I encountered a video on YouTube which I liked and I will write it out with some minor editing below and then comment on it. This video about 12 minutes long, and is entitled, Do You Have Free Will?, and the video is produced by Kurzgesagt.
Kurzgesagt (K after this): “Are you free? Free to choose what you do and make decisions? Or are you an NPC, unable to decide anything for yourself?”
My response: Apparently NPC can stand for a quite submissive non-player character in a video game, who is other-controlled, and this acronym in this video is the producer’s synonym, I assume, for a puppet, without free will.
K: “Do you feel that you have control over your life or at least what you had for breakfast.”
My response: I am driven by common sense: if billions of people subjectively sense that they are free and wielding a personal free will, it likely is what they say it is, for God will not deceive us or play cruel games upon us by convincing us that we are free when we are not, or that we could burn in hell for sinning, when we really do not control our choices or actions. This whole line of thinking seems counterfactual to common experience, as well as counterintuitive to how a kindly good deity would treat humans.
I also regard good deities as individuators, and, I believe that God loves freedom, adventure, and wondrous, open-ended human inventions to react to; our being robots in no way serves God’s purpose, wholesome pleasure, or Creative Impulse. Maybe God enjoys the company of fellow individuators.
K: “But this may actually be an illusion. Physics may actually force you to go through life as if on rails, with no free will at all. You experience free will all the time like when you decided to watch this video instead of doing something useful.
Free will is your ability by yourself to decide what you can do. It means the future is an open arena that you can shape with your actions. It’s at the core of human relationships. You are responsible for your actions which is the basis for our moral and legal systems.”
My response: Clearly physics does influence us, yet we are self-causal and the originator of our own actions too. If my insisting that natural forces determine us in part, and that we determine ourselves in part, I believe that is factual and logically possible though perhaps contradictory. If this is compatibilism, it is one that allows for metaphysical libertarianism at work in the will of the individual, especially for the developed person, the individuators.
It seems as if we suffer from spiritually, socially, and biologically predestining forces too: it is enough to make one slump down, and never try to rise again. We are born evil and live in an evil world run by Satan and Lera. We live by an evil moral code, altruism, and we group-identify and group-live and these are evil practices.
Without acknowledging our extant free will and moral responsibility capacities which we are to strengthen and live in accordance to, society will turn totally wicked, and her children will burn in hell, if this nomological stance of determinism becomes universally accepted.
Those, that promote determinism as the human lot, be those determining forces causal, scientific and secular, religious (predestination), are clamoring, indirectly and perhaps unintentionally, for authoritarian legal and political structures to enslave and subjugate people. The good deities are constitutional republicans and libertarian anarchists, so rigid deterministic political arrangements to control the citizen and agent down to the last petty choice made by him, is an abomination to these liberty-loving Individuators.
K: “There are too many dimensions for one short video: moral, psychological, biological, so we will focus on the most essential part: Is Free Will Even Possible?”
My response: Free will for humans is not only possible but it is an innate, unavoidable capacity which we all possess and are called by God to employ to choose virtue, to grow a good will and a virtuous character. Free will is not only possible, but it is an inevitable burden and responsibility which each human, if she matures, will assume. To choose not to choose to choose how to live is to choose.
I am an ethicist, but, recently I discovered that without the presupposition in place that all humans field a free will, pedaling egoist morality is an utter waste of time, if humans are puppets being exhorted to be responsible and behave better.
I wish to take a stand supporting free will because it is our reality, and people cannot be good unless they choose to go and sin no more, or sin a heckuva lot less.
K: “Two main philosophical camps are fighting about this. No matter how we represent them, they will be upset it, so we will use our own words.
The first camp is that the idea of free will is fundamentally incompatible with the laws of the universe.”
My response: Ayn Rand writes that for nature to be commanded, it must be obeyed, and Ithink that is right: much of our unconscious and automatic psychological processes are ruled by natural law, so, as we self-cause, we are able to make choices. Since I have not wings, I cannot fly like a bird, but I can choose to have whole wheat toast rather than rye toast for breakfast. Our free will is not without limits or worldly constraints, so, within certain confining brackets, we can choose a remarkable range of activities to chase after.
K: “You are an NPC: whatever you exactly are, it is made up of your physical brain and body.”
My response: I refute these materialistic monists and atheists who deny that human consciousness or soul power is the proof that reality is dualistic—matter and spirit, not just matter.
K: “And these are made of cells, which are made of proteins, which are made of atoms and particles like protons and electrons. Specifically, quite fundamentally, you are a dynamic passel of particles. They have no will, no motivation, no freedom. They blindly follow the laws of physics.
And we don’t know why but most laws of physics are deterministic (Ed says, some are not, and randomness still is a factor in reality.) which means things happen the way they do because of things that came before. If you play pool and hit a ball at a specific speed and angle, the laws of physics will tell you exactly how all the balls on the table will behave: their speed, recoil, direction, everything. These laws completely decide the laws of all balls on the table. At the microscopic level, things work very much like that only without players. Actions and reactions affect all the particles in the universe, creating a causal chain with effects which extend through out time from the past to the future.
Things happen making other things happen. Then imagine right after the Big Bang a super-smart super-computer looked at every particle in the universe and noted all their properties. Just by the deterministic laws of physics it should be able to predict what all the particles in existence will be doing until the end of time, but if you are made of particles and it is technically possible to calculate what particles will do forever, then you never decided anything.”
My response: Hard determinists predict that all are caused by previous nudgers, animate or inanimate, and hat God or a super-computer, omniscient, would have foreknowledge entailing that we do not act freely, nor will independently as they prefer, but that is not right.
K: “Your past, presence and future were already predetermined and decided at the Big Bang. Then it would mean there is a kind of fate and you are not free to decide anything. You may feel like your are making decisions, but you are actually on autopilot. The motions of the particles which make up your brain cells that made you decide to watch this video were made 14 billion years ago.
You are just in the room when it happens. You are only witnessing how the universe inside you unfolds in real time But this can’t be true because of quantum mechanics, right? Quantum processes are intrinsically random, not deterministic, and can’t be predicted with total certainty.
On the quantum pool table, balls can go randomly left or up or banana. Their behavior isn’t set by what came before but randomly decided in real time. But for the non-free will camp, this doesn’t affect their argument. They think that since quantum processes are random, they don’t allow you to make any decisions, because if there is, there is randomness for the things that fundamentally make up your brain and body, these random process made the decision for you.
How? Say an electron can randomly go right or left. If it goes left, it triggers electric currents between your neurons that create a neuronal process, which triggers a long chain of actions which make you watch a youtube video. Or does it go right and makes you clean your room? Just because the chain is extremely complex doesn’t mean you have control over it.
So maybe your fate was not decided at the Big Bang but it is decided at this very moment. The important part is that it’s not decided by you. You get no say in this, you have no free will. Wow. This is kind of a bummer because the argument fundamentally seems to make sense.”
My response: No determinism does not fundamentally make sense for creative, innovative thinkers of high consciousness, creatures like human beings.
K: “Except, nooooooo, screams the free will side. This is a really bad way to think about the universe. You are the main character. We know that and we reduce everything that exists to basic particles and the laws that guide them. While this makes physics feel like the only scientific description that actually matters, there is a problem. You can’t explain everything in our universe only in terms of particles.
One key fact about reality that we can’t explain by just looking at electrons and quantum stuff is emergence. Emergence is when many small things together create new fundamental traits that didn’t exist before.
A drop of water is just a sextillion molecules. If you get water on your pants, they get wet. But what is wetness? H2O molecules are not wet. But your pants are definitely wet now. Many small things together just created something new that doesn’t exist at the level of individual molecules. Emergence occurs at all levels of reality, and reality seems to be organized in layers: atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, you, society.
Put many things in one layer together and they will create the next layer up (Great Chain of Being? Ed Says and Asks?). Every time they do, entirely new properties emerge. One atom can’t handle information, but many of them together can form a DNA molecule. Molecules are not alive, but many of them can form a cell and cells are alive.
With each jump up the complexity ladder the rules of what is possible change. Completely new things emerge that are much more than the sum of their parts. And here the reductionist view of the universe breaks down. The layers of reality need each other to make sense.”
My response: I like this theory of emergent consciousness, non-reductive and more than just the biological brain, as the ghost in the machine, the ghost which wield free will.
K: “You can explain living things with cells, cells with molecules and molecules with atoms. But because of emergence, you can’t start with quantum particles and reconstruct the universe. You can’t explain galaxies with quantum molecules, or human psychology with quarks.
This is not the whole story. Reality is not just structured in layers, but, for some reason, the layers are also largely independent of each other. Things existing within the same level can influence each other and maybe a layer up and down. To figure out how your organs work you don’t need quarks. To understand politics, you don’t need to know about cells. If you want to explain things happening on one layer, you can only do that by staying close to that layer.
‘Nooooooo’ screams the no-free will camp in frustration. You can’t use magic to explain free will. But the emergence argument doesn’t invoke magic. It just says thinking about free will in terms of determinism and fundamental laws is a dead end. A kind of category error, like trying to explain galaxies by looking at your digestive tract. It is part of a reductionist school of thinking about the universe that very successfully shaped science for a long time—but that’s been challenged by emergence. So maybe, trying to understand free will by looking at fundamental particles, deterministic laws and quantum mechanics misses the point.
The question we should be asking is—which layer of reality is relevant to free will? Well, just like no individual molecule creates wetness, not a single cell in your brain wants to watch YouTube. But one layer up, your brain made of 80 billion interconnected neurons does. On this layer all the things relevant to you emerge: your consciousness, character, feelings, your fears, and dreams. This is where you emerge. We don’t know why and how, but we know you’re here, right now.”
How all the things going on in your brain play off each other to make you who you are is a whole different can of worms—but, on this layer of reality, you are part of the decision process. Because, at this level, ‘you’ are just one more physical cause of whatever happens in your brain. You are shaped by your decisions and your decisions are shaped by you. You have a say about this layer of reality. You are not just witnessing how the universe inside you unfolds—you’re actually taking part in it. And you are free to do so however you see fit. At least this is how some on the free will side see it.
Conclusion and opinion:
So who is right? Is there free will? We don’t know, If you ask us personally, we think the argument for free will is more appealing because it brings the complexity of the universe to the table. Maybe existence is just a sum of its parts but at least for now it seems the universe is not that simple.
But even if we don’t have free will, it’s not clear what that changes for practical purposes. You and us, on a purely subjective basis, feel like we have free will and that your decisions are yours to make. As long as we are not sure either way, and if it feels like you are making decisions, what does it matter if a non-existent super-computer could have calculated the future at the big bang? Or if quantum stuff is all the way down randomly nudges your cells one way or the other? In any case, now you can decide what to do next. Maybe get some stuff done? Or watch more of our videos? It’s your decision! Probably. 10:20 . . .”
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