Determined, page 22
Such a harnessing scenario has at least three limitations, of increasing significance:
—A child has fallen into an icy river, and your consideration generator produces three possibilities to choose among: leap in and save the child; shout for help; pretend you didn’t see and scurry away. Choose. But since we’re dealing with quantum indeterminacy, what if the first three possibilities are: tango in the absence of a partner; confess to cheating on your taxes; make squawking sounds while jumping backward like the dolphins at Sea World? Perfectly plausible, if superpositioned electron waves are the wellsprings from which your moral decisions flow.
—To avoid having only tangoing, confessing, and dolphining as options, determine that you need to indeterminately generate every random possibility. But now you have to spend a lifetime evaluating and comparing each before choosing which is best. You need to have an impossibly efficient search algorithm.[*],[25]
—So, phew, generate enough options so that they aren’t all silly, figure out how to efficiently evaluate them all, and then use your criteria to filter out all but the winner. But where does that filter, reflecting your values, ethics, and character, come from? It’s chapter 3. And where does intent come from? How is it that one person’s filter filters out every random possibility other than “Rob the bank,” while another’s goes for “Wish the bank teller a good day”? And where do the values and criteria come from in even first deciding whether some circumstance merits activating Dennett’s random consideration generator? One person might do so when considering whether to commence an act of civil disobedience at great personal cost, while another would when making a fashion decision. Likewise, where do the differences come from as to which search algorithm is used and for how long? Where do all of those come from? From the events, outside the person’s control, occurring one second before, one minute before, one hour before, and so on. Filtering out nonsense might prevent quantum indeterminacy from generating random behavior, but it sure isn’t a manifestation of free will.
Messing With
To reiterate, in a messing-with model, you don’t merely pick and choose among the random quantum effects generated. Instead, you reach down and alter the process. As discussed in the last chapter, downward causation is perfectly valid; the metaphor often used is that when a wheel is rolling, its high-level wheel-ness is causing its constituent parts to do forward rolls. And when you choose to pull a trigger, all of your index finger’s cells, organelles, molecules, atoms, and quarks move about an inch.
Thus, supposedly, some high-level “me” reaches down, does some downward causation such that subatomic events produce free will. In the words of Irish neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell, “indeterminacy creates some elbow room. . . . What randomness does, it is posited, is to introduce some room, some causal slack in the system, for higher-order factors to exert a causal influence” (my emphasis).[26]
As a first problem, the “controlled randomness” implicit in reaching down and messing with quantum events is as much of an oxymoron as “determined indeterminacy.” And where do the criteria come from as to how you’re going to mess with your electrons? Amid those issues, the biggest challenge I have in evaluating this idea is that it is truly difficult to understand what exactly is being suggested.
One picture of downward causation changing the ability of quantum events to influence our behavior is offered by libertarian philosopher Robert Kane, who, it will be recalled from chapter 4, suggests that at times of life when we are at a major crossroads of decision-making, the consistent character at play when we choose was formed in the past out of free will (i.e., his idea of “Self-Forming Actions”). But how does that self-formed self actually bring about that decision? At such consequential crossroads, “there is tension and uncertainty in our minds about what to do, I suggest, that is reflected in appropriate regions of our brains by movement away from thermodynamic equilibrium—in short, a kind of stirring up of chaos in the brain that makes it sensitive to microindeterminacies at the neuronal level.” In this view, your conscious self uses downward causation to induce neuronal chaoticism in a way that allows quantum indeterminacy to bubble all the way up in exactly the way you’ve chosen.[27]
Similar messing-with comes from Peter Tse, who, as quoted earlier, argues that “the brain has in fact evolved to amplify quantum domain randomness” (and then speculates that animals that had brains that could do this “procreate better than those that did not”). For him, the brain reaches down and messes with fundamental indeterminacy: “This permits information to be downwardly causal regarding which indeterministic events at the root-most level will be realized.”[*],[28]
I am nontrivially unsure how Tse proposes this happens. He wisely emphasizes how cause and effect in the nervous system can be conceptualized as the flow of “information.” But then a cloud of dualism comes in. For him, downwardly causal information is not materially real, which runs counter to the fact that in the brain, “information” is comprised of real, material things, like neurotransmitter, receptor, and ion channel molecules. Neurotransmitters bind to particular receptors for particular durations; chains of proteins change conformations such that channels open or close like the locks in the Panama Canal; ions flow like tsunamis into or out of cells. But despite that, “information cannot be anything like an energy that imposes forces.” However, such information, which is not causal, can allow information that is causal: “Information is not causal as a force. Rather, it is causal by allowing those physical causal chains that are also informational causal chains . . . to become real.” And while informational “patterns” are not material, there are “physically realized pattern detectors.” In other words, while information might be made of immaterial dust, the brain’s immaterial dust detectors are made of reinforced concrete, steel rebar, and, if you’re on the old side, asbestos.
My problem with Kane’s and Tse’s views, and the similar ones of other philosophers, is that, for the life of me, I can’t figure out how such reaching down and messing with microscopic indeterminacy in the brain is supposed to work. I can’t get past information being both a force and not without sensing cake being both had and eaten. When Kane writes, “There is tension and uncertainty in our minds about what to do, I suggest, that is reflected in appropriate regions of our brains by movement away from thermodynamic equilibrium,”[29] I am unclear whether “reflected” is meant to be causal or correlative. Moreover, I know of no biology that explains how having to make a tough decision causes thermodynamic disequilibrium in the brain; how chaoticism can be “stirred up” in synapses; how chaotic and nonchaotic determinism differ in their sensitivity to quantum indeterminacy occurring at a scale many, many orders of magnitude smaller; whether downward causality causing quantum randomness to fuel the consistency of one’s choices in life does so by changing which electrons entangle with each other, how much nonlocality of time and backward time travel is occurring, or whether the spread of clouds of superpositioned possibilities can be expanded far enough so that, in principle, your olfactory cortex, rather than your motor cortex, sometimes makes you sign a check. It is no longer the challenge I keep raising—“show me a neuron that initiates a complete, coherent behavior for no reason whatsoever, and we can talk seriously about free will.” Instead, it’s “show me how a neuron accomplishes this for the sorts of reasons offered by these scholars.” What we have is a murky version of highly unlikely strong downward causality.
Please believe me—I am so trying to not sound snarky, and to instead seem respectful. I’d certainly come up with bigger cock-ups if I hypothesized about philosophy topics such as agnotology, mereology, or the philosophy of mathematical antirealism. Nevertheless, it seems to me that these free-will advocates are indignantly saying, “We’re not claiming that quantum indeterminacy generates our freely chosen decisions for no reason. We’re saying that quantum indeterminacy does so for magical reasons.”[*]
Some Conclusions
When people are suggesting that fundamental indeterminacies in how the universe works can be the bases of free will, responsibility, and our sacred sense of agency, only weirdos are referring to Brownian motion of dust particles.
Quantum indeterminacy is beyond strange, and in the legendary words of physics god Richard Feynman, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”[*]
It is perfectly plausible, maybe even inevitable, that there will be quantum effects on how things like ions interact with the likes of ion channels or receptors in the nervous system.
However, there is no evidence that those sorts of quantum effects bubble up enough to alter behavior, and most experts think that it is actually impossible—quantum strangeness is not that strange, and quantum effects are washed away amid the decohering warm, wet noise of the brain as one scales up.
Even if quantum indeterminacy did bubble all the way up to behavior, there is the fatal problem that all it would produce is randomness. Do you really want to claim that the free will for which you’d deserve punishment or reward is based on randomness?
The supposed ways by which we can harness, filter, stir up, or mess with the randomness enough to produce free will seem pretty unconvincing. If determined indeterminism is a valid building block for free will, then taking an improv acting class is a valid building block for, à la Sartre, believing that we are condemned to be free.
And Some Conclusions about the Last Six Chapters
Reductionism is great. It’s a whole lot better to take on a pandemic by sequencing the gene for a viral coat protein than by trying to appease a vengeful deity with sacrificial offerings of goat intestines. Nonetheless, it has its limits, and what the revolutions of chaoticism, emergent complexity, and quantum indeterminism show is that some of the most interesting things about us defy pure reductionism.
This rejection of reductionism carries all sorts of subversive, liberating implications. That bottom-up collectivity built on neighbor-neighbor interactions and random encounters can potentially crush top-down authoritarian control. That in such circumstances, generalists, rather than specialists, are most valuable. That what appears to be a norm, on closer examination, is never actually reached; instead, it is reality oscillating strangely, aperiodically, around a Platonic ideal. That this business about norms applies to being normal, no matter what the cool kids say; there are no actual forms of perfection that we fail to reach—normal is a not-quite-accurate descriptor, certainly not a prescription. And that, as a point I emphasize to my students with ham-hocked unsubtlety, if you can explain something of breathtaking complexity, adaptiveness, and even beauty without invoking a blueprint, you don’t have to invoke a blueprint maker either.[30]
But despite the moving power in these nonreductive revolutions, they aren’t mother’s milk that nurtures free will. Nonreductionism doesn’t mean that there are no component parts. Or that component parts work differently once there are lots of them, or that complex things can fly away untethered from their component parts. A system being unpredictable doesn’t mean that it is enchanted, and magical explanations for things aren’t really explanations.
10.5
Interlude
Why did that behavior—dastardly, noble, or ambiguously in between—just occur? Because of what happened a second before, and a minute before, and a . . . The easy takeaway from the first half of this book is that the biological determinants of our behavior stretch widely over space and time—responding to events in front of you this instant but also to events on the other side of the planet or that shaped your ancestors centuries back. And those influences are deep and subterranean, and our ignorance of the shaping forces beneath the surface leads us to fill in the vacuum with stories of agency. Just to restate that irritatingly-familiar-by-now notion, we are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control—our biology, our environments, their interactions.
The most important message was that these are not all separate -ology fields producing behavior. They all merge into one—evolution produces genes marked by the epigenetics of early environment, which produce proteins that, facilitated by hormones in a particular context, work in the brain to produce you. A seamless continuum leaving no cracks between the disciplines into which to slip some free will.
Because of this, as covered in chapter 2, it doesn’t really matter what Libet-style experiments do or don’t show; it doesn’t really matter when intent occurred. All that matters is how that intent came to be. We can’t successfully wish to not wish for what we wish for; we can’t announce that good and bad luck even out over time, since they’re far more likely to progressively diverge. Someone’s history can’t be ignored, because all we are is our history.
Moreover, as the point of chapter 4, it’s biological turtles all the way down with respect to all of who we are, not just some parts. It’s not the case that while our natural attributes and aptitudes are made of sciencey stuff, our character, resilience, and backbone come packaged in a soul. Everything is turtles all the way down, and when you come to a juncture where you must choose between the easy way and the harder but better way, your frontal cortex’s actions are the result of the exact same one-second-before-one-minute-before as everything else in your brain. It is the reason that, try as we might, we can’t will ourselves to have more willpower.
Moreover, this seamless continuum of biology and environment forming us doesn’t leave room for novel portals of free will by way of the revolutions of chapters 5–10. Yes, all the interesting things in the world can be shot through with chaoticism, including a cell, an organ, an organism, a society. And as a result, there are really important things that can’t be predicted, that can never be predicted. But nonetheless, every step in the progression of a chaotic system is made of determinism, not whim. And yes, take a huge number of simple component parts that interact in simple ways, let them interact, and stunningly adaptive complexity emerges. But the component parts remain precisely as simple, and they can’t transcend their biological constraints to contain magical things like free will—a brick may want to be something elegant and glamorous, but it will always remain a brick. And yes, truly indeterministic things seem to happen way down at the subatomic level. Nonetheless, it’s not possible for that level of weirdness to percolate all the way up to influence behavior, and besides, if you base your notion of being a free, willful agent on randomness, you got problems. As do the people stuck around you; it can be very unsettling when a sentence doesn’t end in the way that you potato. Likewise when behavior is random.
As shown in everyday life, in jury boxes, schoolrooms, award ceremonies, eulogies, and the work of experimental philosophers, people hold on to the notion of free will with ferocious tenacity. The pull toward attribution and judgment, whether of others or of ourselves, is enormous and is demonstrable (to varying extents) in cultures all over the world. Heck, even chimps believe in free will.[*],[1]
Given that, my goal hasn’t been to convince every reader that there is no free will whatsoever. I recognize that I’m on the fringe here, fellow traveling with only a handful of scholars (e.g., Gregg Caruso, Sam Harris, Derk Pereboom, Peter Strawson). I’ll settle for merely significantly challenging someone’s free-will faith. Sufficiently so that they will reframe their thinking about both our everyday lives and our most consequential moments. Hopefully, you’ve reached that point.
Nonetheless, we have a big problem, which is that amid all this science and determinism and mechanism, we’re still not very adept at predicting behavior. Take someone with extensive frontal cortical damage, and you’re on solid ground predicting that their social behavior will be inappropriate, but good luck predicting whether they’ll become an impulsive murderer or someone who is rude to a dinner host. Take someone raised in a hellhole of adversity and deprivation, and you’re pretty safe predicting that the outcome won’t be good, but not much beyond that.
In addition to the unpredictable versions of predictable outcomes, there are a world’s worth of exceptions, of thoroughly unpredictable outcomes. Every so often, two rich, brilliant law students murder a fourteen-year-old as a test of their addled philosophy.[*] Or a Crips gang member facing his second stint in jail has his mug shot go viral and winds up as an international fashion model and brand ambassador for a Swiss fragrance line, squiring around the daughter of a knighted Brit business mogul.[*] Maybe Laurey, out among the waving wheat in Oklahoma, realizes that Curley’s a dull pretty boy, and shacks up with Jud Fry.[2]
Will we ever get to the point where our behavior is entirely predictable, given the deterministic gears grinding underneath? Never—that’s one of the points of chaoticism. But the rate at which we are accruing new insights into those gears is boggling—nearly every fact in this book was discovered in the last fifty years, probably half in the last five. The Society for Neuroscience, the world’s premier professional organization for brain scientists, grew from five hundred founding members to twenty-five thousand in its first quarter century. In the time it has taken you to read this paragraph, two different scientists have discovered the function in the brain of some gene and are already squabbling about who did it first. Unless the process of discovery in science grinds to a halt tonight at midnight, the vacuum of ignorance that we try to fill with a sense of agency will just keep shrinking. Which raises the question that motivates the second half of this book.[3]
