Two Types of Free Will, part 3

As my previous post argued, the position that free will is somehow essentially true in a naive sense suffers from the problem highlighted in this Dilbert cartoon. It is an incoherent and meaningless way of talking about free will. However, it seems obvious (to me, at least) that there is some sort of free will at play. Otherwise, why would we even have such a concept? If we were mere automata carrying out our inherent programming, why would be have any reason to think about such a thing as free will? Hence, there is free will in some sense, or what I defined as phenomenological free will.

The description of phenomenological free will I gave in my first post on the subject relied heavily on the concept of consciousness, and I think it is exactly consciousness that makes free will a valid concept. As I will go to some length to describe in a future post, consciousness is the self-reflective model of the world we use to predict the future, including the future of our own mental states. It is also the tool by which we invent a narrative for the events that go on around us, sometimes referred to as confabulation. We instantly and instinctively come up with stories about our actions, thoughts, motivations and surrounding, often with absolutely no relation to truth or reality. Many cognitive fallacies are driven by the storytelling ability, such as the fundamental attribution error. We prefer reasons to be narrative than empirical. We need to know why things happen, not just that they do, even (especially?) if the why doesn't exist or is completely made up.

This exact ability applies as much to ourselves as to other people or objects. We come home from a long day at work and yell at our significant other over some petty transgression, and rationalize it by saying that they were annoying and we were tired and it's not our fault anyway. Every non-philosopher has said to themselves that they never intended to yell, and apologized afterwards. However, I contend that that impulse to deny volition isn't a mere face-saving exercise, but is rather precisely correct. We yelled completely automatically, because that is what our brain decided was the correct behavioural response to the situation. Our confabulation ability, however, even as it watched us yelling, was coming up with retroactive reasons to start yelling, and since we became consciously aware of yelling at the same time as we became conscious of our confabulation (since the confabulation is, in a very important sense, our consciousness) we go on to believe that we chose to yell of our own free will.

If we were less tired when we came home from work, our conscious mind might have been quick enough to notice that we were getting ready to yell, and would have stopped us doing so. That, it seems,  is another function of consciousness (although, of course, not exclusively of consciousness). Consciousness allows us — if we have time — to stop an action we notice we are about to start. When you reach for a hot skillet while cooking, you don't stop reaching (and thereby prevent burning your hand) until you actually look over and become aware of what you are about to do. Most telling of all, sometimes your don't stop reaching! You helplessly watch yourself proceed to grasp the burning hot skillet and burn your hand! Where is your free will then? This is a case of your brain going about the work it knows it needs to do, completely outside your conscious control, and your consciousness not working fast enough to stop it making a grave (and painful) mistake.

I won't delve into what "we" and "chose" refer to in the above paragraph (as those are both profound questions in their own right), but on the assumption that whatever it is that we refer to when we say "I" is a subset of the function of our brain, we can say that "we" are capable of contributing some influence on our actions, but that for the most part our brain goes about it's business completely without "us", until some sort of conscious decision needs to be made — perhaps one too complicated for our animal brain to figure out on its own. However, we should not despair! After all, "our" interests are almost always in line with that of our brain and body. So the limited, phenomenological sense in which we have free will is enough, even if it's a confabulation. For myself, I'm willing to trust my brain to take care of itself, and it's passenger, "me".

Two Types of Free Will, part 2

Previously, I set out two distinct phenomena which could be referred to as "free will". I here continue to contrast them, and attempt to show why one must be the case, while the other cannot be.

Phenomenological free will, I contend, is obvious, self-apparent, and completely, empirically true. It is very hard to find someone who will argue that they do not choose their own actions on a daily basis. It requires extremes of brain-altering drugs and abusive behavior to get someone to lose the sense that they are in control of their actions (note, however, that it is in fact possible to do so). The impression I get is that when most people hear someone argue that there is no such thing as free will, they think that the argument addresses phenomenological free will. And, of course, if this were the case, then arguing against free will would be lunacy. It's just that, as with the term "consciousness", no one bothers defining what they mean, so people end up talking at cross-purposes.

The very idea of metaphysical free will, on the other hand, suffers from incoherence in a non-magical universe. If there isn't a soul or spirit pushing and pulling the cords in our pineal glands, then where does this locus of decision reside? One cannot simply say "the brain", because the brain is a monstrously complicated system, segmented into an even more monstrously complicated collection of subsets, down to the connections between individual neurons, each portion of which considers input from sense organs, bodily nerves, and other portions of the brain. There is no "place" where a decision is made. The brain works as a whole system directing action, and conscious awareness of such decision-making is limited and after the fact.

At any level of description — physical, chemical, interneuronal, conscious — what happens in the brain is either completely random or theoretically predictable. Quantum effects do occasionally tip the scale and something weird happens, but unless you posit that that random weirdness is magically motivated, it can in no way be said to be willful. The interactions between neurons are far less random, and can be described and calculated fairly accurately, and interconnected systems of neurons can be isolated by structure and function. So, again, there is nowhere for this metaphysical decision maker to reside.

From a psychological perspective, the case is even more dire! You do what you are inclined to want to do. You take that action which the sum of your habits and motivations does in fact motivate you to take. If you chose to go running instead of eating that tub of ice cream, it's not because you are a free agent in a libertarian universe capable of making any logically possible action. Rather, your sense of guilt over not exercising recently, your motivation to look and feel better, and your desire to be healthier as you get older overcame your desire to eat delicious ice cream and feel aesthetic pleasure for a few minutes. You had these various motivations wrestling inside you, and your brain finally computed that the former motivations were more pressing than the latter, and sent the balance of these desires to conscious awareness so that you could write your "decision" to go running into your conscious narrative.

If you try to explain metaphysical free will from a psychological perspective, you get hopelessly muddled (I can't even formulate a coherent argument for such a thing in my mind), and the only fall-back I can see is on Descartian magic — souls and spirits and such.

Libertarianism (in the philosophical sense mentioned in the previous post) suffers from exactly the same problem as metaphysical free will. What would it even mean to say that the universe "could have gone a different way"? A quantum event could have had some other outcome than it did? Well, sure, in a counterfactual way. But since quantum events are truly random — that is, there is no way on principle to know which way they will come out — all you can possibly say is that it will take some value but you won't know what that value is until you actually measure it. So if there was in fact some metaphysical agent generating our wills in a libertarian universe, without magic powers its determination of a quantum outcome would happen simultaneously with its measurement of that outcome, so it would be beholden to that value no matter what. This is as bad as being beholden to a completely pre-determined outcome! It is worse, in fact, because in the quantum world you can't even make a prediction!

So, I dispose of libertarianism as hopeless. And I dispose of a metaphysical compatibilist view as meaningless at any level of analysis. Since this post is already almost twice as long as I expected it to be, I will hold off on my argument about phenomenological free will, and of my opinion on the nature of our will, until the next post.

Two Types of Free Will, part 1

I recently heard Daniel Dennett's explanation of his concept of deepity. It struck me that the concept of free will is exactly such a thing. It is a concept which is trivially true, but, in another sense, is logically ill-formed. The usual debate about free will is whether the concept of such is compatible with a deterministic (or truly random — that is, quantum) universe. Those who believe free will is compatible with a deterministic universe, and that therefore free will is "real" in some sense, are called compatibilists, while those who believe it is not, and that free will is an illusion, are called incompatibilists. The idea that the universe is not limited in this sense, but could in fact go some way other than the way it went is called libertarianism, but I more or less dismiss it out of hand as incoherent, for reasons I shall explain below.

Normally, free will is somehow taken to be a single, monolithic concept which is either true or false, and therefore is argued over. However, it struck me that there are two very different concepts of free will which no one bothers to distinguish (as far as I have seen). These I call phenomenological free will and metaphysical free will. Let us take them in turn.

Phenomenological free will is what we experience whenever we are awake and aware. It is the feeling of making choices, which is obvious and inescapable whenever we experience usual brain function, not under the influence of hypnosis, drugs or derangement of some sort. It is the conscious mind's narration of the things it sees us doing (we are consciously aware of our actions about 500 milliseconds after our brain initiates them). A large function of consciousness, it seems, is to inhibit actions it realizes aren't desirable, but it does not initiate them. Regardless, as far as one can tell (and in as far as there is a real "I" there to do the telling), we choose our actions and build our identities around those choices.

Metaphysical free will is what I call the idea of making "real" choices. That is, it is what explores the world of counterfactuals relative to what we did indeed choose, and decides that, had it wanted to, it could have selected one of those other choices. Alternately, it can be seen as that device which looks at the current state of the world, and picks what future actions would be most beneficial or desirable for the actor. It is, however, never forced to make any particular choice — it could make some wild, unmotivated flight of fancy at any moment (or at least, that must be a serious possibility in order for this style of free will to be worth considering). It is somehow independent of forces in this world, even if the actor himself isn't.

These two types of free will are very different to each other. One is a fact of experience and perception (hence, phenomenological), while the other makes a claim about the very nature of our minds, about what is true of the universe. I will contrast these two views in my next post, and show why one of these must be the case, while the other cannot be.