The Question of Free Will

Do human beings have free will – or are what we see as our ‘choices’ and our future in fact strictly determined? I don’t see people running amok if the ‘wrong’ answer is given but it is important nonetheless to have some idea of where we stand and to give reassurance as to our independent identity.

This is a fundamental question that has, through the ages, received the attention of some mighty thinkers and it is still being posed today, informed opinion, as so often in other matters, taking its familiar oscillating trajectory. But, in my opinion that the answer to this question is a little more involved than simply a bald yes or no. Rather, I see the ‘dilemma’ as artificial.

A cynic might suppose that long established religions have a vested interest in the existence of free will (or else there would be no sin, no punishment and one less need to belong to religious groups) while science has, in times past, from time to time seemed to point towards the deterministic alternative as, surprisingly, have some more recent philosophers.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century at the highpoint of development of the world view of Newtonian Mechanics (which I will here caricature as quantified forces acting on particles like billiard balls) it seemed that given enough information about the relative positions and movements of the particles at any one time (and some kind of external and utterly vast computing capacity) the future could be predicted with certainty.

But the Romantic Movement had already reacted against the classical scientific mechanistic picture, and the ‘clockwork’ model was finally shattered by the advent of Quantum Mechanics and Field Theory. Even though the approach of quantum mechanics with its irreducible uncertainties has replaced the classical mechanics, it is not entirely clear that the classical conclusion regarding free will cannot be re-cast within this framework.

The great scientist Albert Einstein, although a co-founder of quantum theory, did not find its philosophical implications consistent with the world view that he preferred, and accordingly he expressed the opinion that – if we but knew it – the future was as entirely determined as the past.

I must say that while I heartily yearn for Einstein’s world view in general to be proved right (caricatured as ‘God does not play dice’ – i.e. there is something with a more defined structure underlying quantum mechanics) the free will conclusion is the one aspect that I would least wish to be true.

Einstein however, positioned himself away from the mainstream of developments in quantum theory. Even so, excursions into the weird world of the quantum have a tendency to produce a mystical train of thought- such for example as this: Perhaps the quantum world is the substrate of the mind of God and ‘reality’, and we ourselves, are thoughts within it.

There may be world views finding their origins in quantum theory that bear striking comparison with some (admittedly selected) of the assertions of eastern religions. These were presented very eloquently by Fritjof Kapra in his still popular book The Tao of Physics some years ago. The essential understanding that is relevant our subject here is that all times may merge into an eternal present. Kapra also draws our attention to the eastern view that opposite poles are manifestations of an underlying unity.

The apparent opposite poles that we are considering here are of course free will and determinism. I say ‘apparent’ since there is a unifying idea - the notion of constraint. Determinism would then be seen as perfectly constrained choice, there being only one possible outcome. Complete free will on the other hand would be the absence of any constraints – or would it?

It has been pointed out many times that without rules, without the ‘laws’ of physics (or indeed the Highway Code) there would exist only choiceless chaos. In fact we would not be here to make any choices at all, and even if in some Poincare event of unimaginable unlikelihood (now more often thought of as the question of ‘Boltzmann Brains’ arising if there was an infinite universe) an individual was accidentally and randomly assembled that individual would be unable to predict, even statistically, the outcomes of his actions and thus have no paths at all to follow.

So both determinism and free will can be seen as involving choice under constraint. The questions that remain are how much constraining is going on and is there an ideal level of constraint. In some ways the situation here is similar to one of the points that I made in Arne Saknussem. Different mixtures of constraints give rise to differing richness of choice possibilities and the ideal would produce a maximal range of high quality choices.

When you consider the orderliness of Nature and the small number of types of physical forces and constraints that there are (with the prospect of even fewer given the ongoing work of physicists to produce a unified theory) it seems likely to me that we are already close to that ideal level – a highly desirable circumstance with minimal, though essential constraints.

These are the main reasons why I think that the supposed dilemma between free will and determinism is an artificial and unproductive one. We can regard ourselves as having, as it were, freedom under the law (s of nature) and making choices accordingly. All roads do eventually lead to the Rome of choice.

Furthermore, in practical terms we must surely act as if we have genuinely free choices, constrained or not. Without this perspective there would be no sense of responsibility that extended beyond the self. So my position is that we can confidently go out and make our own (though hopefully not always immediately self-serving) choices and take responsibility for them.