Bill's Big Stuff

The following article appeared in Tech Central Station, December 13, 2004. I have posted a couple of times on this topic, the second time more validly than the first. This particular article strikes me as a piece of garbage, glib sophistry trying to pass as philosophy. The comments it drew at TCS were definitely against the position he took, but I found them to be about as badly flawed as the original article in different ways. I have really two threads of criticism of the article. The first is stylistic—he has the tone of a huckster or con-man, not a professor. He talks down to his audience, making the insignificant important and the important insignificant in order to slide it past our examination. The second is, he is plain wrong about some things. The title is misleading, since he asks if we are free then discusses Free Will. The two are not the same.

Are You Free?

By Max Borders Published 12/13/2004

This article is the outgrowth of a debate on objective morality between Ed Hudgins of the Objectivist Center and me, which took place at George Mason University Law School. During our debate, we touched on the question of Free Will. Followers of Ayn Rand -- indeed most folks -- believe we have Free Will. I, however, am not so sure. "Am I free?" you may ask. First, the bad news: no, you're not.

What you call making choices or exercising your Free Will is an illusion. I realize this seems highly counterintuitive, even absurd to suggest. But the following considerations may convince you that
you are not, indeed, free.

He is making the stand that what we believe to be free-will is an illusion and that we are not free. Right off we have a problem in that being free and having free will are not equivalent. To be free is to be able to act. To have free will is to be able to make choices. I may have free will in the sense of seeing choices that I might make and yet being constrained in my actions by my environment. I can make a choice now that may not be implemented until it is no longer constrained. I in effect make a secondary choice not to attempt the execution now, but rather later. It is also possible that I have no constraints, but am aware of no choices. Does that mean that I have no free will to make choices simply because they are not apparent? Free will is a permanent property of ones existence. To be free can be quite transitory or can be prolonged, but is a consequence of circumstance, not a property of the individual.

First, we must agree that your body (and brain) is made up entirely of physical atoms and molecules. In other words, there is no supernatural essence like a "spirit" that animates your physical
body. If we cannot agree on this, the rest of this article is moot.

This is pompous junk. Apparently he thinks that a valid argument against determinism can be made using some sort of non-physical “spirit” or essence. Even if one does try to postulate such an entity, it falls apart as an argument very quickly in the pits of Cartesian dualism—how does the immaterial soul control the material body? Actually the paragraph reminds me of the magician that is busy showing you that nothing is up his sleeve—he is going to be a hard-core physicalist here.

Now, all of those atoms that make up your body are subject to certain regularities we might call the laws of nature. These are the same sorts of regularities that are exhibited when you pick up an
object and it falls after you let go (as you would reasonably expect it to). Or, if you were to push your hand against your coffee cup, you would expect it to move along your desktop. We think similar "nomic" or law-like regularities apply to human beings, as we are a part of the universe by virtue of being physical in our makeup. Another way of talking about all of this is the familiar language of "cause and effect."

Here is the start of the con. With all the verbiage, he is disguising that he is making the assumption of the first premise of his argument, that human bodies are subject to the laws of nature. Rather than stating it, he is oozing into it, hoping we will go along because it all seems reasonable.

There are no causeless effects, it seems -- at least at the macro-level we live in from day to day. Chairs don't fly up into the air and coffee cups don't move across desktops unless some force acts upon them -- "causing" them to move.

The first five words here assume the rest of the argument. What he is planning to do is make everything an effect and thus make it have a cause. But as we shall see, he will equate causes as being absolute determinants of the resulting effects. This statement is so sweepingly broad that it fails to allow for the partially determined events or non-determined events.

So, our bodies and brains are subject to causal laws, as well. Even though the myriad cause-and-effect chains happening in the human body are extremely complex, it is not possible for us to break these causal laws just because we're human. The same can be said for apes, cats, chickens, bugs and bacteria, as all are creatures that belong to the causal-physical world.

This is an attempt to persuade without logic. He has already said humans are subject to cause and effect above. Why he chose to include all the other species is a mystery to me. They are never part of a discussion of free will. Is it an attempt to persuade by making all “God’s creatures” subject to cause and effect? I also love the term “causal-physical”. It implies three other terms, non-causal-physical, causal-non-physical, and non-causal-non-physical. Do the rules change in the other three worlds?

Another way to define causation is to say: everything that happens is a result of some antecedent event. That means every single thing that happens in our bodies, from neuronal firing to DNA replication,is an event that is caused. If we were to extend these processes backwards in time, we would find these same regularities hold, otherwise the universe would have turned out to be a place of complete disorder and we would never have evolved.

Hold on to your wallets, here is the “touch”. By invoking an antecedent event for everything that happens and then saying it is caused, he is implying, but not saying, that there is no non-determinism, that absolute determinism is true, and that there are no optional events. If you accept his argument this far, the rest is a cake-walk for him.

Here's the problem. In our everyday language, we say we "choose" tea over coffee, or we "make a decision" to turn left or right. But since all of our so-called decisions take place in our physical
brains, we are confronted with a very deep problem. When we say we make a choice, aren't we committing ourselves to what I call "self-starter theory?"

We do say we choose, and the decision does take place in our physical brains, but he fails to show the deep problem. Instead he invents a theory that supposedly commits us to “causeless” effects. He doesn’t even have the courtesy to attempt to point out the logic of his argument, that physical brains have every firing of every neuron caused by antecedent events, and therefore any “choice” that comes from such firings must therefore be determined. If the argument is stated that clearly, it is then refutable by a consideration of both neurophysiology and of the nature of cause and effect itself.

Self-starter theory violates everything we intuitively know about cause and effect. That is to say, such a theory commits us to causeless effects. If causeless effects were the norm in the universe we live in, it would be a very strange universe, indeed. Chairs would slide around without any force acting upon them. Coffee cups might float to the ceiling. Gravity might appear to switch on and off at random. But when we say that we have Free Will, we are committing ourselves to the existence of such a strange universe. We are saying that we are somehow able to step outside the causal nature of things -- and the atoms that make up our brain and body simply self-direct, i.e. "self-start." And that's just crazy.

This whole paragraph is nothing but an ad hominum argument, of the fallacious kind. Notice he describes a ridiculous universe and then says, without proof or demonstration, that Free Will implies it. He is unwilling to consider that despite the laws of nature that they may not be absolutely deterministic. I haven’t shown why yet, either.

"Ah ha, Max!" you might be thinking. "I don't have to commit to a self-starter universe, because I have read my Heisenberg (particle physics). I know that at the micro-level, things exhibit very strange properties. In fact, the particles' behaviors aren't deterministic, but probabilistic. For example, there may be a 60 percent chance that a photon will curve to the left, and a 40 percent chance it will curve to the right -- if, say, fired from a particle accelerator."

This is a straw man. He is using an epistemic issue to deal with a more fundamental metaphysical issue. He of course did this so he can demolish it in the next couple of paragraphs. One of the things I avoided in my earlier discussions of free will was the use of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (HUP) to argue for free will. Even if HUP were a metaphysical truth, it is non-deterministic, and not necessarily allowing for free will. A lack of determinism does not necessarily admit the existence of Free Will.

The idea behind this tale of micro-probabilities is that the universe may have a different set of causal laws at the level of the very small. Let us, for the moment, set aside the idea that this may
be an issue of our observational limitations and not differing causal-physical laws. Even if the universe were probabilistic at the subatomic level (and that very same subatomic universe were able to exert itself all the way up to the level of people making their so-called "choices"), it would still be very strange to claim that people have Free Will.

Why? I call this the roulette wheel theory of human action. How is it that we have choice, if our choices are the result of probabilities not unlike heads or tails on a nickel? That's not free at all. That would be like claiming that, when asked to choose between tea and coffee, you flipped a coin and assigned heads with
tea and tails with coffee. The only difference is that "the coin," as it were, would be inside your head. Again, how is that free?

So, we're back to the drawing board.

As I stated above, since he created this straw man to demolish it, he has done so.

"But Max," the astute reader might ask, "haven't you ever heard of Schroedinger's Cat?" The notion is that in many of the cases where micro-particles are observed, observation itself seems to determine the outcome of the probability. It often seems the case that if we look for -- say, the photon -- to curve left, it goes left. Likewise, if we look right, it curves right. But until we make the observation, the probability stays 50/50. Observation, in some sense, "breaks" the probability limbo (ex poste facto we're at 100 percent, i.e. it happened). If this is the metaphysical reality at the micro-level, couldn't we say that human subjectivity -- i.e. experiential awareness and introspection -- is the observational component that breaks the subatomic probability limbo within our brains?

At this point he departs completely from any correspondence with reality. The idea of subatomic phenomena holding all the way to the macro level or that subjective experience operates in an analogous manner is patently ridiculous. I want to discuss this below. However, for Max it is useful in that it allows him to banish it as if it were a valid argument.

This approach forces us between the horns of a very strange dilemma: commitment to supernatural spirits on one hand, or to what I call a "matryoshka homunculus of infinite regress" on the other. In the first instance, subjectivity of experience is conceived of as a soul or non-physical essence, which somehow causally exerts itself in the physical world. This is rife with problems of Cartesian Dualism in the philosophy of mind, which we will dismiss here as mere metaphysical spookies.

I don’t think these are the only two ways to look at this. I don’t even see the logic that gets to the supernatural. However, once he gets there he can dismiss it as “spookies”. I really like the new term he introduces, "matryoshka homunculus of infinite regress". The next two paragraphs then dismiss it as well. But then its purpose is to be dismissed.

On the second horn, however, we have to take seriously the notion that mind and body are intimately connected, and that our experience isn't something spooky. More specifically, in order to be materialists, we have to believe that human subjectivity depends for its existence on the causal-physical goings on in the brain (e.g. why depressed people feel better when they take Prozac). Enter the
matryoshka homunculus of infinite regress.

If observation breaks the probability limbo between two "choices," whatever it is that is doing the observing must be a physical thing -- like a homunculus sitting above our brains and breaking
probabilities limbos for our choices. But since that homunculus is also a physical thing subject to causal laws, it too must "choose" whether to observe one option or the other in order to break the
probability. Since that probability limbo needs to be broken, we must postulate another observer, i.e. a homunculus, to break the probability. Each homunculus is nested within the next (like a matryoshka) ad infinitum. Now you can see the regress. And of course, this is an absurd result.

Yeah, Zeno composed a similar paradox about the race between Achilles and the Tortoise. It has to do with the way it is posited in the first place.

So what do we do?

Why don’t we do some decent metaphysics?

It seems our subjective states force us into the illusion that we are making choices. The unitary nature of consciousness is set up so that, whatever causal track we're riding on, it darn well seems like we're actually in control. But what if we really aren't? If we really aren't in control, how are we to be considered responsible for anything we do?

This is the payoff for all determinists, a moral free-pass.

I'd say we simply have to live in the illusion. We get on with life as if we had Free Will. Many political forms don't depend too much on a presumption of Free Will for their power. But even if they do, we do a pretty good job of living without the idea that everything is somehow predetermined. Political freedom is still good for us. Maybe it was even preordained that I fight for it. And since there
is no way to function outside of the illusion, I may as well get on with life. Besides, it's fun to pick on Ayn Rand for her "axioms." (Sorry. I had no choice, Ayn.)

Let’s see, an illusion that we have Free Will by which we live as if it were reality. Seems pretty close to a definition of insanity.

(Note: here is a decent discussion of Free Will by the blogger on Fly Bottle.)

I checked out this discussion and it is basically a subjective statement that free will is my perception of having choices. Not very helpful in the metaphysical sense, but it doesn’t contradict his statements. In fact a significant portion of the material he uses came from that post.

The author is Program Director, The Institute for Humane Studies.

There are two areas that this whole argument fails on, infinite regress of causes, and mechanisms of neural action.

In the case of infinite regress of causes, as one pushes further and further back into the past to determine the causal lineage, the allowable range of behavior of an antecedent cause becomes smaller and smaller, because any slight deviation will cause cascading deviations in effects. At some point the allowable deviations are smaller than the components from which the cause is made, e.g, smaller than subatomic particles. Additionally, if one looks at the history of the universe as currently proposed, things started out simpler and got more complex. In effect, Max’s despised “self-starter theory” can be considered true, where the condensation of energy to atoms created greater complexity and the condensation of atoms to dust clouds, galaxies, stars, etc. created even greater complexity. Additionally, the rules by which such condensations occur, as currently known, cannot predict or determine the structures we see today. In effect, the universe is non-deterministic. This of itself does not create an argument for free will, but it definitely destroys his argument for determinism.

Neural action is far more complex than Max allows for. Nerves are most interesting summation devices, anything short of not enough stimulus from other nerves or sensation, and the nerve does not fire. Anything more than just enough doesn’t count. Information is lost in both ways. In the first it is discarded, and in the second ignored. The rules by which nerves fire are definitely deterministic, but the outputs are non-deterministic. If one were to attempt to make the firing of nerves deterministic not only would there have to be the ability to define in principle every input and sequence of inputs but also consider that many nerves are inhibitory to other nerves and even in some cases themselves. There are both positive and negative feedback loops in neural structures, and many of the areas of the brain work independently of each other and the results are gathered for output continuously. The notion of Free Will can arise in such an environment, because the brain is a self-controlling structure. The outputs, that we call consciousness, can and do, modify, directly and indirectly, the inputs and outputs for other brain processes.

For those interested in my other two posts in this area here are the links (earlier, more recent).

Post Script: I have been deliberately as hard as I can be in this post. Part of it is because I used to engage in the same pseudo-intellectual crap, and recognize it for what it is—pretentiousness. Another part of it is because I don’t believe one should let something this bad go unchallenged. Stuff like this has been given a free pass for too long. Sure there is a lot of it out there, but it doesn’t take much challenge to cause major retreats to silence or smears, both of which reveal the emptiness of the original positions.

Labels: determinism, free will, philosophy