Free Will : what is it and what are my opinions on it? The idea of free will has consumed me since my religious days, and it still consumes me now that I have left those days behind. This journal entry will be used to attempt to understand my own positions. My goal is to narrate my understanding of the concept throughout my years, and then to try and place my current understanding of the issue firmly for perhaps the first time on secular footing within my head. I hope I don’t lose myself.
My understanding of free will began during my time as a Christian, where I was taught that free will was a gift from God. For what purpose he decided to give it to us was unclear. Some suggested that he wanted something to choose to worship him as it made the worship more meaningful. Others have suggested that it is merely an experiment in creation. Either way, the text of Genesis doesn’t go into why we were given free will, but it certainly gets into the consequences of us having it. Free will is what allowed Adam and Eve to choose to sin, and eat the fruit of knowledge. It is the reason we were cast out of the garden of Eden, the reason that we must struggle for survival, the reason for pain in childbirth. But, perhaps most importantly for Christians, it allowed us to choose to accept or reject Jesus Christ. Free will was the basis for our whole system of eternal judgement. People who freely chose evil, or chose to reject God were appropriately punished in the afterlife for eternity. It was our choices that revealed the nature and final resting place of our eternal soul.
Of course as I grew up and learned more about the world, I realized there was more to choosing Jesus other than pure internal decision-making. Some people didn’t even have the luxury of hearing about Jesus to be able to make the choice. There were entire tribes who grew up in remote, uncontacted villages and lived their entire life without hearing the good word. Their free will didn’t do much good for them in that regard. I always struggled to understand how a fair system of judgement could allow certain souls to be born into this world with essentially no chance of learning about Jesus. If they had free will and yet no chance to save themselves by nature of their birth, then of what point was free will? Also, another issue was the length of the trial and the length of the judgment: the 70 or so years that we were alive and conscious seemed to be an awfully brief period of time to figure things out before an eternal afterlife. Mathematically speaking, the ratio of life to afterlife was equivalent to making a judgement on someone in an instant. Even free will didn’t seem to balance that equation out, and that’s not even to mention how much the circumstances of our childhood impact our decision making as an adult.
While it may seem paradoxical to some, leaving Christianity actually had me finally celebrating free will. As pointed out in the above paragraph, free will seemed almost insignificant in influencing the outcome of the cosmic lottery when it came to Christianity. But without Christianity, my life and the choices that impacted it were literally everything I had! Free will helped me to achieve my goals, to live the best life as I chose to define it. But my joy in such a realization was short-lived as shortly I would be challenged on my concept of free will just as much as I was challenged on my concept of God and the afterlife. The culprit : determinism.
Modern determinism says that ultimately nothing happens in the brain that could have happened another way. From the laws of physics to the laws of chemistry, any individual neuron seemingly has no choice but to fire when the appropriate neurotransmitter builds up at one of the synaptic terminals. Where is the “choice” in this model?
This challenge really shook me. There was something different about giving up the idea of free will over giving up other ideas from Christianity like heaven, hell, and eternal life. When giving up ideas on the afterlife, it only made this one life more precious, because life was so rare and fleeting. Removing free will on the other hand felt like reducing the value of life and it’s specialness. Being able to experience the universe and yet lacking the ability to control how I acted in such a universe just felt wrong.
But then I realized.
Removing free will wasn’t really removing my ability to make decisions.. it was just removing the ghost-in-the-machine theory of decision-making. All it meant was that perhaps I shouldn’t define my “self” as a dual nature entity, with part of me in this universe and part of me somehow beyond this universe. Perhaps I should instead define my “self” as purely something material, and what’s wrong with that? Well, I suppose the obvious answer is that if I only obey immutable laws of nature, then I have no part in the decision making process…. But, wait a minute… I am the decision making process of nature! I am a self aware, self-sustaining, replicating pattern of nature. Isn’t that incredible enough?
The idea that I am completely separate from - and in complete control over - my own personal piece of nature (my body) is only really relevant in a framework where the actions of my body have consequences for the part of me separate from my body. In other words, the idea of a soul controlling a body is only relevant in a system where that soul has consequences for the use of the body. And if the soul has consequences for the use of the body, then the two are causally linked anyway, just as much as a system of neurons controlling a body. At that point, what’s the difference between the mind being judged on the body’s actions and the soul being judged on the body’s actions? Why even have some soul-body hybrid where ½ of the system is judged on the use of the other half? After all, perhaps even in the realm of the soul there are just as immutable laws for determining what the soul will do! Removing the responsibility of the actions one level away from reality doesn’t remove the problem that the souls desires could also just be predetermined according to another system of rules. It’s just pushing the question down the road, and pushing it just far enough away that we can’t say we know what’s going to happen. The only reason that people say the realm of the soul is fundamentally unpredictable is because they have defined it as such a place in advance. I dare even suggest it falls victim to the fallacy of begging the question. It really seems like a conveniently invented cop out, and an unnecessary one at that.
The thing is, it’s my theory that even without a soul, decisions are fundamentally unpredictable anyway, at least by modern scientific standards over any reasonable time period. The principle that there could be enough knowledge to ever predict my actions just because we can measure chemistry in a jar may already be absurd to begin with. In fact, there may be more evidence against such a principle than for it in a form of chaos theory.
Chaos theory is normally a prediction that there are certain systems which require complete knowledge of initial conditions to determine the outcome. For example, even after the hundreds of years we have had to develop mathematical models, we still can’t predict the outcome of a simple 3 body orbiting system. What I would like to argue here however is that such an orbit may not be deterministic at all. In theory it is, because all models we have build to simulate chaotic systems were built off of replicatable systems of logic but we have yet to replicate such a simulation in the real world. I'm arguing that perhaps it will never be replicated in the real world where we can know the outcome of a chaotic system to the end of time. For just just 3 bodies in motion, we may be able to predict the motion for a couple hundred years, just as we may be able to detect the choice a person is about to make under extremely controlled conditions in an fMRI machine a couple milliseconds in advance. But the evolution of chaotic systems will diverge from prediction exponentially fast based on the number of interactions and I think we are near the limit. In that regard, perhaps the knowledge of future outcomes in a material universe may be as obscure as equivalent predictions on any realm of souls ever could be. Whether you call it free will because you define it as free, or whether you call it free because it’s outcome is fundamentally unpredictable, I think it makes no difference in a practical sense.
I am my nervous system. I am made of the material universe. You will not be able to predict where I direct my will outside of highly controlled or statistical scenarios. It is as free of a will as there ever was or ever could be.