About a year and a half ago I wrote a post arguing that there is no free will and also stating that seemed OK to me. As it turns out since then I have been on a fun intellectual and spiritual journey that has led me to a quite different position. Today I want to share a bit more of what I have found.
Let me start by recapping the original argument: you don’t have free will because your brain makes all the decisions based on its state at decision making time. And since there is no “you” beyond your brain it follows that there are no degrees of freedom. If you want to read a recent and forceful account of this position, read Free Will by Sam Harris which I discovered after my blog post. I chose the word state above on purpose to suggest that this argument works equally well if you are referring to the brain’s quantum state (as an aside there is an ongoing debate about whether there is any quantum computing going on in the brain).
The problem with this line of argument though is that it works too well. You can see this by asking the opposite question: what kind of system could have free will? The answer along this line of thinking is: none. Because any system in this universe taken by itself has a completely pre-determined path with outside influences strictly random (and hence also not a source of free will). But a definition of free will that rules it out for anything in this universe isn’t a useful one – it is a strictly hypothetical strawman.
One interesting way out of this was proposed by David Deutsch in his book the Fabric of Reality. To arrive at a definition of free will consistent with deterministic physics Deutsch proposes that we consider what “nearby” copies of you in the multiverse do. If some copies make a different choice then that means the “aggregate” you (across the different universes) has real freedom of choice.
While there are good reasons to believe in a multiverse, this still doesn’t seem like a particularly satisfying definition. But we can bring Deutsch’s idea into this universe by relaxing his condition a bit: consider people substantially like you in *this* universe and observe that some of them are making choices different from yours. For instance, Susan and I had lunch at a nearby restaurant today. We chose different items from the menu. As did other people visiting the restaurant.
So the conception that I have embraced is: free will exists in situations in which people who are similar to each other make different choices. This may at first strike you as trivial but it is a departure from most of the existing thinking on free will and has a lot of things going for it. First, it has a well defined meaning in a single universe (ours) that is even amenable to quantitative analysis (we can develop measures for the similarity of people and situations). Second, it leads us directly to the importance of knowledge and self-knowledge as both increase free will by enabling a broadening of choices. Third, it integrates well with what we know about evolution, psychology and the structure of the brain. I am planning to elaborate on all of these points in future posts.
Clarification: Some tweets including an incorrect response of mine show that this concept is a bit hard to get at first. I am not saying that people making choices is a sign of / evidence for free will. I am saying that it *is* free will. Here is an analogy. Evolution is a concept that does not exist at the level of the individual (mutation does). I am making the same claim about Free Will – it is concept that only makes sense at a level above an individual (possible analog to mutation: learning).
To embrace this view of free will you have to abandon your desire for an individual-based theory. Or put differently: you have to let go of your ego. This is easier said than done as we tend to want things to be for us, about us. Hence the longstanding quest for a theory of free will resting in just the individual despite all the intellectual inconsistencies it brings about.
