On Free Will

Free will gets people really worked up. I’ve never understood why.

I don’t believe it exists. I’ve held that belief since I was a kid.

The thing that broke it for me was simple: God is supposedly omniscient. God supposedly gave us free will. If God knows everything you’ll ever do, how is any choice free?

It’s a straightforward contradiction and nobody has ever given me a satisfying resolution.

So I started asking a deeper question: why does everyone assume free will exists in the first place?

The burden of proof is on the people claiming we have it. I’ve yet to see a compelling case.

What I Mean

I think definitions hold a lot of power in philosophy. Wittgenstein, you know?

My definition is strict. Free will means:

• Making choices unconstrained by the laws of physics
• Unbiased by past experiences
• Unaffected by genetics or anything outside your control.

The “could have chosen otherwise” argument is especially weak.

You can’t rewind time and test it. Every choice ever made was singular and unrepeatable. The statement is unfalsifiable.

If you define free will differently, my arguments may not apply.

That’s fine.

I’m making an argument for my defintion. “Free will” means your choices could genuinely have gone either way, independent of all prior causes.

And… that doesn’t exist :P

Three Camps

When it comes to free will, there are three high-level positions people tend to take.

Libertarianism

Libertarianism says free will genuinely exists: Humans can make choices not fully determined by prior causes.

The justifications are things like:

• Quantum randomness somehow becomes freedom.
• A nonphysical soul pokes the physical chain.
• “Well it feels like I’m free.”

I find all of these unconvincing.

Quantum randomness is just noise, not freedom, it’s statistics. Even if we don’t have exact equations letting us predict our N+1 from our N, we can still do so probabilistically.

Souls are unfalsifiable. While I’m a panpsychist, I don’t believe they can “act” and the feeling of choosing doesn’t prove the choice was free.

Every libertarian I’ve debated eventually retreats to “well, it feels like we have free will…”

This is an observation about subjective experience, not an argument about metaphysics.

Determinism

Determinists argue that free will doesn’t exist at all.

Every choice, every thought, every feeling is the inevitable result of prior causes stretching back to the beginning of time.

This is where I land.

It’s the only position that takes causality seriously all the way down.

Libertarianism wants an uncaused cause inside your head (google it). That’s magic.

Compatibilism, as we’ll talk about next, wants to keep the word “free” but throws away everything interesting about it.

Determinism is the honest answer: you’re a physical system unfolding according to physical laws.

The experience of choosing is part of that unfolding, not a break from it.

Compatibilism

Compatibilism argues that free will can coexist with determinism.

Specifically, they define free will such that you’re “free” if you’re not coerced, i.e. no one’s pointing a gun to your head.

If your desires, reasoning style, and impulse control were all determined by physics, genetics and environment, calling the result “free” is just rebranding determinism to be an easier pill to swallow.

Compatibilism doesn’t solve the problem. It changes the subject.

The Physics of Choice

Here’s a classic thought experiment: imagine a being who knows the exact position and momentum of every particle in the universe. Using the laws of physics, it should be able to predict the future with perfect accuracy.

Here’s a programming version. In Erlang:

random_number() ->
    random:uniform(100).

Laplace said it more like:

“For such an intellect nothing would be uncertain, and the future, just like the past, would be present before its eyes.”

When I first learned Erlang, I was surprised that calling this function always returns the same number.

Fire up a fresh shell and you get 10. Restart it and you get 10 again. Every process has a hidden seed. Same seed, same output.

The universe works the same way.

Objects don’t change unless acted upon by forces. If you know an object’s state and all forces on it, you know its future state.

Scale that up to every particle and you’ve got determinism. The seed was the Big Bang.

Every day we feel like we deliberate. We weigh options, consider consequences, decide. But weighing and considering are themselves determining processes.

• You didn’t choose your genetics.
• You didn’t choose your childhood.
• You didn’t choose which ideas you’d encounter and when.
• You didn’t choose your temperament, your intelligence, your predispositions.

And yet every “choice” flows from exactly these things.

Think about the last time you made a hard decision. You listed pros and cons, talked to friends, slept on it.

Every factor in your deliberation had a specific weight, and that weight was determined by everything you are.

If you could replay the decision with exactly the same brain state and context, you’d make the same choice every single time.

Compatibilists say you’re free when you act on your own desires. But your desires were determined too.

You didn’t choose to want what you want. You discovered it. Already weighted.

Agency

I fully believe in “agency”: the ability to perceive, identify goals, and act toward them.

Lots of things have agency. None of them have free will.

• E. coli swims toward nutrients and away from toxins.
• Slime molds solve mazes and optimize paths to food.
• A thermostat perceives temperature, has a goal, and acts to achieve it.

Nobody thinks thermostats have free will.

The difference between us and thermostats is one of complexity, not kind.

We seek pleasure and avoid pain. We crave social connection and fear isolation.

This is just biological programming, refined by millions of years of evolution.

Going Deeper

Going a little bit deeper about the physics of choice, I want to address some common objections.

Quantum Objections

Some people point to quantum indeterminacy and say: randomness means freedom.

I find this baffling.

If your decisions are random, that’s not freedom either.

A dice roll isn’t a choice. Adding noise to a deterministic signal doesn’t create agency.

It creates a noisier signal. If quantum effects influenced neural firing, you’d get choices that are 70% your past and 30% dice roll.

And at macroscopic scale, quantum effects wash out into classical behavior. Neurons are macroscopic. Brains are macroscopic.

We don’t experience quantum superposition in our daily lives; we experience decidedly non-quantum, aggregated, causality.

Superdeterminism

I’m actually a superdeterminist!

Everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen was determined at the Big Bang.

I see it like… there’s really only one wave function for the whole universe, evolving deterministically.

One equation, all the way down.

We don’t know the seed. That’s why things look random to us (same as the Erlang example).

From inside the system, the output seems unpredictable because you can’t inspect the process state. But the state is there, and it fully determines the output.

I actually don’t know why there’s much a distinction between super, and non-super determinism.

Even Thomas Aquinas talked about a “chain of causes”, a “prime mover”, and a “first cause”.

Living With It

If there’s no free will, why does it feel so much like there is?

Evolution.

The ability to make choices was crucial for survival:

• Hunt here or there.
• Fight or flight.
• Trust this person or not.

The feeling of agency motivates the behavior.

But neuroscience suggests the feeling is backwards. Your brain moves toward a decision hundreds of milliseconds before you’re aware of it.

The conscious experience is a delayed readout.

Like, you predicted you’d raise your hand, and your hand went up, so the brain tags that as “I did that.”

Ethics

Some people argue that without free will we can’t hold anyone accountable.

I think that’s backwards: punishment serves functions regardless of metaphysical freedom.

Punishment deters and disincentivizes people from doing “bad” things. It removes dangerous people and helps maintain social cohesion.

Criminals face consequences not because they freely chose evil.

They couldn’t have, in my world view.

They face consequences because they failed to reason within society’s rules.

We judge all determined beings equally. That’s enough. I don’t see a problem with that.

Relationships

My determinism makes me more forgiving, not less.

When someone hurts me, I understand they were determined to act that way by their history and circumstances.

This doesn’t excuse harm or mean I should accept mistreatment. It just means I respond less reactively. I still set boundaries. I just don’t take things as personally.

When a friend says something hurtful, my first thought isn’t “how dare they” anymore (it used to be).

It’s “what the heck caused them to say those horrible words?? ;w;”

That question turns resentment into curiosity. Curiosity leads to better outcomes.

Most of the time, anyway. I’m still determined to get upset sometimes ;)

Why Argue

Minds change through determined processes.

Arguments are inputs.

Hearing a new idea becomes part of your context, part of the weight calculation in your next decision.

Some people are determined to be convinced by good arguments. Others aren’t. I’m determined to try.

This resolves a common paradox: if everything is determined, why bother doing anything?

You’ll do what you were always going to do. The only thing that changes is whether you get to feel like you chose it.

Free will is an idea that falls apart the more you look at it.

The universe is a cascade of cause and effect stretching back to the beginning of time. We’re sophisticated biological machines running programs written by evolution, culture, and experience.

The fact that we experience this execution subjectively doesn’t make us the programmers, doesn’t mean we get a say. It doesn’t make any of “this” less amazing though!