Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
—Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
What’s it like to do something intentionally? When you choose a movie to watch, how much power do you have over that choice? To what extent is your choice actually the result of things completely outside of your control?—like your preferences, your mood at the time, the prevalence of that movie in whatever setting you’re browsing movies, the way the poster or the trailer stokes your intrigue, and what you may or may not have heard about the movie already? If you try to do something unpredictable, like choose a movie that you would normally never watch, what caused that? Were you just in the mood for something different? Did someone want you to watch it? Or did you do it just to prove that you have free will? But then that’s the thing that determined your choice, not your free will.
Try it. Give yourself a decision to make and watch what happens. How deep does intention go? You’ll notice that thoughts crash into your skull incessantly, and it’s hard to pin down exactly where your intention is. You’ll notice that besides what’s going on inside your head there’s all this stuff going on outside; all the things that we deal with are inextricably bound up with the rest of the world one way or another, and every decision you make is profoundly constrained by the limitations of the material world. You’ll find that most of your decisions are mostly made for you. You have to go this way because the other road is closed, you have to buy the peppered bacon because your partner likes it better, you have to make coffee because you’re out of tea. Of course you are choosing these things not because it would be impossible to choose otherwise, but because it’s the best choice…? These “decisions” aren’t happening autonomously? But how often do you actually interrogate the experience of choosing? Do you stand there, in the supermarket, two varieties of bacon in hand, in a state of meditation, and observe your will at work, so that you can say to yourself Yes, I am free?
Free will, obviously, couldn’t possibly exist. Where could it be? You’re made up of physical components that are all soundly mechanical. Everything in universe behaves according to deterministic interactions between particles.1 You could never observe free will because everything that happens can be attributed to these interactions.
But the same sort of thing can be said about consciousness. Consciousness, obviously, couldn’t possibly exist. Where could it be? Your consciousness can’t be observed. You’re made up of physical components that are all soundly unconscious.
But of course, you are in fact conscious. Scientifically, we can really only shrug our shoulders at this reality, but shrug we must, because the fact of consciousness might be the only real epistemological solid ground.
Why then is it so common to deny the existence of free will? We all observe free will as much as we feel like we observe consciousness. Yes, it’s impossible to come up with a physical explanation of free will, but that can’t be a good enough reason to deny the existence of something, because it’s not possible to come up with a physical explanation of consciousness, either. Couldn’t it be possible that part of what’s going on with the mystery of consciousness is that it’s producing free will, giving us true agency over our lives and our environment?
In January, I asked this question in an open thread at ACX. It generated a lot of discussion, showed me that ACX readers want you to define your terms (see below), and also illustrated that a lot of people (over there, at least) are free-will skeptics (Luke Burgis observed this as well in a wonderful article at Anti-Mimetic). And I think we have to acknowledge that yes, it is true that it is basically impossible to come up with a description of objective reality that agrees with our scientific understanding and also allows for free will. The question is what you do with that; how you square that with your own subjective experience.
Let’s get clear on what we’re talking about.
Consciousness is consciousness a la Nagel: the quality of a system of having something that it is like to be that system; this is something that basically every normal person believes they have and most serious thinkers believe everyone has. And yet consciousness is fundamentally mysterious.
Free will is “libertarian” free will; real causal free will: the capacity of a system to causally affect the outside world independent of other physical causes;2 this is something that basically every normal person believes they have, and many serious thinkers believe that no one has / is incoherent / does not exist. I’m not talking about the feeling of free will or the “illusion” of free will, I’m talking about actual will, the actual magical ability to produce an effect independent of physical causes, whether we feel it or not, that thing which immediately offends our scientific understanding of the universe.
The problem with most serious discussion of free will is the (apparently) very tempting prospect of simply redefining free will as something that is compatible with the accepted physical description of the world. You say something like: Okay, free will the way most people would like to have it is incoherent, but if we define free will as “the quality of a system of having a certain threshold of degrees of freedom,” then we’re all good! We’ve got mechanics and we’ve got free will.
Of course, this is meaningless and incredibly boring. So don’t worry, I’m not going to do that here. I’m talking about the real, mystical, (incoherent?) free will that you want to believe in. But I’m not claiming that free will does or doesn’t exist. I’m claiming that since it is true that consciousness exists, and we cannot explain consciousness in any physical terms, it is not necessary or helpful to deny the existence of free will based on the lack of a physical explanation.
Okay, so now let’s pump our intuition here a bit.
Can you imagine an unconscious and unfree being? Absolutely, that could describe anything from a toaster to an earthworm to a computer.
Can you imagine a conscious but unfree being? It seems at least philosophically possible. I might even describe, say, a lizard this way—there is something that it is like to be a lizard, but it is utterly bound to automatic instinctual responses to stimuli; it has no agency that can affect the world independent of the mechanical forces at work on its body and mind. And like I said, many people believe that humans are conscious but unfree, merely subject to mechanical forces. It may not be true, but a conscious yet unfree being is at least imaginable.
Can you imagine an unconscious but free being? I’m not so sure.
What would it even mean to have free will but no subjective experience?
It seems to me that consciousness is a prerequisite for the concept of free will. That doesn’t mean that free will exists in every conscious being or even that free will exists at all, but it does suggest that the idea of free will is rooted in consciousness. And because consciousness is a fundamentally mysterious thing, to make strong claims about free will always comes across as a little brash to me.
apxhard responded to my question in the ACX thread with what I think is the basic challenge:
I think what people would say is that consciousness is still deterministic, and we accept that consciousness exists because we experience it, we just don’t know precisely what causes it.
Free will posits, in effect, a new causal mechanism. I think a lot of people implicitly think consciousness is a “causal dead end,” effectively as a result of not believing free will is a thing.
Even though we don’t understand consciousness, it’s presumed that it is the result of some physical process for which there is a mechanical explanation. It’s a “causal dead end”—the result of a complex, twisting chain of causes that doesn’t produce any further causes in the world (this may seem obviously false, but if you actually investigate it, it becomes less obvious*). It’s like you’re trapped in a box, watching your experience through a TV, unable to produce any effect on the world. To propose the existence of free will is to propose the existence of a “new causal mechanism,” a way that things can happen that is completely separate from everything we understand about the way the universe works, i.e. dualism, which is often the absurd in the reductio ad absurdum proving the nonexistence of free will.
But there’s circular logic happening here. This conception of consciousness comes from a commitment to the power of physical explanation. People believe that consciousness is a causal dead end because they believe that free will doesn’t exist because they believe that consciousness is a causal dead end. Isn’t it possible that consciousness isn’t a causal dead end? That you, as a conscious mind, can in fact have a willful effect on the world? Is there any actual evidence that goes against that possibility, or do we reject it simply because we have faith in the power of material causality?3
Consider Laplace’s Demon: an imaginary entity that knows the position and momentum of every single particle in the universe, commonly posed as a thought experiment to illustrate the impossibility of free will. If determinism is true, the Demon would be capable of inferring all past and future states of the universe, which rules out the existence of free will as an independent causal mechanism.
But that’s only if determinism is true. There’s no proof that it is. We can’t know whether the Demon would actually be able to perfectly predict the future—it’s just a thought experiment. If there actually was a Demon, it could be the case that he wouldn’t be able to predict everything, because your free will screws everything up.
If it sounds unscientific to suggest a new causal mechanism, well… yes. It is unscientific, arational. But it’s not irrational—remember, I’m not claiming that it exists (claims unsupported by evidence are bad; questions about possibilities are good), I’m only asking whether it’s impossible that it exists, given that that’s what the rational consensus seems to be. And remember also that it is similarly unscientific to suggest that consciousness exists! Outside of your own subjective experience (which doesn’t exactly fall into the realm of scientific evidence), you have exactly the same amount of evidence for the existence of both things. And yes, your own subjective experience is an important thing to consider.**
Okay but so aren’t we entertaining dualism here? Isn’t dualism obviously wrong? Isn’t dualism what you believe in when you believe in ghosts or Christianity or astrology or whatever? And yes, talking about free will this way does start to sound a little conspiracy-ish (ghost sightings, too, are an experience that could be described as a “mystery that science can’t explain”).
But isn’t some (weak) form of dualism obviously true? Isn’t there material stuff and also completely distinct mental phenomena? The stuff of the world and the stuff of experience? Aren’t these two completely distinct things? The subjective and the objective? Your experience doesn’t consist of rocks or air (consciousness may in fact be substrate independent). Rocks and air aren’t made up of experiences. There is electromagnetic radiation, and there is color. There are two completely independent worlds with completely independent phenomena, laws, and consequences. These worlds interact in at least one way—namely, that you can experience the material world; you can perceive electromagnetic radiation as color. Experience might not be a perfect reflection of material reality, but it is at the very least influenced by it. Is it really so bad to say that the experiencing world can affect the material world, too? I don’t think so. I think this is what basically everyone implicitly believes to be true—I think this is what a normal person believes when they say they have free will. I think that the confident denial of the existence of free will is a symptom of identifying too much with the mythology of rationality (which is not to say that rationality is “just a myth”—i.e., not true—it’s to say that denying the existence of free will is what happens when the exclusive way that you choose to make yourself comfortable with mystery is rationality rather than, say, mixing in a little spirituality).
That’s not to say that there exists an immaterial soul separable from your body that encapsulates your individuality, or that ghosts exist, or anything like that. You don’t have to take any phenomena you don’t like when you accept the obvious fact that there are two basically different things; material and experiential.
Still, it must be acknowledged: the position that consciousness exists, it’s fundamentally mysterious, and that it produces free will is basically what the western world believed for something like 3,000 years. The concept of the soul wraps this position up for you, ready to eat. And… well, yeah. That’s sort of the advantage of religion and spirituality. They’re perfectly okay with mystery, or they just replace mystery with some explanatory framework that makes the occurrence of true mystery impossible (if God exists, He is the epistemological solid ground). Spirituality stands in opposition to rationality in the way it gets you to accept things you can’t understand—one redeems these things, the other defeats them. Under Christianity, free will is the ultimate gift from God; under a commitment to a scientific and rational understanding of the universe, free will is incoherent and must be accepted as such.
And I must say, I really tend to prefer rationality for pretty much everything. But when it comes to actual, real, subjective Experience, the powers of rationality frankly run out—“Here be dragons.”
In The Origin of Conscious in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes puts forth an absolutely ridiculous theory: ancient peoples were all schizophrenic, and the voices they hallucinated were the origin of religion (people really did “hear” their god speaking to them), and the invention of writing cured this schizophrenia, which also caused a temporary collapse of society all over the globe as peoples’ gods left them, and, oh yeah, people actually didn’t have phenomenal consciousness until then.
And now consider what it is like if neither of these methods avail, because there is no person there, no point of space from which the voice emanates, a voice that you cannot back off from, as close to you as everything you call you, when it presence precludes all boundaries, when no escape is possible—flee and it flees with you—a voice unhindered by walls or distances, undiminished by muffing one’s ears, nor drowned out with anything, not even one's own screaming—how helpless the hearer! And if one belonged to a bicameral culture, where the voicess were recognized as at the utmost top of the hierarchy, taught you as gods, kings, majesties that owned you, head, heart, and foot, the omniscient, omnipotent voices that could not be categorized as beneath you, how obedient to them the bicameral man!
The book is absolutely crazy, but I would like to offer Jaynes some credit: to me the only part of the theory that is definitely wrong is the proposition that consciousness didn’t exist until ~2,000 B.C. The rest of it is only probably wrong. It’s the claims about consciousness, and the way he attempts to support these claims (e.g. a very close reading of the Iliad), that are ridiculous.
If you, for example, replace every time Jaynes uses the word “consciousness” with “free will,” you have something that is potentially interesting.4 The theory would be something like: before the invention of writing, people were subject to the voices in their heads, which they understood to be gods, and it wasn’t until the invention of writing cured this schizophrenia that people were able to exert their own agency. I still think it’s probably wrong, but it’s not clearly wrong, or at least not so clearly wrong.
The explanation of volition in subjective conscious men is still a profound problem that has not reached any satisfactory solution. But in bicameral men, this was volition. Another way to say it is that volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command, in which the command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey.
*Jaynes’s book is pretty expansive, and it includes a lot of discussion around the concepts of consciousness and free will. One of the neat things about the book is it forces you to think about the existence of functions of consciousness: he provides a lot of background on what we know about ancient peoples’ behavior, all in an effort to convince you that these people were not conscious at all—but it’s just really hard to imagine them engaging in any of these behaviors as unconscious, autonomous slaves to the voices in their heads. Which means that we (or at least I) implicitly believe that consciousness has some sort of effect on behavior—otherwise, it wouldn’t matter whether they were conscious or not, any behavior would be equally believable.
But it is an open scientific question whether consciousness does anything. Is consciousness a feature or an accident of evolution? If it’s a feature, what’s the benefit? This seems like the sort of thing we’d be able to figure out, because if there was a benefit, wouldn’t it be observable? Does consciousness change anything, besides the existence of a subjective world? If consciousness had never evolved, would the objective world be any different? Would super-intelligent aliens observing earth be able to determine whether there was any consciousness down here? It sure feels like surely, there must be some difference between a world of experiencing beings and a world of autonomous zombies. But what?
There are a lot of things that might seem like obvious functions of consciousness. For instance, it might seem like the experience of fear provides a real evolutionary advantage—the actual subjective experience of fear makes you more likely to avoid danger. But we can fully understand the evolutionary advantage of fear through its physical manifestation. Fear could be equally effective by influencing your behavior through your limbic system without producing any subjective experience of fear at all. It’s difficult to imagine what it would be like to be influenced to avoid danger without any specific accompanying experience (and I think this fact is important; and this thought experiment also forces you to wonder about free will and the involvement of consciousness therein), but the point is that our physical understand of the universe, sans consciousness, is sufficient to understand the evolution of fear (the biology; not the experience—remember, these two things are the stuff of two completely different worlds). So you’re still left wondering why consciousness evolved. The fact is, we don’t know whether consciousness has any function. Our current understanding really wants to cut off consciousness as a causal dead end—if there’s any downstream effect of consciousness, that would really upset scientific consensus, and all of those cold arguments against the existence of free will would start to look a little more malleable. Jaynes spends the first part of his book going over this problem.
Or what about problem solving? This is another thing commonly put forth as a potential function of consciousness. Can we achieve more effective problem solving by consciously thinking about something than we can by automatic, non-conscious processing? I mean, it doesn’t actually seem like that is the case. Do you feel like you’re better at math when you really exert yourself thinking about it? Do you feel like you’re better at painting, or navigating a difficult conversation, or anything really hard when you think really hard? Or are you most effective when you do things almost unconsciously?
When I’m, for example, writing, I wouldn’t say that I consciously figure out what words to use—it’s really more like I sit back and read what I have written so far and maybe try to call to mind a vague idea and I simply receive the words to write down. Your experience may differ, but in my experience, almost all of my actual conscious thought (when I think about it) is… pretty much useless. It’s me going round and round on programming problems I haven’t figured out, or remembering something enjoyable, or something embarrassing that happened to me, or something like that.
Try it yourself. Pay attention to what it’s like to do anything that you regularly do, and see if your conscious awareness plays any role in getting it done.
If you’re playing the piano and you become conscious of your fingers, you screw up. If you’re running and you start thinking about how your legs are moving, you might trip. Consciousness seems to deepen when we are making decisions, and become shallow when we are immersed in action—flow states are pleasant, but they aren’t experiences of higher consciousness, they’re experiences of subdued consciousness.
Jaynes:
If consciousness is the mere impotent shadow of action, why is it more intense when action is most hesitant? And why are we least conscious when doing something most habitual? Certainly this seesawing relationship between consciousness and actions is something that any theory of consciousness must explain.
But even if you feel like any of these things benefit from conscious awareness, the fact is that they do not conceptually require the existence of free will. You could imagine all of these—a runner running, a pianist playing, a painter painting, a programmer programming (or a computer programming itself), and a writer writing—in a universe where free will does not exist, happening as a result of the physical forces at work in unconscious brains, bodies, and the rest of the world. It’s really only the magical-seeming, causal, agentic decision making that is conceptually incompatible with a universe where free will does not exist.
Free will would be the ultimate function of consciousness. And the experience of making decisions, at least to me, does seem like a higher or deeper consciousness, as opposed to the experience of action. While trying to make a decision, you become a more mental being, less aware of the physical world and your body, more situated in the world of experience. Try it yourself. Pay attention to the experience of making a decision freely. What do you find?
**The vast majority of people insist that they experience free will (or at least they would if you asked them—I think the actual vast majority of people never think about it), but skeptics like Sam Harris insist they do not. Experienced meditators describe experience in a way that seems to exclude free will. Psychedelic trips often put the subject in a state of automaticity (see Superb Owl’s piece on free will). Many people are willing to accept that the experience of free will is merely an illusion when confronted with the lack of scientific explanation. But why can’t we agree on it? Why is free will up for question when consciousness is not?
This it what makes compatibilist theories seem like such a waste of time (in the words of Kant, “wretched subterfuge” and “word jugglery”). They neither allow for causal free will nor provide any insight on the experience of free will (illusion or no). To be fair, any explanation of any experience is basically impossible (explain the color red), but it does seem like it would be possible to do more than compatibilist theories do for the experience of free will.
The existence of a scientific theory of consciousness would resolve this. There are really only two possibilities: either free will actually exists and consciousness is somehow implicated in the explanation, or some compatibilist theory is true that explains why most people feel like they have free will even though it doesn’t exist as an independent causal mechanism. Sam Harris’s position that we don’t even experience free will doesn’t really seem to fit in anywhere, even if he’s right that when you get to the bottom of experience, there’s no free will to find—it’s not useful to just instruct people to spend decades meditating in the Himalayas so that they can see it, too. You still have to explain the fact that every other person on the planet believes they have it. So, in the absence of a theory of consciousness, the compatibilist theories are useless.
I think something that we could all explore is the possibility that the experience of free will is shakier than it might immediately seem, whether you fall into the free will skeptic camp or the free will enjoyer camp. Meditate in the grocery store, with the bacon in your hand. The more you pay attention, the less freedom there is to find. But also the more you pay attention, the greater capacity for freedom you may actually have, because you can only be free to the extent that your are conscious; so practice being conscious—avoid being a slave to the material world and the voice in your head.
Appendix: further reading
I’m really not qualified to talk about this. I’m not a neuroscientist nor a philosopher. I would highly recommend checking out some material written by experts before resolving any positions. In particular, check out these writers, all of whom I am a big fan of:
I’m really excited about Erik Hoel’s forthcoming book, which I suspect will have novel insight on this topic. He also wrote about an idea called causal emergence, which proposes a scientific way to things like consciousness and free will. From the abstract:
Some physical entities, which we often refer to as agents, can be described as having intentions and engaging in goal-oriented behavior. Yet agents can also be described in terms of low-level dynamics that are mindless, intention-less, and without goals or purpose. How we can reconcile these seemingly disparate levels of description?… I argue that agents, with their associated intentions and goal- oriented behavior, can actually causally emerge from their underlying microscopic physics.
Sam Harris, a free will skeptic, has a book about free will, and a very nice explainer podcast episode that provides different viewpoints and discussion on free will
Daniel Bennett, a compatibilist, has written a lot about free will, including a book
The universe might have fundamental randomness, but there’s no free will there, either. If something occurs absolutely randomly, it doesn’t really make sense to say you willed it.
A lot of free will discussion uses a definition of libertarian free will something like “the possibility of having chosen otherwise, if all conditions were reverted to their original state,” which is reliably rejected. I don’t find this definition particularly helpful. If I imagine that I do have free will, and conditions are reverted to the original state of a decision I made freely, I don’t imagine I would ever make a different choice, because all of the conditions are exactly the same; and I don’t see how this defeats the prospect of real causal free will. I think “the ability to have chosen otherwise” is a bit of a straw-man free will.
There are these experiments that are supposed to prove that free will is an illusion. They involve imaging your brain as you make a decision and apparently somehow they observe that the decision is made before you are aware of the decision. I’m really not convinced by this. What does it mean that the decision is made in the MRI? What does it mean that the subject is aware of the decision being made? How can you be sure the subject’s report of awareness perfectly corresponds to awareness? Couldn’t the delay just be the delay between making a decision and being able to report the decision? A lot of times this neuroscientific counter-evidence for free-will is summarized as “your brain makes the decision before you do,” to which my response is ??? What? What does that even mean? What is “you” and what is “your brain”? Presumably my brain makes all of my decisions, and does everything, and is me to some extent. Does it mean we don’t have free will if we aren’t perfectly consciously aware of decisions the instant they are “made”? Haven’t you had the experience of wrestling with a tough decision and then afterwards feeling like “you knew all along”? Did that shatter your belief in your own free will?
You might be wondering if in fact this was the claim that Jaynes was actually trying to make, and he simply used the term “consciousness” in a confusing way (which is easy to do). I am very nearly sure that this is not the case. He goes over his concept of consciousness pretty thoroughly.