Determined, page 2
As such, the first half of the book’s point is to rely on this biological framework in rejecting free will. Which brings us to the second half of the book. As noted, I haven’t believed in free will since adolescence, and it’s been a moral imperative for me to view humans without judgment or the belief that anyone deserves anything special, to live without a capacity for hatred or entitlement. And I just can’t do it. Sure, sometimes I can sort of get there, but it is rare that my immediate response to events aligns with what I think is the only acceptable way to understand human behavior; instead, I usually fail dismally.
As I said, even I think it’s crazy to take seriously all the implications of there being no free will. And despite that, the goal of the second half of the book is to do precisely that, both individually and societally. Some chapters consider scientific insights about how we might go about dispensing with free-will belief. Others examine how some of the implications of rejecting free will are not disastrous, despite initially seeming that way. Some review historical circumstances that demonstrate something crucial about the radical changes we’d need to make in our thinking and feeling: we’ve done it before.
The book’s intentionally ambiguous title reflects these two halves—it is both about the science of why there is no free will and the science of how we might best live once we accept that.
Styles of Views: Whom I Will Be Disagreeing With
I’m going to be discussing some of the common attitudes held by people writing about free will. These come in four basic flavors:[*]
The world is deterministic and there’s no free will. In this view, if the former is the case, the latter has to be as well; determinism and free will are not compatible. I am coming from this perspective of “hard incompatibilism.”[*]
The world is deterministic and there is free will. These folks are emphatic that the world is made of stuff like atoms, and life, in the elegant words of psychologist Roy Baumeister (currently at the University of Queensland in Australia), “is based on the immutability and relentlessness of the laws of nature.”[5] No magic or fairy dust involved, no substance dualism, the view where brain and mind are separate entities.[*] Instead, this deterministic world is viewed as compatible with free will. This is roughly 90 percent of philosophers and legal scholars, and the book will most often be taking on these “compatibilists.”
The world is not deterministic; there’s no free will. This is an oddball view that everything important in the world runs on randomness, a supposed basis of free will. We’ll get to this in chapters 9 and 10.
The world is not deterministic; there is free will. These are folks who believe, like I do, that a deterministic world is not compatible with free will—however, no problem, the world isn’t deterministic in their view, opening a door for free-will belief. These “libertarian incompatibilists” are a rarity, and I’ll only occasionally touch on their views.
There’s a related quartet of views concerning the relationship between free will and moral responsibility. The last word obviously carries a lot of baggage with it, and the sense in which it is used by people debating free will typically calls forth the concept of basic desert, where someone can deserve to be treated in a particular way, where the world is a morally acceptable place in its recognition that one person can deserve a particular reward, another a particular punishment. As such, these views are:
There’s no free will, and thus holding people morally responsible for their actions is wrong. Where I sit. (And as will be covered in chapter 14, this is completely separate from forward-looking issues of punishment for deterrent value.)
There’s no free will, but it is okay to hold people morally responsible for their actions. This is another type of compatibilism—an absence of free will and moral responsibility coexist without invoking the supernatural.
There’s free will, and people should be held morally responsible. This is probably the most common stance out there.
There’s free will, but moral responsibility isn’t justified. This is a minority view; typically, when you look closely, the supposed free will exists in a very narrow sense and is certainly not worth executing people about.
Obviously, imposing these classifications on determinism, free will, and moral responsibility is wildly simplified. A key simplification is pretending that most people have clean “yes” or “no” answers as to whether these states exist; the absence of clear dichotomies leads to frothy philosophical concepts like partial free will, situational free will, free will in only a subset of us, free will only when it matters or only when it doesn’t. This raises the question of whether the edifice of free-will belief is crumbled by one flagrant, highly consequential exception and, conversely, whether free-will skepticism collapses when the opposite occurs. Focusing on gradations between yes and no is important, since interesting things in the biology of behavior are often on continua. As such, my fairly absolutist stance on these issues puts me way out in left field. Again, my goal isn’t to convince you that there’s no free will; it will suffice if you merely conclude that there’s so much less free will than you thought that you have to change your thinking about some truly important things.
Despite starting by separating determinism / free will and free will / moral responsibility, I follow the frequent convention of merging them into one. Thus, my stance is that because the world is deterministic, there can’t be free will, and thus holding people morally responsible for their actions is not okay (a conclusion described as “deplorable” by one leading philosopher whose thinking we’re going to dissect big time). This incompatibilism will be most frequently contrasted with the compatibilist view that while the world is deterministic, there is still free will, and thus holding people morally responsible for their actions is just.
This version of compatibilism has produced numerous papers by philosophers and legal scholars concerning the relevance of neuroscience to free will. After reading lots of them, I’ve concluded that they usually boil down to three sentences:
Wow, there’ve been all these cool advances in neuroscience, all reinforcing the conclusion that ours is a deterministic world.
Some of those neuroscience findings challenge our notions of agency, moral responsibility, and deservedness so deeply that one must conclude that there is no free will.
Nah, it still exists.
Naturally, a lot of time will be spent examining the “nah” part. In doing so, I’ll consider only a subset of such compatibilists. Here’s a thought experiment for identifying them: In 1848 at a construction site in Vermont, an accident with dynamite hurled a metal rod at high speed into the brain of a worker, Phineas Gage, and out the other side. This destroyed much of Gage’s frontal cortex, an area central to executive function, long-term planning, and impulse control. In the aftermath, “Gage was no longer Gage,” as stated by one friend. Formerly sober, reliable, and the foreman of his work crew, Gage was now “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom) . . . obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating,” as described by his doctor. Phineas Gage is the textbook case that we are the end products of our material brains. Now, 170 years later, we understand how the unique function of your frontal cortex is the result of your genes, prenatal environment, childhood, and so on (wait for chapter 4).
Now the thought experiment: Raise a compatibilist philosopher from birth in a sealed room where they never learn anything about the brain. Then tell them about Phineas Gage and summarize our current knowledge about the frontal cortex. If their immediate response is “Whatever, there’s still free will,” I’m not interested in their views. The compatibilist I have in mind is one who then wonders, “OMG, what if I’m completely wrong about free will?,” ponders hard for hours or decades, and concludes that there’s still free will, here’s why, and it’s okay for society to hold people morally responsible for their actions. If a compatibilist has not wrestled through being challenged by knowledge of the biology of who we are, it’s not worth the time trying to counter their free-will belief.
Ground Rules and Definitions
What is free will? Groan, we have to start with that, so here comes something totally predictable along the lines of “Different things to different types of thinkers, which gets confusing.” Totally uninviting. Nevertheless, we have to start there, followed by “What is determinism?” I’ll do my best to mitigate the drag of this.
What Do I Mean by Free Will?
People define free will differently. Many focus on agency, whether a person can control their actions, act with intent. Other definitions concern whether, when a behavior occurs, the person knows that there are alternatives available. Others are less concerned with what you do than with vetoing what you don’t want to do. Here’s my take.
Suppose that a man pulls the trigger of a gun. Mechanistically, the muscles in his index finger contracted because they were stimulated by a neuron having an action potential (i.e., being in a particularly excited state). That neuron in turn had its action potential because it was stimulated by the neuron just upstream. Which had its own action potential because of the next neuron upstream. And so on.
Here’s the challenge to a free willer: Find me the neuron that started this process in this man’s brain, the neuron that had an action potential for no reason, where no neuron spoke to it just before. Then show me that this neuron’s actions were not influenced by whether the man was tired, hungry, stressed, or in pain at the time. That nothing about this neuron’s function was altered by the sights, sounds, smells, and so on, experienced by the man in the previous minutes, nor by the levels of any hormones marinating his brain in the previous hours to days, nor whether he had experienced a life-changing event in recent months or years. And show me that this neuron’s supposedly freely willed functioning wasn’t affected by the man’s genes, or by the lifelong changes in regulation of those genes caused by experiences during his childhood. Nor by levels of hormones he was exposed to as a fetus, when that brain was being constructed. Nor by the centuries of history and ecology that shaped the invention of the culture in which he was raised. Show me a neuron being a causeless cause in this total sense. The prominent compatibilist philosopher Alfred Mele of Florida State University emphatically feels that requiring something like that of free will is setting the bar “absurdly high.”[6] But this bar is neither absurd nor too high. Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will. The point of the first half of this book is to establish that this can’t be shown.
What Do I Mean by Determinism?
It’s virtually required to start this topic with the dead White male Pierre Simon Laplace, the eighteenth-/nineteenth-century French polymath (it’s also required that you call him a polymath, as he contributed to mathematics, physics, engineering, astronomy, and philosophy). Laplace provided the canonical claim for all of determinism: If you had a superhuman who knew the location of every particle in the universe at this moment, they’d be able to accurately predict every moment in the future. Moreover, if this superhuman (eventually termed “Laplace’s demon”) could re-create the exact location of every particle at any point in the past, it would lead to a present identical to our current one. The past and future of the universe are already determined.
Science since Laplace’s time shows that he wasn’t completely right (proving that Laplace was not a Laplacian demon), but the spirit of his demon lives on. Contemporary views of determinism have to incorporate the fact that certain types of predictability turn out to be impossible (the subject of chapters 5 and 6) and certain aspects of the universe are actually nondeterministic (chapters 9 and 10).
Moreover, contemporary models of determinism must also accommodate the role played by meta-level consciousness. What do I mean by this? Consider a classic psychology demonstration of people having less freedom in their choices than they assumed.[7] Ask someone to name their favorite detergent, and if you have unconsciously cued them earlier with the word ocean, they become more likely to answer, “Tide.” As an important measure of where meta-level consciousness comes in, suppose the person realizes what the researcher is up to and, wanting to show that they can’t be manipulated, decides that they won’t say “Tide,” even if it is their favorite. Their freedom has been just as constrained, a point in many of the coming chapters. Similarly, wind up as an adult exactly like your parents or the exact opposite of them, and you are equally unfree—in the latter case, the pull toward adopting their behavior, the ability to consciously recognize that tendency to do that, the mindset to recoil from that with horror and thus do the opposite, are all manifestations of the ways that you became you outside your control.
Finally, any contemporary view of determinism must accommodate a profoundly important point, one that dominates the second half of the book—despite the world being deterministic, things can change. Brains change, behaviors change. We change. And that doesn’t counter this being a deterministic world without free will. In fact, the science of change strengthens the conclusion; this will come in chapter 12.
With those issues in mind, time to see the version of determinism that this book builds on.
Imagine a university graduation ceremony. Almost always moving, despite the platitudes, the boilerplate, the kitsch. The happiness, the pride. The families whose sacrifices now all seem worth it. The graduates who were the first in their family to finish high school. The ones whose immigrant parents sit there glowing, their saris, dashikis, barongs broadcasting that their pride in the present isn’t at the cost of pride in their past.
And then you notice someone. Amid the family clusters postceremony, the new graduates posing for pictures with Grandma in her wheelchair, the bursts of hugs and laughter, you see the person way in the back, the person who is part of the grounds crew, collecting the garbage from the cans on the perimeter of the event.
Randomly pick any of the graduates. Do some magic so that this garbage collector started life with the graduate’s genes. Likewise for getting the womb in which nine months were spent and the lifelong epigenetic consequences of that. Get the graduate’s childhood as well—one filled with, say, piano lessons and family game nights, instead of, say, threats of going to bed hungry, becoming homeless, or being deported for lack of papers. Let’s go all the way so that, in addition to the garbage collector having gotten all that of the graduate’s past, the graduate would have gotten the garbage collector’s past. Trade every factor over which they had no control, and you will switch who would be in the graduation robe and who would be hauling garbage cans. This is what I mean by determinism.
And Why Does This Matter?
Because we all know that the graduate and the garbage collector would switch places. And because, nevertheless, we rarely reflect on that sort of fact; we congratulate the graduate on all she’s accomplished and move out of the way of the garbage guy without glancing at him.
2
The Final Three Minutes of a Movie
Two men stand by a hangar in a small airfield at night. One is in a police officer’s uniform, the other dressed as a civilian. They talk tensely while, in the background, a small plane is taxiing to the runway. Suddenly, a vehicle pulls up and a man in a military uniform gets out. He and the police officer talk tensely; the military man begins to make a phone call; the civilian shoots him, killing him. A vehicle full of police pulls up abruptly, the police emerging rapidly. The police officer speaks to them as they retrieve the body. They depart as abruptly, with the body but not the shooter. The police officer and the civilian watch the plane take off and then walk off together.
What’s going on? A criminal act obviously occurred—from the care with which the civilian aimed, he clearly intended to shoot the man. A terrible act, compounded further by the man’s remorseless air—this was cold-blooded murder, depraved indifference. It is puzzling, though, that the police officer made no attempt to apprehend him. Possibilities come to mind, none good. Perhaps the officer has been blackmailed by the civilian to look the other way. Maybe all the police who appeared on the scene are corrupt, in the pocket of some drug cartel. Or perhaps the police officer is actually an impostor. One can’t be certain, but it’s clear that this was a scene of intent-filled corruption and lawless violence, the police officer and the civilian exemplars of humans at their worst. That’s for sure.
Intent features heavily in issues about moral responsibility: Did the person intend to act as she did? When exactly was the intent formed? Did she know that she could have done otherwise? Did she feel a sense of ownership of her intent? These are pivotal issues to philosophers, legal scholars, psychologists, and neurobiologists. In fact, a huge percentage of the research done concerning the free-will debate revolves around intent, often microscopically examining the role of intent in the seconds before a behavior happens. Entire conferences, edited volumes, careers, have been spent on those few seconds, and in many ways, this focus is at the heart of arguments supporting compatibilism; this is because all the careful, nuanced, clever experiments done on the subject collectively fail to falsify free will. After reviewing these findings, the purpose of this chapter is to show how, nevertheless, all this is ultimately irrelevant to deciding that there’s no free will. This is because this approach misses 99 percent of the story by not asking the key question: And where did that intent come from in the first place? This is so important because, as we will see, while it sure may seem at times that we are free do as we intend, we are never free to intend what we intend. Maintaining belief in free will by failing to ask that question can be heartless and immoral and is as myopic as believing that all you need to know to assess a movie is to watch its final three minutes. Without that larger perspective, understanding the features and consequences of intent doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.
