Addressing The Best Argument Against Free Will To Show How We Do Have Free Will

 

In the article on my side bar (link here), I laid out my thesis on free will and determinism - and I expanded on it even more comprehensively in a chapter in my book The Genius of the Invisible God (which isn’t yet available). In that book, I explain why part of the genius of God’s creation is that we do have free will but in a deterministic universe – although that’s too involved for this post, so you might have to buy the book when it comes out to see why. 😊

Below is some leftover material that I thought I’d turn into an article, as there’s lots of interesting stuff still there.

In most cases, three quarters of a problem is solved when concepts are defined clearly, so let me start by defining free will as the ability to make choices in a way in which you could have made different choices. Under that definition, perhaps the best argument against free will, would be as follows. There are only two types of decision you can make in life - a decision based on your desire to do something, or a decision based on being forced to do something. Every single decision you make falls into one of those categories; you either desired to do it or you were forced to do it against your natural desire. Your desire to do something means you wanted to do it because you still preferred to do it when considered against all other alternatives.

To avoid a possible misunderstanding here, your desire to do something doesn't just mean doing the things you enjoy doing or are glad you are doing. You might say, for example, I had my Covid vaccine, but I didn't really desire to do it - I hate needles, and felt compelled to do it to protect myself and others from Covid. But that doesn't mean you didn't desire to do it. You still weighed up the other options and decided that having the vaccine was the decision that provided the preferred utility amongst competing preferences. You may not have enjoyed your Covid vaccine, and you may wish you lived in a world where you didn't need it, but in having it when no one forced you to have it, you desired to have it. When you do something you wouldn't ordinarily choose to do with enthusiasm, it's still because your desire to do it is stronger than competing desires, because the benefits to you outweigh the costs.

Having hopefully convinced you that every decision is either something you desire or something you are forced to do, an argument is then put forward to suggest that this means we don't have free will. The reasoning goes that if you are forced to do something that you didn't desire, then that isn't free will, but if you did desire it, that isn't free will either because we don't control or choose what we desire. Suppose one evening I fancy watching either Frasier or Seinfeld, and I can't choose which I prefer. I desire either Frasier or Seinfeld, but I didn't control my desire to narrow it down to those two options. Suppose I think about it for another couple of minutes, and then opt for Frasier - I did so because my desire for Frasier was slightly greater than my desire for Seinfeld. But I can't choose to desire Frasier more than Seinfeld - it occurred within my internal cognitive machinery. We can't control any of our desires, it seems - they happen to us within our subconscious, based on all our experiences over a lifetime. Think of something you don't desire right now. You probably don't desire that you will fall over and break your pelvis this evening. And if you tried your hardest to desire it, you still wouldn't be able to.

You may be thinking, hang on, suppose I had a slight preference for Frasier, but I chose to override that desire and watch Seinfeld instead - doesn't that demonstrate that I have free will? Alas, no, that doesn't solve the problem, because all it shows is that your desire to demonstrate your belief in free will and watch Seinfeld was stronger than your desire to watch Frasier - you still didn't choose or have any control over the desire. We can't change something we desire into something we don't desire, or vice versa, without desiring to change the desire. At any point, the desire comes upon us, we don't come upon it.

This is perhaps the most persuasive argument against free will; we either do things we are forced to do, in which case it's not free will; or we to something we desire to do, but we can't control our desires, in which case it's not free will either. And to take it further, if we don't have free will, then how can Christianity make sense, given that it's predicated on our being sinners who must freely chose to repent and accept the price Jesus paid for our forgiveness on the cross? How can God punish us for not repenting if we have no desire to repent, and no control over our desire to repent, or our desire to desire to repent? Taken at face value, it seems to put us in an unenviable position that potentially undermines the framework of Christianity.

Yet even that argument, as well made as it appears to be, doesn't convince me - because it doesn't seem to be speaking about the reality we know and experience. Even if we don't fully understand all the conditions and antecedent causes for our decisions, our desires and our will, we still live as though we have the ability to make choices in a way in which we could have made different choices – and that is what I will now unpack.

When you make an ethical statement - "Jack should put back on the shelf that laptop he has just picked up to steal" you are making a statement as though Jack has a choice. Even if you think it's an illusion, you still think as though Jack is as agent of choices with other alternatives. If Jack goes through with the theft, you might feel angry with him - which suggests there is a sense in which you feel like he made the wrong choice. Under hard determinism, for those who say our sense of free will is illusory, are they really just angry at the universe’s deterministic algorithms? Perhaps they think you are, but it doesn't really feel like they are - it feels more like they are angry with Jack, in this instance.

Whichever way we cut the cloth, we act as though people are responsible for their actions. Suppose your son comes home from school, happy that he got top marks in his exam - you would feel a sense of pride in is achievements. But this feeling suggests he got top marks by efforts that could have produced alternative outcomes. Feeling a sense of pride feels like an emotional response to a set of choices that someone you love has made. Would you feel pride if you really felt like your son's achievements were all just part of the universe's pre-programmed determinism, over which he had no control? I have my doubts. Other things we do, like offer advice and guidance, or think hard about what course of action we should take against several alternatives, are done with our minds presupposing that agency and will are fundamental elements in the equation.

As I said at the start, I actually do think the universe is ultimately deterministic in the hard sense, it’s just that our free will is of a different and more complex nature to what most people think. But even if we take the standard free will vs. determinism debate on the free-will-denier’s terms - when we try to decide which we accept out of free will or determinism, we actually rationalise as though there is some free will, but yet in accepting determinism over free will, our reasoning process is behaving as though determinism is false.

Furthermore, we act as though there is a point to doing things, and a purpose too. Think of your wife and children, you home life, your job; you act as though these things are important - to you, to your family, to the wider society - but you don't act as though you presuppose you had to do action x, or that it was impossible to not do x. There's not a good reason to do something if you are inevitably going to do it, and can't not do it - yet you act as though there is a good reason to do it. In a purely deterministic, free-will-denying world, everything is either inevitable or impossible - and even hard determinists don't think, speak and act as though that's true. If you don't think, speak and act in accordance with what you claim to believe, that the belief is somewhat undermined by a stronger interpretation of reality that you, the determinist, lives by - this potentially defeats the foundation of the belief.

A deeper dive
Now we need to go deeper. Existence is a complex subject, and things exist in a diverse range of ways. Ditto the nature of being 'free' and having 'will'. Consequently, the notion of free will existing is a spectrum, not merely a binary proposition, bound up in the complex dynamic between first and third person phenomenology. Reality comes in the first person and third person perspectives - that is, one's view of oneself, and the third person perspective of that self. It's a hasty presumption to discount the concepts of 'free' and 'will' merely through the lens of the highly deterministic particulate third person account of human beings. Just because we believe we have got to grips with mental activity from a third person perspective, I don't think it means we can use that as a viable basis for ruling out degrees of free will from the first person perspective.

The first person perspective is a different category of consideration from the outside third person perspective - there are aspects of first person cognition that transcend the elemental measurements of third-person empirical analysis, even though third person manipulations of the brain can throw up some quite bizarre altered states of consciousness. Despite those bizarre anomalies, the fact remains that freedom from the first person perspective has a category of intrapersonal depth and fecundity that is beyond the lower resolution third person exploration (remember the famous 'king of infinite space' observation in Hamlet). This kind of freedom may well belong more in the arts than the sciences (although it can quite easily belong in both).

Under the first person perspective, there is a complex multidimensional spectrum of freedom, conditioned by a whole range of tenets of personality and character qualities: truthseeking, intelligence, authenticity, temperament, psychology, discipline, aspiration, conscientiousness, goodness, ethics, and so on. If you take the positive elements of the above, juxtaposed with the negative (good better than bad, truth better than falsehood, intelligence better than stupidity, etc) then you'll find that the individual self can enjoy a greater kind of freedom by wedding themselves to the positive values, and a more constricting life by wedding themselves to the negative values. Love the truth, and the world expands beyond your wildest dreams; love goodness and your reality opens up into a joy not previously anticipated, that sort of thing.

Given the primary facet of reality is phenomenological, I think it is the case that these tenets of what we might call 'freedom' and 'will' do exist. The first person reality in which they are experienced differs from the third person deterministic reality measured from the outside, but we enter very shaky grounds if we use that pretext to say it doesn't exist. I think there is also Biblical truth in this notion, which St. Augustine taps into when he says that serving God is greater freedom for us. We read from Christ that ‘Everyone who sins is a slave to sin’ (John 8:34), but in the next breath that "‘If the Son sets you free you will be free indeed’ (John 8:36). That seems to me to hint at a connection between greater freedom and a greater life if we embrace Divine things and die to those old habits.

People ensnared by naïve scientism often just can’t get to grips with the fact that there is a complex set of phenomenological first person experiential testimonies that not only transcend the third person perspective of mind, they actually transcend the third person’s suite of knowledge on how physical reality actually operates. Moreover, we need an up and running first person mental structure that integrates our experiential qualia into coherent patterns before we can even begin to discuss the third person ordinances of physics, so to suggest that the latter has a more primary existence in terms of free will over the former is quite a dodgy place to go. As soon as we become a responsible agent, and think and act as though progress can be made, and that some things have a higher value than other things, we live as though free choices are an integral part of that state of being.

If we can review the past, contemplate the present, and make forecasts about the future in relation to our decisions and values, then we operate as though free will is part of the intellectual and emotional substrate of our life. If as a result we get to partake in the world and relate to each other, then phenomenologically there are no real grounds for denying that choice and agency are fundamental to first person selfhood.