the problem, it is impossible to specify the “state” of a synapse precisely due to Quantum Mechanical restrictions. This is not about what we know, but whether the state can be said to exist. We never put our foot in the same river twice (Heraclitus). 

The idea that the “laws” of the Universe are deterministic has been dead for a century at least. Almost all physical phenomena are governed by the rules of chaos. That includes what happens in our brains. Some philosophers have not got the memo. This means that even dead rocks cannot be put through the “same” situation twice.

Sapolsky is undoubtedly worth reading on this subject (“Behave” is a classic). But his arguments actually prove the opposite of what he claims about free will. He shows that it is hopeless to “explain” behavior precisely. He does this by giving us a dozen different ways to “explain” behavior and showing that none of them is exact and all of them together produce a black box. But then he pulls a rabbit out of the hat by claiming that because we can’t explain behavior, it is somehow utterly determined from some God-like perspective. Shame on you. Robert.

So have your fun.

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This may be similar to knowing the position and momentum of a proton. It is not possible to know both of these quantities with arbitrary precision. It’s not just about “knowing” — in fact, at a certain scale, the idea of position and momentum don’t apply. Does this mean that, at our scale, position and momentum are meaningless? Of course not.

In the case of “free will”, I’d say that a person’s behavior cannot be reliably predicted, even by himself. On the other hand, there are situations where the individual has clearly made a considered choice and others where he will say “I have no idea why I did that”.

Society can deal with this by eliminating perverse incentives and situations where the individual is forced to choose between starvation and obeying the law. We can provide a “menu” of choices, which assumes that the individual is free to choose. "Punishments" will always be on that menu. But anyone who has ever had an unruly child will know that "punishment" (negative reinforcement) is only one tool in a wise parent's arsenal.

At the fine level of day-to-day behavior, the fact is that we run “on automatic” almost all the time. 

Many of our “crimes” are due to a simple lack of attention. 

The Same Old Thing

We are constantly getting into trouble by mixing up our mental models (mathematical or not) with "actual reality". One obvious example was our assumption that space is "Euclidean". We really hit the wall with this in Quantum Mechanics, which seems to defy human logic itself (The EPR Paradox). I see it all the time when respectable physicists fail to grasp the idea that the Universe may actually be infinite or disallow actual singularities.


My favorite example of this is the canard that someplace in an infinite universe there "must" be another version of me typing an identical e-mail to another version of you. Although the analogy is far from exact, I enjoy thinking about this in the same way I enjoy the proof that there is an infinite number of prime numbers. In my imagination at least, an infinite universe implies an infinite number of "situations" at every scale. The idea that two "situations" are identical is a construct of the human mind - a useful approximation of what happens in the real world.


I apply this to the idea of "free will". Those who say such a thing doesn't exist make the assumption that, given the "same" situation, we would always do the "same thing". Whatever you may think of our freedom to decide, the idea of the "same" situation or the "same" action is 

Making Choices in a World Without God

It's natural to ask whether all this speculation matters. Asking this, it is easy to slip into the trap of making general conclusions and offering general advice for those who may agree with me on the issues raised here. That's a mistake. All I can do is say what it means to me Others may draw their own conclusions.

Basically, I can ignore religion's claims of authority (derived from beyond the observable Universe) as well as its claims that its insights trump observation reality.

If I compare my life and priorities with others who allow religion to totally dominate, the advantage is huge. Millions are willing to die for their particular religious fantasy. Millions of others willingly surrender their right to chose for themselves in matters of great personal impact. It matters.

This blog recognizes that I am embedded in a culture that is strongly influenced by "Christian" values and mythology. Many of us are broadly familiar with the stories in the Bible. However, actual in-depth knowledge of this book is rare. Young people - even those who think of themselves as Christian - are as shockingly ignorant about the Bible as they are about all other topics. As an influence on "Western" culture, Christianity has been so misunderstood, misapplied and discredited that it is now safe for any individual to disown it without looking back.

What is less clear is whether, by turning one's back on Christianity, I am left with the need to replace it with something else. If we accept that the soul (if any) dies with the body and there is no other Universe but the one Science describes, what are we to do without the supposed guidance that religion provides? This question remains even when we acknowledge that religion has a terrible track record in providing its supposed benefit - namely a population of believers who behave in anything like a moral, principled way.

Absent religion, Is there anything like good and evil? What is justice?

I am still left in my own personal "Matrix" in which every object, event, and situation is colored with value - everything is "good" or "bad". That's the way my brain works. If it didn't I'd starve to death in my bed, not caring to move.

One starting point is to accept the gift and the burden of free will - both for me and for those around me. We are all free to be murderers, liars, cheats and/or general parasites on society. Conversely, we can choose to be honest, principled and dedicated to the welfare of humanity. Moreover, we must admit that the choices we make and those made by others are often dictated by forces beyond our control. This observation leads us to an attitude of compassion and forgiveness (including self-forgiveness). Such an attitude recommends itself even if only to support personal peace of mind. We can choose not to be the angry sword of justice. Of course, we may choose differently but to do so flies in the face of true understanding and is bound to cause us personal grief.

But what do we do about the palpable danger that certain individuals pose to us personally and society at large? I think it makes sense for us to act to prevent such individuals from harming others. That is a supportable aim of what we call a "Justice" system. At the same time, we need to avoid the tendency for revenge and moral judgment to taint our core aim, which is to prevent harm. We need to take into account the actions of those who commit no "crime", but, through neglect and indifference. Especially in this category, the only effective action is to avoid these sins myself.

It is striking that one of the core values promoted in the Bible is what we might call tribalism. This is particularly evident in the Old Testament, which is the (largely mythical) story of how the ruler of the Universe concerns himself with the "chosen people": Israel. The "us and them" message continues in the New Testament with the message that belief in Jesus is the one and only criterion for selecting the individual for eternal life. The "us and them" mentality runs through the entire history of Christianity, as it splits into innumerable sects that regard themselves to have the keys to heaven and "outsiders" to be bound for Hell. Systematic indifference toward people who have been left out of the story entirely (such as those who never heard the "Gospel") continues in the form of indifference toward "enemy" civilians killed by the thousands in other countries.

I feel personally free to challenge this message and to do so wherever it occurs - whether in a religious context or not. It is the toxic message that is left behind even when the other-worldly justifications for it have been rejected.  We need to stop thinking in terms of "us and them". "We" have no right to be killing "them". "They" have all the rights and aspirations that "we" do. "They" are not wrong about everything just because they are "they". "We" have no special insight into ultimate truth just because we are "we".

SOCIAL JUSTICE WITHOUT RELIGION

Leaving aside morality as it pertains to social issues, we are increasingly confronted with issues that arise out of an increasing appreciation of our place in the Universe - the place that is shared by all human beings - whatever they may believe about supernatural forces or authority. To cite just one question that each of us must answer for himself: Is it right and good that life should survive on Planet Earth? It is amazing to me that many young people are so lost in the moral vacuum left by religion that they will be indifferent to this question or shrug their shoulders to answer, No. More narrowly, many people regard humans as to be a positive evil on the planet and welcome the demise of the human race. The stunning truth is that is hard to find anyone who thinks such questions are worth a moment's thought.

Our chance to prevent catastrophic climate change is slipping away from us on a daily basis. There is a very real possibility that the end of the human race is not far off and we may, in fact, prevent that from happening by personal actions in our lifetime. Will we?  Will we try? The Biblical story is not helping us here. The story of Noah tells us that God judged all of humanity to be worth destruction (indeed all of Nature). God condemned all of humanity because of the disobedience of one man (Adam) over one instruction, then arbitrarily reversed that decision because of the sacrifice of one man (Jesus) but that saved only "believers". All this mythology predisposes believers of all sorts (not just Christians) to be open to the idea that the Universe would somehow be better off without us.

I'm not quite arrogant enough to propose a solution to this ultimate existential question. All I can do is make a choice for myself. I chose not to commit suicide out of guilt for being a human being. I chose not to give up on humanity. I chose to regard saving the natural world from destruction as being a cause worthy of my active support.

The fashionable trend toward "save the planet" ideology is encouraging to me, but the really big, nasty threats are not being prevented or even challenged. We march to save the whales but fail to save the oceans. We are willing to save the planet as long as it doesn't cost jobs or raise taxes. We are happy to watch the planet die because others are not doing their share to prevent it. It can all seem silly and sad. Personally, it often seems that all I can do is to see the situation as clearly as possible and share that knowledge (or at least the desire to have that knowledge) with others.

From what I know of the "big picture", there is no ultimate guarantee that things will turn out the way I'd like. I'm certain of my own fate. The thought that there may come a time when there is no living thing left in the Universe is even more fearful. The Universe without God (which is what I believe to be the case) has no special love for us or life itself.

There is a daily corollary of this attitude, which is a love for life in all its forms. For me at least, such love takes the place of religion. Like faith, it is a free choice.

Thoughts on Religion vs. Reality

For the moment, let me talk about the world of human experience as "E".

The world that Science investigates is assumed to exist apart from human experience, although we can only know it through human experience. Without really thinking about it, we imagine the "real world" to be about the shared experience: verifiable, consistent and augmented by what we call "reason". But we have long admitted that Universe, which I will call U, is not the same as "E". In fact, we assume that we can never know "U" entirely, directly or completely.

We all know that "E" is not the same for each of us. In fact, it is quite remarkably different between different cultures and different times or even for a single individual throughout his or her lifetime.

The question at hand is, is there anything "out there" apart from E and U?

In most religious traditions the answer is "yes".  Most religions postulate a universe in which the individual "soul" - the most important part of E  - exists apart from the individual physical body and survives death into a realm that may or may not is occupied by spirits, gods, occult forces and a whole world. Christianity specifically claims that the "soul" always exists apart from the body - an idea that appears in modern Science Fiction in many forms. Mystical traditions claim that some varieties of E (mystical experience) perceive alternate universes or perceive U directly, whatever that may mean. At least in the early days of the "drug culture", drugs like LSD were seen as a means of exploring that alternate reality - not just a way of bending the brain out of shape.

Religions also tend to assume that there is a moral universe that exists beyond the world of mere mortals but applies in some way to the moral choices we make. For example, the fate of our souls depends on the moral choices we make. In such a moral universe, the concept of "free will" is an essential attribute of the soul. If we have no free will, the entire idea of merit and reward beyond death (or even in this world) makes no sense. Religious apologists are well aware of this problem - frequently claiming that in a world without God (or their religion), morality cannot exist.

But if we stick to the evidence available, we are forced to conclude that our minds and therefore all of E are happening between our ears and are therefore embedded in U, like the rest of our bodies. There is no other Universe. Mind, like gravity, however mysterious, is a phenomenon within U.

One of the most impressive bits of evidence for this is the structure of the brain. Brain structure heavily contributes to "character" in the sense that lesions, injuries, tumors, and drugs can dramatically alter moral behavior. What we consider to be "moral" choices - the ones that supposedly chart the progress of the soul - are the work of identifiable brain structures.  If you break down "free will" into components, you wind up with faculties (brain structures, processes and systems) that may or may not work as expected. These faculties may fail individually or in combination as a consequence of specific injury to specific brain systems. For moral decisions to take place:

• You need to be aware of the alternatives for action;
• The alternatives need to be emotionally "tagged" - some "feel" better than others - otherwise you don't care;
• You need to access applicable memory and social "rules";
• You need to feel things like disgust, lust, shame, pride, and empathy;
• You need to be able to hold all this in working memory long enough to work out an action;
• You need to be able to act according to your mental "computation" (many people "know" what is right but behave in alarming, self-destructive ways anyway).

Drastic departures from "normal" capabilities in these areas are labeled with morally-tinged "disorders" such as psychopathy or even mild character judgments such as "laziness" or "impulsiveness". We are just beginning to understand the physical roots of these personality patterns. The field of psychological neurology is gradually stripping away our common sense idea that "bad" people are acting out of free choice - making "bad choices". What's left is a view that "normal" people make "normal" choices using "normal" brain structures. There is no room left for the idea that morality is something that exists outside of E (what we experience) and our bodies (part of U). We may need to toss wickedness onto the same scrap heap as demon possession.

Brain structures are stunningly complex in a way that shouts "design". Of course, we put aside the "Santa's Workshop" view of this "design". There is no "designer". But what then? We must say that our brain structures are a result of strong evolutionary pressure.

Our nervous systems extract an astonishing amount of detail from basic sensory information. To cite just one example, there are 20 different types of ganglia in the visual system. These nerve cells extract the "analog" information coming in from the retina. Each type of ganglion "speaks its own digital language" to the deeper structures of the brain. At the moment, we have a vague idea what five of these ganglion types are "talking about". What the others are "saying" remains mysterious. In no case are we in a position to decipher the language that each type speaks.*

There are hundreds of different cell types in the hippocampus - the brain area critical to memory. The complexity of this design is several orders of magnitude beyond anything that has come out of human design efforts. What is motivating this incredible process? It can be nothing but what we call R. The "real world". Our brains are embedded in R and they are a direct consequence of phenomena in R. Specifically, evolutionary "pressure" from events in R have consequences for even subtle differences in the design of our bodies - especially our brains. This applies to the way our brains make "moral" choices. There is no particular need for us to know what these "pressures" are. For example, we have been breathing for millennia before we discovered oxygen.

Evolutionary "pressure" is "adaptive", or "survival of the fittest". But for humans, survival depends on acting together with other humans. Great sections of the brain are specifically devoted to this job, including obvious things like speech but even more sophisticated "circuitry" that computes socially acceptable behavior - that's what we call "morality".

The main business of religion is to help us "compute" our behavior in socially acceptable ways. Religion is the result of many brains "computing" general solutions to the problems of existence, especially existence together with other humans.

We are left with a view of the world and our role in it that departs significantly from virtually all religions, but, at the same time, tells us why we have religions and why there is no particular reason for them to "make sense":

• There is no "soul" apart from the body. Consciousness - and all the mysteries of the self - are created by the brain. The "self" can be disassembled bit by bit or ultimately destroyed by injury to the brain. The fact that we can't "explain" this does not put the phenomenon in a special category. We have no ultimate explanation for anything at all - including gravity.
• "Free will", if it exists at all, is severely constrained by the details of our individual brain structure and health.  Wild departures from "normal" - such as psychopaths - have brain abnormalities not much different from being blind from birth. We must challenge our common-sense idea that others may be regarded as fundamentally "good" or "bad" in some absolute sense. 
• With no "soul" or independent realm that dictates moral choices outside of our minds, the need for anything like "heaven" or "god" vanishes. As Pascal famously noted: "We have no need for that hypothesis".

But does the need for religion itself vanish? Our brains are designed to depend heavily on the input from other brains. To cite a simple example, our courts could not function without laws. Laws could not exist without language and the deep history behind the moral "computations" performed by cultures over the centuries. The fact that different cultures compute different answers to the moral problems presented does not diminish the fact that individuals are not "designed" to make moral choices entirely on their own.

It does seem possible for these insights to inspire something that looks like "morality". For example, perhaps we should back off from our natural tendency to regard people with different moral standards as "evil". Perhaps we should be more skeptical of ideas like deliberation and willfulness in those who offend against our laws. Perhaps we need to re-think our ideas of "justice" entirely - especially when it comes to our systems of punishment and reward that supposedly motivate people to behave in the "right" way. It seems to me that people who accept compassion as a core religious belief are already close to accepting this attitude for simple "scientific" reasons. It is a simple, verifiable fact that E is a creation of the human mind in response to the "real" pressure from R plus our efforts to survive in partnership with others (also playing itself out on a stage in R).

The vast majority of the human race believes or acts "as if" their own cultural standards of morality are absolute and not "invented" by "mere" humans. We want to think that their worldview is not "merely" mythical but in some sense reflecting a special insight into the nature of reality, usually augmented by some kind of "supernatural" (not part of U) history. I don't think it is too much of a leap for such people to accept that their worldview is a special case of "E". Other worldviews - even conflicting worldviews - need to be understood as fundamentally human and not uniquely valid conclusions of the nature of reality. For the individual, morality boils down to what we should do - here and now, in this world. Practical experience tells us that it's quite possible for folks with utterly different worldviews to agree on a wide range of common action.

On the other hand, it should be possible for us to deny "supernatural" justifications for actions that cast others as "evil" - deserving suppression or even death.

It's not too much to ask.

* More on visual system ganglia and the "big picture" posed by the brain here.

Motivation

In his brilliant overview of human behavior, Sapolsky challenges our intuitive sense that there are reasons for the way we behave. This can be taken as a license to challenge the very idea of "free will". It occurs to me that the issue is more subtle.

Perhaps we are just very bad at explaining our reasons. We certainly lie about them all the time, using "rationalizations" to explain our actions in a way to place ourselves in the best possible light. There is strong evidence that this tendency is much stronger in some people than others. For example, it's an open question whether the narcissist really believes himself to be super special and immune to accountability.

In extreme cases, we see instances of confabulation, where the brain "explains" its action in ways that are transparently wrong.

In spite of difficulties with the concept of motivation, we are quick to attribute motivation to others - pretending to peer into their minds and extract reasons for what they do - reasons that they don't even know themselves!

Even worse: we attribute motivation to groups of people - something inherently impossible. For example, we will talk confidently about why "the rich" oppose minimum wage laws or "why" the USA fights a war in Afghanistan. We love secret reasons and many of us follow conspiracy theories as a hobby.

If we can't be sure of the motives of one individual (even ourselves!), how is it that we become confident to attribute motives to groups of thousands or millions of people?

Is it possible that attribution of motives to anyone (even ourselves) is a crucial error in every case? Is it possible that this insight takes us a long way to "solving" the paradox of free will? Perhaps we do things for a reason but we are rarely able to fully explain that reason. We act for deep and complex reasons that are usually beyond our ability to comprehend. When we act in groups, the interactions become so complex that any comprehensive explanation for the resulting action becomes impossible to distill.
At the very least, we must treat claims of "motives" - even our own - with profound suspicion.

This is not a just a philosophical issue. The legal system assumes that the reasons for people's actions are knowable. To cite one obvious example, it makes a difference if you deliberately kill someone or do so by accident (without intent). An everyday example is our attempt to "parse" the actions of a loved one, asking if she is doing something "because" she loves me or not.

A disturbing special case is the core assumption of democracy: that the actions of a government will somehow align with the motivations of its citizens. After all, that's the "reason" the citizens voted the government into power, right? But we know that the reason any one person votes as he does is complex and easily manipulated. There is no reason to suspect that it makes sense for some kind of cumulative "reason" to emerge by simply adding up votes.

Milestones - Mind, Time, Society

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading lately. Things seem to be coming together in a way that demands a bit of summarization.

THE PROBLEM OF "MIND

I think Dennet's reductionist approach is wrong. He seems to think that everything important about "mind" can be learned from studies of the way the physical brain works (neurology) plus experiments with subjects to correlate what is known about the brain with what subjects reveal about their "first person" experience of the world. This is a "bottom up" approach.

I would say that for, humans at least, the brain is almost certainly necessary but not sufficient to create a "mind". The first person experience of the world is infinite, open-ended and individual. It can't be "averaged" and will resist creation of general "laws" of much interest. The mind is, to a first approximation, identical with the first person experience of the Universe.

At first, there would seem to be a conflict between "I=Universe" and he Zen contention that "I" am an illusion. However, Zen meditation practices are precisely aimed to foster awareness of the Universe (taken as a "given") and the Mind as "nothing more than" a reflection of that Universe. The goal is to make the Mind a perfect mirror of the Universe, which amounts to either the elimination of the Mind or the absorption of the Mind in the (real) Universe, depending how you look at it. This contrasts with the reductionist view that the Mind is "nothing more" than firing of neurons in the skull.

Data coming in from the reductionists can therefore be regarded with interest but it's not fundamental. You will learn more about "minds" in general by reading great novels (or appreciating the wonder of your own experience of the world) than neurology or laboratory experiments will ever reveal. One might almost say that the idea that "I" am a brain is just a more sophisticated way of saying "I" am something inside my brain (like a homunculus). What is actually gained by trading the homunculus for the brain in our model of the mind?

Why do I say the brain is "almost certainly" necessary? I consider the example of an ant colony. If the colony has anything like a "mind", it belongs to the whole colony. It's in an organizing principle that is unknown to the individual ants. So, the question is, how much of my "mind" is shared with other aspects of my environment? If I'm looking for subtle features of the mind (as Dennet's experiments pretend to do), am I barred from considering subtle influences of society or even mathematical limitations on the kind of things minds can contain? Do these influences depend on the brain of an individual person or are they shared to such an extent that it makes sense to talk about a shared mind? If that makes sense, the individual brain is not the end of the story. The individual mind is always, to some extent, assimilated into a larger entity which I regard as a living thing. This assimilation is somewhat subtle (Freud thought of it as part of the unconscious mind), but it is real enough and quite close to the surface: easily discovered and analyzed.

TIME, FREE WILL

The "arrow of time" undeniably exists at the human scale, where we live. The idea that all natural phenomena look the same when time is reversed is simply wrong at our scale. The idea that time is reversible at the quantum scale depends on the kind of thing physicists do when inferring "laws" about any system. They neglect "unimportant" details (like gravity). When examined closely, there is no reason to expect that the future is somehow determined by initial conditions at any scale. The problem of free will is seen to rely on assumptions about the physical universe that turn out to be false. This was revealed even in Newton's lifetime, yet Newton's "clockwork" universe somehow survived in the popular mind.

NONLINEAR DYNAMICS, CHAOS, PHASE CHANGES, SCALING

A detailed study of these fields is necessary to get a "feel" of how the world really works. In general, it's about how "things" evolve over time and how we make approximations, especially when it comes to scale. Without this understanding, it is not possible to understand the "basics", such as what space is and what life is. Unfortunately, such understanding is beyond the grasp of almost everyone. Most people choke when a few symbols or graphs are introduced into an argument. Philosophy (a fancy word for "talk") is left in the dust when serious questions need to be answered. Fortunately, my education allows me to "speak the language" of serious physics, but it means that the ideas hat emerge will not make much sense to my friends or the readers of this blog.

The founders of modern science, from Galileo to Einstein have pointed out that mathematics is the language of the Universe. Nothing deep or profound can be learned about the Universe by those who don't speak its language.

Do things happen for a reason

[From Yabberz Greatest Hits]

Perhaps right at the core of most religious thought is the idea that "things happen for a reason". In the Biblical tradition, this reason is in the Mind of God. His plan has a fundamentally moral aspect (it's good and merciful). Everyone outside of mental hospitals agrees that the "plan" is completely inscrutable.

Even when stripped of all the particulars of theology, many people cling to the last vestiges of this idea. They ask "why" a person is "taken away" in the prime of life or "why" innocent, good people are destroyed by random events like hurricanes and earthquakes. The question is always rhetorical. It's rude to attempt an answer. Even those who think there is no reason feel in their bones that there ought to be one.

I've often encountered people who earnestly believe in "fate", which is (to me) the silly idea that whatever happened was what somehow had to happen. This pulls away even the "moral" nature of the process but leaves its inevitability. Such beliefs are, of course "not even wrong". How could you disagree?

Well actually, you can.

Since the early 20th century, Science (specifically Quantum Mechanics) has been showing that things "just happen" for "reasons" that are fundamentally probabilistic. To put it another way, if you know everything there is to know about a system, there are things you cannot predict about what happens next. This has been reinforced by the advent of Chaos theory, which says pretty much the same thing but at a more familiar scale - the scale of the weather, for example.

To put it simply, there is no such thing as the "future". The Universe does not "unfold" according to any "plan", whether decreed by God or not. On a more subtle level, there isn't even such a thing as the "past", in the sense that the current state of affairs is not entirely due to a knowable state of affairs that existed at some previous time.

It takes time to get comfortable with the absence of purpose or even predictability in the Universe. For me, it comes back frequently in the realization that I am personally astronomically improbable. I can sit down and calculate the probability that I would be born and make the number come out as small as you like. Those of us who have taken Calculus means that this means the probability is equal to zero. I am impossible.

Even so, I'm happy to accept this. Is it then so hard that I will exit the world as a result of events that are equally improbable and meaningless?

This is not to say that life itself lacks meaning. It's just to say that the meaning, if any, must be found in our own lives, from the "inside" and not within the mysterious workings of the Universe.