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?
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 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 the answer I was looking for. Thank you Comrade. You elaborated so much reply, that it could be already a philosophy paper 😁 BTW your nick and knowledge of statistics suggests that you are a statistician :)
I am not a statistician, but i did take statistics courses when i got my physics degree. Can’t say it was my favorite subject but it also wasn’t the worst.
I mean emergent properties, of course. Life itself is an emergent property, as are locomotion, consciousness, thought, emotions, etc.
A rock that falls from a cliff will have a final position, velocity, and duration of fall easily predicted by kinematics. A bird that flies off a cliff does not, nor is it following a gravitational orbit, electron orbit and spin, or any other of the types of motion we’d expect from nonliving things.
If someone were here arguing that bird flight is an illusion because inanimate objects and the constituent atoms that make them up don’t behave that way, we’d think they’re nuts. Obviously bird flight still follows the laws of physics and is not magical, but it’s also certainly not exactly the same as a rock falling.
Likewise, human neurological activity does not violate the laws of physics and it’s not magical, and I never said otherwise. But human thoughts also are not dice, much like birds aren’t rocks.
A valid proof in logic is to say that there exists an exception to a universal rule. I gave a definition if free will above that says that free will is decision making not determined by physical forces. If our universal rule is that everything is determined, then simply showing at least one exception exists (example: probability) shows that it’s not universally true that all things are determined.
That alone should suffice to show there is no evidence that human thought is 100% constrained by determinism, but there was also the claim that complete knowledge of the system would show that human thought is determined. However, we already know the inherent uncertainty of getting complete knowledge at the quantum scale (via the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,) that probabilistic micro events can have macro effects on the world (via Schrödinger’s cat,) and that small changes in initial conditions can have unpredictable results via chaos theory. So even if we had a supercomputer that we thought had complete knowledge, we know from physics that there is still the possibility of an unobserved quantum event causing macro changes resulting in something the machine didn’t predict. This makes the claim that we could ever predict all of human thought entirely inscrutable.
In short, there is a lack of evidence that free will is an illusion, and claims that we could disprove free will with more knowledge are inscrutable. Without further evidence, the best we can say is that free will is an apparent property of human thought, and trying to call it something else is just semantics at this point.
Suppose that human decision is in some amount random, by any cause. How this proves that human makes free choice, not determined by laws of physics?
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.