First of all, I need to say that, even if it is ignorant, I even do not bother to read philosophical speculations.
I am interested in empirical premises. I’ve heard that there is some research, where scientists, monitoring activity of a person’s brain, are able to predict which switch (s)he’s going to switch, before (s)he does, or maybe before (s)he’s conscious about the choice. This implies that our decisions are results of some chemical processes determined aside of our “free choice” and so called free will is only an illusion, a way in which alternatives presents to us, while the choice is made already deep in our minds unconsciously and maybe even deterministically. Does anybody know this research and could cite it?
Since I am constantly busy, I really sucks in the theory, so could anybody say what’s the Marxist stance on free will if any?
I’m sorry to disappoint you but with this topic you won’t really get around at least some amount of philosophy. The Marxist stance on free will is: “it depends what you mean by free will”. In general yes, Marxism acknowledges free will but not in a metaphysical sense, rather in the sense that it views humans as conscious actors in society. This is not a pronouncement on whether “free will” can exist scientifically, rather it has to do with how we view the interaction between society and the individual.
Scientifically speaking though, “free will” in the sense in which it is traditionally understood by most religions most likely does not and cannot exist. You don’t even need to get into any complicated neuroscience research to see why.
We know that our actions and thoughts are determined by the electro-chemical processes in our brain. No matter how complex those processes are, they are still subject to the laws of physics which determine how electrons, atoms and molecules behave. And here’s where the problem of definition comes into play: what do we mean by “free will”? Do we simply mean that we can’t know ahead of time what someone will think, or do we mean that a person can somehow, through some unexplained magic influence the physical processes taking place in their brain?
In classical physics neither would be possible as classical physics is completely deterministic and so the future state and behavior of any given system (such as your brain, which is a complex biological neural network) should be completely predictable provided you have a complete knowledge of the current state of the system (the location and position of every particle) and the laws of physics that govern it.
However classical physics is only an approximation that does not accurately describe the behavior of reality at the smallest scales. In reality the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles is governed by quantum physics which is non-deterministic. This means that the behavior of a given system is to some extent stochastic (i.e. it contains an element of randomness). Further, the exact state of a quantum system can never be known due to a fundamental uncertainty limit (Heisenberg).
All that this tells us is that it is impossible to predict the behavior of a complex system such as the brain with complete accuracy and certainty (though quantum randomness usually tends to average out on a macro scale, hence why in practice macroscopic reality is mostly deterministic, but this is beside the point). If you wish to call this unpredictability “free will” then that is certainly a definition you are free to adopt. However you do not have “free will” in the traditional, metaphysical sense since you have absolutely no control or influence over the way the “dice roll” of quantum randomness lands (unless you believe in some supernatural force that is capable of bending the laws of physics).
Thank you for this elaborate and knowledgeable answer, it is better than most pop science articles on the internet, and I will study it deeper.
I’m not as educated on the subject as you seem to be, but I think I fall in the determinism camp as well. Can I ask how it impacts how you live your life? For me I think I mostly just ignore it/live as if I did have free will
Just to be clear, i am not in the strict determinism camp, i believe our current understanding of physics says that there is an inherent element of randomness to reality, but it’s a randomness that we have absolutely no control over hence why it can’t be called free will.
It doesn’t impact my life at all. It’s a purely academic discussion with no practical application. For all intents and purposes it is impossible to live without the illusion of free will. And we also need to pretend that others have free will too else we can’t have a society.
Yeah I agree with that. I may have used the wrong term. It doesn’t impact my life either. But for some reason that doesn’t feel like a satisfying answer so I wanted to ask to see if anyone thinks about it differently
As I said, great answer, but I have still two concerns:
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Even if in the subatomic level we have an element of randomness (is it a scientific consensus now?, please excuse my ignorance), then such random behaviour average out and presents at macroscopic level as deterministic, as you said, and as analogy to the temperature in thermodynamics. And I suppose our brains work at this macroscopic level, so randomness can be negligible in my view.
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I have strong conjecture that human views are shaped by empirical observations and experience, what can be seen by the efficiency of propaganda and commercials, so I think this supports the claim that human choices, at least for majority of people, are not actually product of their free choice.
Besides, your point on definition of free will is very important, since earlier I made no distinction and I think by the free will I understood the traditional, religious definition.
On point 1: Yes it is the scientific consensus that quantum physics correctly describes reality at the atomic and subatomic scale, and this includes probabilistic (random) outcomes for quantum interactions. Whether or not we will discover in the future that the seeming randomness is actually not true randomness but the result of even more fundamental physics which we have not discovered yet (kind of how computers can generate pseudo-random numbers by applying sufficiently chaotic but ultimately deterministic mathematical algorithms) remains to be seen.
Yes the vast majority of quantum randomness averages out at the macroscopic scale, in fact you even see this demonstrated mathematically when you take a college physics course: you learn how to derive classical mechanics from quantum mechanics by a process of statistical averaging. That being said we know there exist systems which exhibit chaotic behavior, meaning they are more sensitive to very slight changes in initial conditions which can create “unpredictable” outcomes (i.e. not easily expressed in simple mathematical equations, though they can still be computed through numerical simulation methods).
Whether our brains are such systems in which microscopic randomness could snowball all the way into macroscopic changes is not yet clear, so we have to assume that there may exist at least a small non-deterministic element to our thoughts, though this may or may not be negligible in practice. As i said, we just don’t know. But it doesn’t change anything with respect to the debate about free will. This doesn’t mean that we will ever be able to completely predict human thought/behavior in practice, as i illustrated above with the example of computer generated pseudo-random numbers, even deterministic systems can still exhibit “unpredictability”, pseudo-randomness.
On point 2: I completely agree with you here. It is clear that much if not most of human behavior is the result of the influence of external stimuli. Our reactions to certain circumstances are strongly shaped by our past experiences, going all the way back to our infancy. Our environment has such a strong influence it can physically form new pathways in our brain’s neural network. This is not controversial or speculative, this is pretty much established science. And yes we can be very easily manipulated by those who understand human psychology, which is why it is essential for us as Marxists to do our best to understand it too. This is a much more worthwhile way to spend our time than engaging in pointless, borderline metaphysical speculation and endless academic debates about “free will”.
If it was up to me i would make every Marxist take a course in marketing psychology to learn just how people are manipulated because there is very little practical difference between advertising and political propaganda.
Whether our brains are such systems in which microscopic randomness could snowball all the way into macroscopic changes is not yet clear, so we have to assume that there may exist at least a small non-deterministic element to our thoughts, though this may or may not be negligible in practice.
As you said, we do not know, but I have a strong suspicion that our brains could not work effectively, if processes in them would be very sensitive to some initial conditions or external factors, i.e. chaotic. As Stanisław Lem wrote in Summa Technologiae, I suspect that the more complex system, the more it needs to be regulated and homeostated, the less freedom should be allowed for components of the system (a nasty view for free market advocates ;)).
And yes we can be very easily manipulated by those who understand human psychology, which is why it is essential for us as Marxists to do our best to understand it too. This is a much more worthwhile way to spend our time than engaging in pointless, borderline metaphysical speculation and endless academic debates about “free will”.
Yes Comrade, I got your allusion :) But this is so fundamental question that it is hard to not seek for the answer, even if it is doomed to failure or ill-stated. And it is not purely an academic concern, it has such practical consequences as artificial intelligence.
That’s an interesting point about more complex systems needing to be more regulated, i think i agree.
As for artificial intelligence, i think we’re still a very long way off from the point when we need to worry about whether they have anything that looks like free will. All that current “AI” is (if you can even call it that), are systems that are fed massive amounts of data and just learn to regurgitate it in ways that imitate the form of the inputs. There is very little actual intelligence there, and what there is has been programmed in by humans. It has a lot of practical applications for sure but i think philosophically it’s not very interesting yet.
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Yes.
Our universe had two seemingly contradictory properties: determinism and probability.
Determinism states that if I put a cat in a box, fill it with poison gas, and wait 30 minutes, it will die. Probability says that if I put the same cat in a box with a radioactive isotope that has a 50% chance of decaying in 30 minutes, which triggers a sensor that releases the gas if it detects decay, then after 30 minutes the cat has a 50/50 chance of being alive or dead and I have no way of actually knowing until I open the box.
With determinism, we can always predict the next step in the chain, but with probability we can only predict the likelihood of an event happening, but we don’t know the outcome until we actually observe it.
If we lived in a universe with only determinism, there would be an unbroken chain of cause and effect and our actions would all be preordained. If we lived in a universe with only probability, then our actions would be arbitrary because we would never be able to predict their outcome.
However, we live in a universe where our actions have predictable consequences, but there are also things happening we can’t predict. This means our actions are both meaningful but not fixed. Therefore, we have free will.
I am unclear what exactly your definition of free will is here. You correctly point out that reality functions according to a mix of deterministic and probabilistic laws but where exactly is the “free will”?
What I mean is this: picture reality as a board game. This game has strict rules determining how the pieces must be moved depending on where on the board they are currently at. Additionally, sometimes the rules call for rolling some dice, after which the move is altered depending on the result of said dice roll. Crucially however, there is no player input required, no decisions to be made. The game plays itself. The outcome of the game is dictated solely by a combination of deterministic rules and random dice rolls. How do we fit in “free will” in a game that has no players?
Sorry, I should clarify:
We as humans experience consciousness and ascribe agency (“free will”) to our actions. Determinists generally charge that free will is an illusion because every action is a reaction to something else: in other words, if we had complete knowledge, we would not be able to predict our actions.
As stated by Jeffrey Goines in the movie 12 Monkeys, “Using that model they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, 10 years. Which they then filtered through a probability matrix of some kind to - to determine everything I was gonna do in that period. So you see, she knew I was gonna lead the Army of the Twelve Monkeys into the pages of history before it ever even occurred to me. She knows everything I’m ever gonna do before I know it myself.” The character believed that all his thoughts were determined, and a sufficiently advanced computer could predict his future decisions with high accuracy.
However, we know from chaos theory in mathematics that small changes in initial conditions can have widely divergent and unpredictable effects in complex systems. To use the 12 Monkeys system above, even sedating the character to run the theoretical algorithm he postulated may have changed the man’s experiences enough such that the algorithm is ultimately wrong very shortly after it’s generated, and over time it will rapidly drift further away so that Jeffrey’s life in 10 years would look nothing like the machine predicted. And this is just one person: multiply this across billions of people, and you have a system that is fundamentally unpredictable, even with a theoretically limitless AI taking readings and running simulations.
So we as humans experience our decisions as real things, and when we make decisions we have real effects on the world, and we know from our observations of the universe that it is impossible to fully predict our future decisions from past circumstances. That means that we as agents are really experiencing real choices with real impacts on the world that are not fixed, and thus our choices are free.
Whether or not it is practically possible to predict our actions doesn’t have any bearing on the question of free will. Neither does how we subjectively experience our decisions. Unless you redefine free will to mean something different and much lesser than most people understand it to mean. Which is why i asked how you define free will. If your definition of “free will” is simply that our actions are not predictable then dice have free will too. If you say that free will is simply having the impression that our choices are free then this is no longer a scientific debate but one about how we subjectively experience reality, which is certainly an interesting discussion but not what OP was asking.
Chaos theory is also in no way relevant here. Chaotic systems exist in classical physics too (two famous examples taught to every physics student are the double pendulum and the three body problem - do these have free will?) but classical physics is nevertheless deterministic.
The reason why chaotic systems are hard to predict far into the future is because we never have complete and perfect knowledge about the starting state. If we did and if we could run a simulation with arbitrarily high precision then we could in fact predict any classical system no matter how chaotic or complex.
The fact that this is not possible in practice is beside the point. A system is considered to be deterministic if it would be predictable given complete information and infinite computational power. It does not mean this has to be practically possible with any existing or even any possible future technology.
The definition of free will I use is the philosophical one from disctionart.com:
the doctrine that the conduct of human beings expresses personal choice and is not simply determined by physical or divine forces.
The argument against free will typically rests on the claim that human choices are determined. But if the universe has non-deterministic elements and small changes in conditions can have large changes in outcomes, then both of these together make human choice non-determined.
The analogy to dice fails because dice are not human decision makers.
We can’t have perfect knowledge of classical systems because those systems are built on top of a quantum system that has elements that are entirely probabilistic. Chaos theory is relevant for the very reason that they make systems impossible to predict. Again, going back to Schrödinger’s cat: we don’t know if it’s alive or dead until we open the box. The sensor is based on quantum mechanics, the cat and the gas are macro elements, but we can’t just ignore it because the decay does not fit with classical physics. It’s already been proven via the Uncertainty Principle that our knowledge can never be fully complete, so we would never be able to run such a simulation as you suggest.
Ultimately, the burden of proof is on those claiming that all choice is determined to show it, but considering the universe does not constrain choice to be 100% deterministic, there is no real reason to suspect it exists.
The analogy with the dice is precisely correct because all systems can be reduced down to their individual parts. Humans can be reduced to atoms, electrons, etc. Those particles are all governed by the laws of physics, not by human choice. Whether their behavior is deterministic or stochastic is irrelevant, we still have zero control over how the particles which make up our brain behave. And yes, quantum interactions have probabilistic outcomes and are thus non-deterministic. I repeat: the ability or inability to predict our actions is not sufficient to determine whether we have free will or not. This is also why quantum uncertainty plays no role at all in this. It would only play a role if non-predictability was the sole defining feature of “free will”. But free will as it is traditionally defined implies more than that, it implies a conscious choice. Saying that we have free will because quantum randomness exists implies that we can control how the “dice” of quantum randomness fall, and there simply is no evidence for that. It is in fact the position which claims that this physics-defying so-called “free will” exists which requires proof. Where in the chain of causality from subatomic quantum interactions to the actions taken by a human does the “free will” come in and how? Which particle is compelled by human will to behave differently than it would if it were only subject to the laws of physics (no matter whether the laws are deterministic or probabilistic)?
The reason i asked for a definition is because you can only argue that free will exists if you remove the element of choice/control and reduce it solely to a problem of predictability. That is not the definition you cited however. In your definition free will is “when the conduct of human beings […] is not simply determined by physical […] forces”. But you acknowledge that human behavior is the result of the behavior of the components which make up a human, and you also acknowledge that those components are subject to the laws of physics, therefore human behavior is determined by the laws of physics. The confusion stems from conflating this with determinism. A system does not need to be deterministic for its behavior to be “determined” (a better word to use here would be “governed” in order to avoid conflation with determinism) by the laws of physics.
The crux of your reply appears to rely on your claim that “all systems can be reduced down to their individual parts.” Before we continue, am I correct that you are in essence stating that emergence does not exist?
Depends what you mean by emergence. I believe systems can exhibit emergent properties but those properties are ultimately still just a statistical result of the myriad complex interactions between their individual parts. I don’t believe that somehow new physics magically appears simply because you add more particles and make a system more complex (if you believe otherwise then i would like to know where exactly the point is at which this magic occurs, where is the threshold such that X+1 particles behave in a radically different way than they behaved when there were just X of them and that is not explainable by the rules which govern the individual parts?). All macroscopic behavior is derived from the microscopic scale; to believe otherwise is to believe in magic. Whether or not we can actually perform this derivation in practice is irrelevant, analogous to how not being able to write down a closed form solution for an integral does not mean that it does not have a solution, it’s just that sometimes we need to apply methods of approximational computation instead.
That being said i still don’t see what this has to do with free will. Where exactly does the human input come in? Where is the choice? Are you claiming that it is an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems such as brains that they can choose the way that their physics works? That given possible outcomes A or B for random quantum interactions of their component particles they can choose at will which will happen such that the effect of this choice propagates into the macroscopic system and changes the actual human behavior? And do they do this in a way that is so sneaky and smart that we are still not able to distinguish between choice and randomness if we were ever to make a statistical analysis of all the random quantum outcomes? Because normally when choice gets imposed on something that was supposed to be random this alters the observed probability distribution when we do the tally at the end, it’s why we can tell when people are cheating at games of pure chance. So how exactly are we cheating the laws of physics and the randomness of quantum interactions such that we impose our will on them?
I don’t know, this whole notion of “free will as emergent behavior” sounds too much like magic to me. It seems to be something that is by definition unexplainable, that defies the laws of physics and simply appears out of nowhere and that cannot ever be proven to exist by any amount of careful scientific examination because it is so shrewd as to disguise itself as though it was never there if we were ever to look closely to try and find traces of it at the most fundamental level of reality. Awfully convenient… and basically the same as any other metaphysical belief.
I think this is a very reasonable proof, aligned with current state of science and materialism.
I think association between free will and probability comes back to Rene Descartes, who said that if we are perfectly deterministic, then we have no more free will than falling rock. But many his views are outdated and in stark contrast to materialists, so I write this comment only for some historical context.
As was said, systems complicated enough may appear to us as non-deterministic, even if they are deterministic. But there is another possibility: we could have uncertain knowledge about some process. The process can be perfectly deterministic, but since our knowledge is imperfect, we may perceive this process as non-deterministic.
The fact that we cannot predict something does not imply that we have a free will, probably by any definition.
Your OP was about questioning free will on the basis of prediction. Without prediction, what is the basis for your OP?
As far as I remember, I meant that scientist are able to predict response by observation of brain process, almost surely, not by simulation of a process of a brain. Some brain activity were supposed to tell that the patient will select precisely this switch
Free will exists because of chaos.
What do you mean by chaos?
So determinism is a linear function right? Take the past conditions and you can predict the future. To a certain extent. Like weather predictions- we see determinism in fluid dynamical systems and can say based on these conditions tomorrow will probably be cloudy or something, but because we can’t go waaaaay back to the initial conditions of the system to as infinite degree, we can’t predict what’s going to happen that far ahead. I think our free will is similar. There is such complexity that things go to infinity or zero. Within that infinity we have patterns, we have nodes where things have a tendency to happen in an orderly manner - the Nietzsche concept of the eternal recurrence or Joseph Campbels perinealities, and then we have chaos that is totally baked into the system. That’s why I think we are free. Of course we are also determined! But not infinitely determined. We have infinite length in a finite area.
My conjucture is that something is deterministic or not, nothing in between. And as was mentioned above, determinism may be not unique or not at all factor in the discussion about the free will.
I don’t think this is a very good answer, i think this will just confuse OP more than help.
