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 Matrix - Pushing the Metaphor

Many of the "Matrix" ideas can be seen as just a slightly different angle on ideas presented elsewhere in this blog - especially here, where I summarize "progress to date".

Art is a useful species of simulation. It allows us to imagine different worlds using no more hardware than our senses and our brains. The result can go beyond what we usually think of as "metaphor" - even extending into the realms of myth and religion.

The Matrix movie series provides a challenging dramatization of metaphors that are so commonplace that they have become tropes for empty speculation and dead-end philosophy. The movie updates some old ideas in dramatic new ways:

• Many religions, including the "Abrahamic" and Hindu traditions, regard reality as some kind of dream, with the "real", important reality being the realm of the gods. The "soul" is separable from the body and travels on after death into the more important realms of the gods. In such traditions, little attention is paid to the actual details of the "real world". It's Turkmenistan*.
• Certain philosophies, most notably "idealism", claim that the there is nothing but our experience - the "real world" is either non-existent or unknowable. This comes close to how I regard the "matrix" to work, but, in my view, the matrix is built on the real world and assumes the existence of the real world.
• Antonio Damasio teaches that complex animals, such as mammals, "model" the real world by means of states of their central nervous system. However, somehow the word "model" doesn't convey the fullness of our experience - how totally comprehensive and all-embracing these models can be. We live inside the models.
• In his best-selling novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig presents the concept that a motorcycle, in spite of being made of hard physical metal, is really an idea. While Pirsig later claimed that the novel has nothing to do with either Zen or Motorcycles, his motorcycle-as-idea formed the basis of what was "Zen" for me and allowed my concept of the "Matrix" to encompass more than "mere" mental phenomena. All "artificial" objects are also ideas and therefore part of the "matrix" for both their creators and users.
• In the Knowledge Illusion, Sloman shows how the world surrounding us and the world of our ideas is really constructed by society. Our own contribution to our thoughts is easy to overestimate (the illusion). Our ability to navigate the physical world is the result of an illusion that we know more than we actually do - actual knowledge coming, for example, from the designer and builder of the car we thoughtlessly drive around.
• In Thinking Fast and Slow, one of the most influential books of the 20th century, Kahneman shows how we go through life on auto-pilot most of the time, living in a sea of assumptions that are questioned only when we run up against surprising challenges. This calls to mind the throngs of people in the matrix, who go about their lives without a thought about what is really going on (in this case, they are living in a computer simulation).

All this combines to produce my vision of the "matrix" as being more than a product of the individual mind and more than something "merely" mental. Like any good work of art, it invites us to go beyond the obvious and ask for deeper connections. The matrix is what Hoffstader would call an "Essential" metaphor. We are invited to take the "red pill" to learn our true nature. Within the constraints of movie fiction, our "true nature" is something simple, dramatic and (let's face it) implausible. Outside of fiction, discovery of our "true nature" is perhaps the most important quest of all.

* Turkmenistan is my short-hand for aspects of the world that you know are real but, other than that, we know little about them and you are not overly curious to know more.