In an earlier post I took issue with some of Sam Harris' arguments against the existence of free will. I highlighted three issues in particular: there is no room for free will in a fundamentally deterministic system, the granularity at which Harris analyzes the brain is too fine, and free will is never satisfactorily defined. At the end of the post I promised to offer my own opinions on free will, which I shall attempt to do here.
Before I begin, let me offer the disclaimer that I am not a scholar of philosophy or psychology and I do not claim to have any expertise in either field. My opinions are based solely on my experience and my own thoughts on the matter.
So what do we mean when we say that an individual has free will? Certainly we are implying that the individual in question is not being manipulated by any other individual or entity. In general, however, it is implied that the individual in question is also not manipulated by his or her environment or fate or some supernatural or spiritual being. An individual with completely free will is the source of his or her own decisions.
This sounds simple enough, except we are assuming we know what an individual is and what decisions are. The notion of the self is just as tricky as the notion of free will, so for the sake of brevity let us assume the existence of the individual for now and see where it gets us. That leaves us with the task of defining what it means to make a decision.
Conceptually we may think of a decision as the moment before which many options were possible to the individual, and after which only one option is possible. A choice has been made and possibility has been reduced to necessity. Unfortunately this is a somewhat mystical way of looking at the situation and tends to defy analysis. How can we move in a single moment from a nondeterministic state of mind to a deterministic one? The mystic will tell us that this question is unanswerable. The skeptic, on the other hand, will search for causes. Surely there must be some reason why one choice was made and another was not.
Again it may be instructive to consider how a computer is able to make what appear to be decisions to the outside observer. A computer is always presented with a multitude of options: what instruction to execute next, which thread of computation to attend to, and so on and so forth. Which option the computer will choose is either determined by its hardware and the software it is running at the time, or external factors over which it has no control. A computer does not so much make decisions as it evaluates expressions and executes instructions which determine the next course of action.
So it is by and large with the human brain. We tend to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of various options if we are thinking rationally, or pick the option that feels correct if we are thinking intuitively. In either case we are allowing internal processes in the brain, whether intellectual or emotional, essentially make a decision for us. Again, this process is far more complicated than the process of selecting the next instruction in a computer, but the principle is basically the same.
However, let's imagine that the individual in question is aware of all of these factors and in the course of making a decision starts thinking about the decision process itself. "My rational mind will clearly conclude that option A is the correct option and therefore I shall decide option A," she says, "but as I am aware of this imminent decision I shall instead choose option B." With complete knowledge of the processes of her own brain she must know what option she will choose. However that knowledge can be used to subvert the decision itself, which then implies that she never had complete knowledge of her mental processes to begin with.
Here we have a classic Douglas Hofstadter self-referential paradox. Knowledge implies power, but power subverts knowledge. Logically speaking then, this particular knowledge of ones own mental processes must be impossible. But if that knowledge is impossible can we truly say that said processes are deterministic? They might be, but we can't ever prove it. For all intents and purposes, they might as well be nondeterministic, or at the very least are shrouded in mystery. It is at this point that the mystic smugly says to the skeptic "I told you so" and proceeds to start babbling on about the akashic field and how everything is connected and the skeptic orders a very strong drink.
So do we have free will or not? I'll offer some concluding thoughts in part III.
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