Free will

Free will refers to that feeling, or experience, one has that one can have complete control to choose among alternative actions, even in the face of psychological and other conflicting influences. It is an age-old concern to separate what we can do something about, choose to do, from what we cannot. Much of human experience is interpreted as depending upon our choices. Capturing the content of this subjective formulation, one stance regarding free will is the philosophical position that human beings are able to choose between different courses of action in any given circumstance, whereas the opposite position, determinism, claims that all our mental states and actions are made necessary by preceding causes, and the idea that we are free at all is an illusion.

These diametric extremes, on the one hand we always are in complete control, and on the other that we never are in control, unnecessarily restrict our options, an example of false dichotomy, referred to specifically in this instance as naïve dualism. Reality lies somewhere else, as it is abundantly clear that our actions can be dictated by factors outside our control and outside our awareness, but it is unclear that such factors are decisive in every instance or in the long run. The present situation is that the ability to exercise free will is known definitely to be limited by many factors, sometimes strongly limited. An alternative to the "either-or" formulation is metaphysical libertarianism, which simply asserts that determinism is false, and at least sometimes humans exert control over their choices. However, a useful discussion of free will may require vocabulary and concepts not yet developed, and whatever its ultimate formulation, a persuasive account of free will requires an extrapolation of the present understanding of the brain beyond what is verifiable today.

The controllable and uncontrollable aspects of decision making are logically separable using the following device:

All of us have subjectively experienced being torn between doing one thing or another –what we would like to do, what we think we should do, or what we think others would appreciate our doing, and so on. We might assume that the decision is up to us, that we are free to do one thing or another, and others may heap blame or praise on us assuming the same thing. This assumption is what is meant by free will –the belief that whatever we may have done in actual fact, could have been otherwise because we might have decided on another course of action, and that before taking the action we were free to choose between alternatives. The claim might be: "Consciousness has the ability to override its genetic (and other) instructions and to set its own independent course of action."

At the same time, we realize that some aspects of the world work in ways that can be understood because there are law-like processes that can be deciphered, and that allow us to predict some future events based upon observations of past events. The principle operating here is that future events are governed by physical laws rooted in past events, and the notion that this kind of explanation applies to everything that happens is known as determinism. Some have argued that the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics opens a door to a randomness in human behavior, which is foreign to human experience. Inasmuch as random atomic events are not under our control any more than predetermined events, determinism can be rewritten to include this randomness, for example, as follows: All our decisions are either implied by past events, or by random events, that in both cases do not involve us as agents, but which we simply witness.

If the world is deterministic, our feeling that we are free to choose an action is simply an illusion. We have trouble believing all our actions are beyond our control, and that our sense of freedom is totally illusory, but we also have problems thinking that our actions are totally within our control. Although it is an exaggeration (at least at the moment) to think that science requires determinism, it is apparent that "consciousness plays a far smaller role in human life than Western culture has tended to believe."

This dilemma is what in philosophy is known as the problem of free will (or sometimes referred to by its flip-side as the dilemma of determinism), and it is a dilemma because it is difficult to decide how to assign responsibility for our actions. In a more nuanced formulation, the dilemma stems from the question posed as follows:

A clear statement of the dilemma is as follows:

Mind-body problem
The idea of free will is one aspect of the mind-body problem, that is, consideration of the relation between mind (for example, consciousness, memory and judgment) and body (for example, the human brain and nervous system). In the context of free will, does the relation between mind and body allow for the mind to 'cause' neurological states, or is the mind simply an artifact or correlate of what the brain and nervous system are doing on their own? That question is presented as though the issue is empirical, but there are serious questions as to whether it is properly phrased that way, and whether standard methods separating the observed from the observer really apply to this investigation. Are there causal connections behind known correlations between subjective mental activity and objectively identified neurological events? Is the language of 'cause' and 'effect' too limited to describe huge systems of sensors with complex feedback arrangements? The discussion of free will falls into various parts: some empirical (What is going on in the brain?), some semantic (What are the possible meanings of free will, and are new concepts necessary?), some theoretical (there are many of these, among them: Does the disturbance of what is observed by the very act of observation imply that terms like free will and the terms used in neuroscience are fundamentally incompatible descriptions, making psychology irreducible to neuroscience?).

For example, interactionalist dualism suggests that some physical events cause some mental acts and some mental acts cause some physical events. Dualism allows humans free will, because mind only is correlated with brain activity, and is not reducible to it. A modern dualist position from the field of artificial intelligence, or AI, is made by so called strong AI theorists, who say that the mind is separate from the brain in the same way that a computer algorithm exists independent of its many possible realizations in coding and physical implementation, and the brain and its 'wiring' is analogous to a computer and its software. (Perhaps it is worth pointing out that the brain and its operation is known to be quite different from any man-made computer. ) Another version is the "three world" formulation of Popper. These are examples of what is called epistemological pluralism, that is the notion that the mind-body problem is not reducible to the concepts of the natural sciences.

One contrasting approach is called cognitive naturalism, in which mind is simply part of nature, perhaps merely a feature of most very complex self-programming feedback systems, and must be studied by the methods of empirical science. Certainly, some areas of the brain (see image) are connected to aspects of mental function and consciousness.

Attempts are being made to soften the boundary between these two views based upon self-organizing systems, exploring the conjecture that such systems can have a causal power over the organization of their deterministic subsystems, expressed in the ways these substratum elements are organized and put into action. One aspect of this development is the answer to the question: Is a machine realizable for which the goals of the machine are not imposed from the outside, but produced by the machine itself?

An outstanding unsolved issue in the mind-body problem often is called the hard problem of consciousness, how physical phenomena acquire subjective characteristics becoming, for example, colors and tastes. For example, "it is possible to know all the physical and functional facts concerning the operation of human brains without, for example, knowing what it is like subjectively to experience vertigo." The subjective intuition of free will may fall into this category as well.

Philosophical positions
The discussion of free will sprang historically from attempts to reconcile the sense that the mind could freely make decisions that affected a person's future with the observation that at least some things in nature were simply the consequences of other things. A more modern view of free will concerns the relation between the subjective, free will, color, taste, and the objective or scientific mode of observation. Both are outlined below.

Compatibilist-incompatibilist arguments
Using T, F for "true" and "false" and ? for undecided, there are exactly nine positions regarding determinism/free will that consist of any two of these three possibilities: Incompatibilism may occupy any of the nine positions except (5), (8) or (3), which last corresponds to soft determinism. Position (1) is hard determinism,and position (2) is libertarianism. The position (1) of hard determinism adds to the table the contention that D implies FW is untrue, and the position (2) of libertarianism adds the contention that FW implies D is untrue. Position (9) may be called hard incompatibilism if one interprets ? as meaning both concepts are of dubious value. Compatibilism itself may occupy any of the nine positions, that is, there is no logical contradiction between determinism and free will, and either or both may be true or false in principle. Below some of these positions are examined in more detail.

Incompatibilism
One approach, of course, is simply to accept as a fact that human beings are not free, a position termed hard determinism or incompatibilism. To accept this position is to accept that our actions are caused by things other than our will –that actions do not originate in volition (willing), but rather in forces that determine its disposition in one way or another, a view often associated with stoicism. Hard determinism, however, insofar as it accepts a causal chain of events, means our present actions are determined in the past, and some consider that view to wholly destroy any notion of moral responsibility. From this stance, freedom is considered a necessary component of responsibility, for why should anyone be blamed or praised for actions that could not have been otherwise?

Stoics, however, considered that an agent was responsible for thinking through their choices, even though the appearance of choice is illusory. This curious situation led to much debate over the centuries, with Chrysippus (279 – 206 BC) attempting a way out of this apparent contradiction by separating external antecedant causes from the internal disposition receiving this cause, a solution adopted by many thinkers since that time in various formulations.

Classically, the idea of determinism goes back at least as far as Laplace, who posited (based upon Newton's laws of mechanics) that an omniscient observer knowing with infinite precision all the positions and velocities of every particle in the universe could predict the future entirely. Needless to say, omniscient observers are imaginary creations. A less restrictive view of determinism than that of Laplace is discussed by Nagel. "A theory is deterministic if, and only if, given its state variables for some initial period, the theory logically determines a unique set of values for those variables for any other period." To extend this idea to a view of determinism, in addition one would have to assert that the Universe is governed, at least in principle, by some amalgam of deterministic theories. Nagel argues that a deterministic formulation does not require the viability of omniscient observers, but only the possibility in principle of determinism: "A theory is labeled properly as a deterministic one if analysis of its internal structure shows that the theoretical state of a system at one instant logically determines a unique state of that system for another instant." The use of the term "state" incorporates field theories like the Standard Model within determinism.

Libertarianism
Others have argued that determinism is false, or that at the very least, human actions are a special case and stand outside the requirements of a deterministic universe. In simple terms, freedom of thought is distinguished from freedom of action, and their connection is made a subject of study. By separating the rules of thought, one might be free to choose between alternatives, one might have causal powers.

Saint Augustine held this view, the capacity for metaphysical freedom. Kant also subscribed to this view: besides nature and empirical knowledge, there is the realm of things in themselves accessible to thought and governed by different rules; a distinction between phenomena and noumena.

There are other ways to suggest that "reality" is larger than the realm where determinism applies. For example, Pierre Duhem suggested that scientific theory was simply a device to facilitate economy of thought, and could not be considered to encompass "reality". Thus, thought is a distillation of reality, and what goes on "in reality" is a much deeper and broader question than how we describe it. Similar to consciousness itself, scientific theory is a synopsis of some of what goes on, not the full text. This view of science as dealing with only part of the picture opens the way to more modern statements of the separation of causality in nature from that in the mind.

Another way to limit the applicability of determinism is to introduce the role of subjectivity, more generally, consciousness, as a matter beyond the reach of the methods of science and its requirement for public verifiability. So, for example, pain is a subjective phenomenon. It can sometimes be correlated to verifiable events in the nervous system, but the experience of pain is inaccessible except through subjective reports from the victim. The so-far unobtainable goal of relating subjective experiences like pain, color, taste to verifiable constructs is called the hard problem of consciousness, and the experience of free will falls under this label. An additional issue related to this separation of the subjective and the objective is the question of mental causation, the ability (or not) of the mind to affect the material world. This concern may have more respectable goals than establishing telekinesis.

For example, we have this modern statement of the claim for mental causation: A different approach questions the concept of "causality" itself, considering it a construct inappropriate to the description of human and animal behavior. See the section below on causality.

Compatibilism
An intermediate view has been to soften the requirements of what it means to be free. One accepts the fact that actions have causes, but argues that this does not mean we are not free.

In the approach known as soft determinism, I am still free even though my character, common sense and so forth, strongly support a course of action, because they do not compel me to act in this way, nor preclude alternatives. Of course freedom understood in this way is not an arbitrary freedom. It is freedom in the sense that nothing stops me from doing otherwise, even though it is unlikely. Put in an extreme form: "A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings".

What are the "strings" attached to our decisions? The questions of character, predisposition, programming and so on, are part of the field of behaviorism, where behavior modification, reinforcement, and so forth are studied. A closely related field is cognitive psychology, the psychology of cognition, studying matters such as the processes involved in memorization and decision making.

Subjective-objective dichotomy
An undecided question is whether the world of science and the universe are coextensive. Science has practical impact upon technology and our understanding of interconnections. However, there are areas where science so far has had little impact. So there exists a difference in optimism about science, with one view opining that science will gradually extend to everything, and the opposite view opining that won't happen. For example, the statement is found in many books: On the other hand, the contrary view is described below in the section on complementarity.

Free will is an arena in which to contrast these viewpoints. Free will is a widely shared intuition that appears to be at variance with the scientific program, and one has to ask whether science can say anything useful about this intuition. Free will stands at the nexus between subjective and objective realities, and is possibly the most interesting situation where these two meet.

Following the historic debates above, one could formulate the pattern of propositions: "All p are determine by P", "all q are determined by Q", & etc. ... and one position is that this sequence (p,P) (q,Q) ... can be continued to exhaust all things and imply that all things are determined one way or another, tantamount to implying nomological determinism, while a second position is that this sequence cannot be so extended, which is one very specific form of compatibilism.

Free will often is contrasted with determinism. In considering a statement involving determinism, like All events p are determined by other events P , in order to be consistent with science today, and avoid oversimplification, one has to be very clear about how the events (p,P) are defined. One also has to replace "determined" by something like "logically imply".

The need for great care in defining "events" and "determined" results in detailed descriptions of what constitutes an "event" and how one is said to "determine" another, and raises questions of how to relate the "universe" to these detailed descriptions.

These developments take the subjective-objective distinction to a more general level than simply arguments over the prospects of success of the scientific program in certain areas of experience. A Popper-like view emerges with an "event" as some kind of formalized "state" and the relationship "determines" phrased as a "logical implication" of connection between states, all combined as parts of one or another abstract theory. That formalization puts a lot of emphasis upon mental constructions. From the stance of a Duhem, or a Popper, or a Hawking, the use of an intermediary, elaborate mental construction is a meld of the subjective and objective. It is used to determine connections about objective events, but the form of the theoretical construct is a product of subjective activities, and its particular form may well be more about the brain than anything else. Much like a computer algorithm can be expressed as assembly language instructions peculiar to a particular computer by translating the algorithm into steps that particular computer can handle, some aspects of the universe's operation can be expressed in terms of mental constructs.

Lest this apparatus be thought of as an entirely formal understanding, some among us actually do have intuitive grasp of these abstractions, perhaps analogous to the fact that some among us hear music in the sounds around them. Quoting Feynman about his creative process:

This comment could be paralleled by others about the intuitions of musicians and mathematicians. The point is that the creation of scientific theories is subjective, and the very concepts of determinism are themselves subjective and mutable creations of the human mind. What is in charge here: the intuition conceiving the theory, or the theory that results; or is it an unending back-and-forth spiral from one to the other? Using such theory to assess mental activity itself, including free will, is something of a bootstrapping process that might never converge. The question of whether an intuitive free will submits to a critique by some deterministic theory has aspects of an infinite regress. Did a rat "decide" to run a maze, or was it "instinct"? Did the biologist in the laboratory "decide" to build the maze, or was it the zeitgeist of the field? Did the corporation "decide" to build the laboratory, or was it a fad?

Complementarity
In quantum mechanics the notion of complementarity arises, that is, different aspects of a description that are mutually exclusive. Bohr (1922 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics) suggested complementarity is useful outside of quantum theory. In asking whether one can perform an action, one is both observer and subject, which is posited to be an untenable situation: one must adopt one or the other stance. To quote Niels Bohr: These observations are echoed by experimentalists studying brain function:

Another description of this issue is by Northoff: These observations suggest the possibility that "free will" and neurology inhabit different realms, and it is confusion to try to explain "free will" using a neurological approach that by its very nature excludes the effects of observation upon what is observed. In broad terms, this argument complements that of Chrysippus (279 – 206 BC).

Causality
In extending the application of the principle of complementarity, Bohr questioned the everyday ideas of causality: Bohr considered these reservations might apply in trying to explain the connection between mental and physical events in terms of observation altering what is observed. If our notion of causality is questioned, "free will" as mental causation takes on a different interpretation.

Similar reservations have been expressed by others, but take a broader, more historical approach. Historically, two types of causality (the "being responsible for something else") are distinguished, with several sub-genres. The first kind of causes is that which is included in the effect and is part of it (embedment); the arising of something out of itself. The second kind of causes does not reside in the effect and is separate from it.

In the first category, two subdivisions arise:


 * causa materialis or material cause: the implied but not yet realized result, as Michelangelo said his act of sculpture "released" the form already present and buried within the marble.


 * causa formalis or formal causality: a mental construct created to relate an effect to a cause.

The second category of external causes also divides into two:


 * causa efficiencs or efficient causality: cause and effect can be separated and determined, the usual 'cause' of science as stimulus and response.


 * causa finalis or final causality: the objective as shaping the action; as may entail its expression though no cause as yet exists. Thus, the desire for a king may cause a coronation, and goals set by evolution may determine a response.

These notions of cause may not be all that distinct. For example, the "principle of least action", and its extension to the Feynman path integral, predicts the realized path of a system as a minimization of 'action' over all possible paths, seemingly suggesting that the system 'action' (a causa materialis) already embodies the path to be taken given the objective of 'least action' (a causa finalis). And yet this formulation is equivalent to those based upon Newton's laws or quantum mechanics, which invoke only causa efficiencs, and it has been argued that physics theories themselves constitute a causa formalis, no more than a mental shorthand to link selected events, a subset of all events.

Northoff regards the restriction of cause to causa efficiencs precludes a proper understanding of the dynamics and self-organization of the brain, restricting explanations to an 'outside of the brain' point of view: “the possibility of mental causation is necessarily dependent on the possibility of 'final and formal causality'”.

Along these lines, Freeman introduces the replacement of "causality" by what he calls "circular causality" to "allow for the contribution of self-organizing dynamics", the "formation of macroscopic population dynamics that shapes the patterns of activity of the contributing individuals", applicable to "interactions between neurons and neural masses...and between the behaving animal and its environment": Freeman's usage for the term circular causality appears akin to the views of Kelso, and is more radical than the common use of this term, which refers to causality in a system with feedback. A more specific use of this term is as follows:

Self-programming robots
Today robots can be made that adapt their responses to their environment through self-programming, so-called intelligent robots. Much of the description of these machines seems parallel to human behavior, although technology has still not reached sufficient complexity to make a strong case for the similarities. Is such a machine deterministic? We cannot predict the machine's exact behavior without a complete knowledge of its personal history with its environment, the reliability of its components, and its present state of programming, uncertainties in which limit us to probabilistic statements. It may be that this question is objectively undecidable, and has only an answer according to some or another theoretical formulation, in particular, a statistical answer indicating a probable range of responses to a probable range of inputs.

Groups of cooperating robots also are envisioned: One can conjecture that some such groups could evolve following a Darwinian scheme, not only an interest of engineers, but a recurrent topic of science fiction.

Addiction
The separation of freedom of action from freedom of will is demonstrated in addiction. An addict has disconnected their will that identifies a course of action as desirable from their ability to enforce that action. Brain imaging of addicts and non-addicts show differences in brain activity and can relate the process of addiction to a reprogramming of the brain's handling of dopamine that can be reversed only with a very prolonged and multipronged therapy.

Response times
Studies of the timing between actions and the conscious decision to act have a bearing upon free will. A subject's declaration of intention to move a finger appears after the brain has begun to implement the action, suggesting to some that unconsciously the brain has made the decision before the conscious mental act to do so. Some believe the implication is that free will was not involved in the decision and is an illusion. The first of these experiments reported the brain registered activity related to the move about 0.2 s before movement onset. However, these authors also found that awareness of action was anticipatory to activity in the muscle underlying the movement; the entire process resulting in action involves more steps than just the onset of brain activity.

Some argue that placing the question of free will in the context of motor control is too narrow. The objection is that the time scales involved in motor control are very short, and motor control involves a great deal of unconscious action, with much physical movement entirely unconscious and not a matter of intention at all. On that basis "...free will cannot be squeezed into time frames of 150-350 ms; free will is a longer term phenomenon" and free will is a higher level activity that "cannot be captured in a description of neural activity or of muscle activation..."

The bearing of timing results upon notions of free will appears complex, and remains a topic of discussion.

Emotion
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, emotions evolved in humans in response to environmental challenges, and serve to organize human responses according to success in handling ancestral experience: Other than undefined "open parameters", perhaps related to "recalibrations", these words leave little room for the effects found in behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology, and the field of developmental psychology associated with the names of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, which find much room for environmental factors arising during the development of each individual. The field of evolutionary psychology is marked by some heated controversy.

Although evolutionary psychologists attempt to understand the organization of the mind and brain based upon how they arose, it is hampered by the observation that different species arose in different environments with different responses, making cross-species comparisons very difficult.

Epigenetics
"Once nurture seemed clearly distinct from nature. Now it appears that our diets and lifestyles can change the expression of our genes. How? By influencing a network of chemical switches within our cells collectively known as the epigenome." Various mechanisms for transference of such environmental response to the next generation are under study. In the context of free will, these mechanisms indicate pathways at a very basic level that can change the programming even of identical twins, and even that of successive generations. Not free will, but certainly adaptivity and originality of response in populations.

Summary
The various notions of free will conflict, but involve many of the same elements. These matters have been argued for millenia, and their resolution may depend upon developing a better understanding of what actually goes on in the brain. In popular accounts of this subject, the same modern developments are used as new wine in old bottles. On one hand, we have K. E. Stanovitch's The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin, which advances the view that decisions are possible using "instrumental rationality" with goals "keyed to the life interest of the vehicle" to replace "gut" decisions. On the other hand we have books like Sam Harris' Free Will, and D.M. Wagener's The Illusion of Conscious Will, that take the view that consciousness is completely illusory, and old-fashioned determinism is completely correct.

At an individual level, perhaps we can be viewed as complex machines with built-in goals sought using algorithms for survival, which adapt to experience. The conscious monitoring of some aspects of this reprogramming may generate feelings of mental control over our individual destinies even though these feelings may be illusory. Our survival depends upon the execution of ancestral programming that includes some adaptivity, and our mental states may be analogous to a debugger watching the evolution of some code.

The occurrence of mutations introduces a random aspect. Unusual circumstances occur due to random events, provoking new responses. New types of individual arise that exhibit novel reactions even to mundane environmental factors. These novelties may permit (or even force) individuals and societies to explore new avenues. Although once a new path is initiated, evolutionary programming and natural law exert their influences, events proceed with a complexity that defies prediction.