Great Illusion

by Paul Singh

  Nevertheless, too many defenders of free will want something far grander than a natural free will. When they stubbornly declare that a person has no free will over an action unless she could have done otherwise, they aren’t impressed by Hume’s way, or modern science’s way, of handling human freedom. How a person actually does what gets willed isn’t sufficient, they declare. Such philosophers—like Kant, for example—aren’t interested in a person’s actions being free just because they are willed. They are concerned about whether a person’s will is free to will what it happens to will. After all, they reason, unless important components to a person’s free action is also itself free as well, that action can’t be truly and completely free. It turns out that such free will simply does not exist.

  Free will defenders agree that a person’s willing decision to do something should result in the intended action, in order for the person to display liberty of action. What about the liberty of the will itself? Having committed the fallacy of division (if something has a power or property P as a whole, then some or all of its parts must have P as well), they demand that a vital part of a person’s free action, that person’s will to act, must be just as free, too. This sounds innocent enough, but it is still a fallacy, and a firm argument must be additionally supplied to bridge that fallacious gap.

  Instead of filling that logical gap, a second fallacy is promptly committed by free will’s defenders, the fallacy of false analogy. If a person’s control over an action is just like a person’s control over their own will, then the test for free will should be just like a test for a free action. But controlling one’s mental thoughts is very different from controlling one’s body in physical space; you don’t have to be a mind-body dualist to see how that analogy is weak. We control our bodies by activating our muscles to balance against external forces that we can feel resisting us so we can get things done in the world. Is that what thoughtfully deciding what to do is like? Do we activate our “mental” muscles to put energy into preferred thoughts in resistance to other thoughts having their own powers of resistance against us? Certainly not. Only some sort of amateur psychologist would depict matters that way, and even then, the analogy is supposed to be only metaphorical and suggestive. A person’s control over an action really isn’t like controlling one’s will.

  Ignoring both fallacies, defenders of freedom of the will set a requirement along the following lines. A person’s will, they say, could have willed otherwise in the moment of willing, if a person’s will is truly free. They then design a required test for this “could have willed otherwise” that goes something like this: If a will is free, then at the moment of decision, and with everything exactly the way it is, a will could both decide to do an action and not to do that action.

  These requirements go far beyond anything suggested by ordinary free will. We aren’t really talking about ordinary free will any more, but rather “freedom of the will.” Because ardent defenders are rarely careful about their labels or their meanings, too many just use “free will” as the label for what they prefer to defend, and cause a great deal of confusion. We must keep distinct a defense of free will from a defense of freedom of the will. They are two very different things, with different requirements for fulfilling them.

  Defenders of freedom of the will treat the will as a mini-person, applying to the will the same sort of criteria for freedom that they apply to the whole person. If a person is free only if nothing outside of the self completely determines what he or she does, then the same must be true for the will itself; a will is free only if nothing outside of it completely determines what it does. Even if things outside the will inform and influence it, the will must supply something extra to finally decide what is to be done, so that it retains the ability to both choose and change any choice.

  Defending a radical kind of freedom of the will takes an enthusiast far beyond anything empirical, worldly, or natural.

  Freedom from Reality

  Taking a position on freedom of the will, in contrast to free will, isn’t a simple matter. Consider the philosopher committed to defending what the Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne calls the “FoW” criterion, namely, that “if a will is free, then at the moment of decision, and with everything exactly the way it is, a will could both decide to do an action and not to do that action.” The FoW criterion is that the will must be able to suspend influences from outside itself at the moment of decision, so that nothing has determining control over it. A will’s decision may be helpfully shaped by available information, of course. The will should be receptive and reasonable, rather than arbitrary.

  This FoW criterion is commonly accepted among philosophers and theologians who prefer dualism over naturalism, usually for religious reasons. Dualism asserts that a person as a whole, and something within a person as well, cannot be entirely physical in nature and operation. This non-physicality is manifested in a power to counter-balance and even override what would otherwise happen according to forces and laws. That way, a person can do some things which aren’t entirely controlled by those natural causes.

  In Western philosophy, following Plato, the basic way to be a dualist is to believe that the physical world is ultimately shaped and controlled by a nonphysical power, a power able to guide the cosmos for the general good of the whole and for the good of each specific thing. Because this power is able to deliberately guide matters great and small, it can be characterized as a mind, with intended goals and the intelligence to attain them. Each person also participates in this power to control one’s own life and guide it towards whatever goals appear to be good. Unlike the cosmic mind, individual human minds only partially and dimly understand what is truly good, and we all get distracted by many emotions and desires that prevent us from doing what is good.

  And, ever since Plato, explaining how our mental abilities can control bodily urges has remained a primary philosophical problem. The more the mind is independent from the natural world, the harder it becomes to explain how such different things can have any relationship. Christianity adopted many Platonic ideas about the human soul’s ability to intellectually control the body, and appealed to God’s (mysteriously) divine powers to affirm that a human soul is (miraculously) united with a human body during one’s earthly lifetime.

  Christian theology still hasn’t been able to decide whether it must emphasize this unity of mind and body, or emphasize the differences between body and mind. Emphasizing their unity makes it easy to explain why humans easily and eagerly choose bodily pleasures and sin, but explaining why anything about us deserves immortality becomes harder. Emphasizing their disunity makes it easy to explain how human souls are separable from the body after death but impossible to explain how the body can have such power over the soul as to make it sin.

  René Descartes upheld theological dogma by arguing that the mental world and the physical world have nothing in common. The mental world consists of the ongoing processes of thinking concerning our ideas about what is sensed, remembered, imagined, inferred, doubted, believed, intended, valued, and the like. The material world consists of objects of varying sizes and energies which have extension, solidity, motion, and related physical properties. This dichotomy between the mental and the material worlds permitted Descartes to believe in the immaterial soul and its immortality, as well as the free will of the soul, which cannot be (entirely) dictated by material forces. Descartes, however, did not write enough about free will to explain his psychological theory about the will, and he never settled on a satisfactory account of the mind’s control over the body. Philosopher Lilli Alanen describes the hopeless situation for the Cartesian position in this way:

  On Descartes’ view, human nature is constituted essentially of a union between two different natures, which can be clearly and distinctly understood only when considered as distinct from each other. I will not dwell on the ontology of this problematic notion, for I grant that it is, in the end, incoherent. Descartes himself recognizes as much in declaring tha
t we cannot conceive at the same time the mind and the body as distinct and as constituting one single thing. [Lilli Alanen, Descartes’ Concept of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 48.]

  Religiously-minded philosophers, unlike the theologians, couldn’t dismiss the “mind-body” problem as yet another example of a conundrum handled by a God but inscrutable to everyone else. All the same, ever since Descartes, they have typically upheld free will, denied that the mind is material in nature, affirmed that moral judgments can be held against people’s voluntary actions but not mere bodily motions, and affirmed that the soul can survive the death of the body.

  Secular philosophers couldn’t so easily grant these hoped-for results from keeping mind and matter distinct. Materialism, once a minority view, developed during the nineteenth century into naturalism, to stand as the opposition to dualism and supernaturalism. Gilbert Ryle announced his naturalistic rebellion by describing his target as “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine”—a dogma which we have previously discussed.

  Although an immaterial mind needn’t be controlled by anything physical, by definition, it remains impossible to conceive how anything immaterial could exert control over anything physical. Science has never been in the business of postulating the inconceivable to pass it off as an explanation. The scientific study of the brain, on the other hand, has been explaining more and more about the life of the mind. Michael Gazzaniga has recently affirmed the stance of scientific naturalism against the dualistic notion of free will:

  In traditional philosophy, free will is the belief that human behavior is an expression of personal choice that is not determined by physical forces, Fate, or God. YOU are calling the shots. YOU, a self with a central command center, are in charge, are free from causation, and are doing things. You can be free from outside control, coercion, compulsion, delusion, and inner lack of restraint over your actions. . . . [H]owever, the modern perspective is that brains enable minds, and that YOU is your vastly parallel and distributed brain without a central command center. There is no ghost in the machine, no secret stuff that is YOU. [Michael Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), p. 108.]

  To continue nonetheless to assert that mind can control matter while remaining distinct and aloof from matter, as many dualist and supernaturalist thinkers still claim, is the upholding of dogma indeed. So long as the mind can form intentions and make decisions no matter what influences may arrive from a physical brain, then the test raised by the FoW criterion can be passed. If the will is mental, then it can evade control by physical energies and forces. Whether those natural influences are strictly deterministic or whether they are somewhat indeterministic (how the universe evolves is only somewhat determined by statistical laws of nature), is not really relevant. Freedom of the will, by the FoW criterion, requires that no matter what the universe happens to be doing at the moment of a willful decision, the will can still choose one action or another, and which action gets chosen is determined more by the will than by the universe.

  The reader may be relieved to hear that it really isn’t necessary to discuss the entire debate over determinism and indeterminism as it has played out in the debate over free will. Although friends of freedom of the will have no choice, due to the FoW criterion, but to regard a rigidly deterministic universe as a foe of free will unless the will can escape the grip of the physical world, the will can’t be permitted to answer to a quantum indeterministic world either. Even if the physical universe is ultimately indeterministic according to quantum mechanics, as some naively believe, quantum mechanical control over mental judgments and choices is still control, leaving no control by a will unless the will can transcend the quantum realm as well. To see why, imagine that I want to enter a locked building, but my only way to enter is to go through a guarded door. The door is guarded by a doorman who doesn’t recognize me, so he flips a coin to determine whether he will let me in. When the coin toss comes up in my favor and he opens the door to me, did I freely enter the building entirely of my power? Not really, because it was due to chance that I was allowed into the building by another power. By analogy, just because quantum indeterminacies can’t strictly and precisely control the will, its erratic influences will still manage to control the will Randomness is just as much an enemy to free will as is determinism. Determinism or indeterminism, it doesn’t matter — the dualist must insist that a free will has some sort of unusual power of its own to resist whatever the universe happens to be locally doing at the moment of willful choice.

  What is clear is that devotion to the FoW criterion drives free will enthusiasts towards the speculation that the will must be entirely unnatural and transcendent. If it were just another cog in the material machine, it wouldn’t be able to control the machine by itself. Freedom of the will calls for freedom from reality. Unlike theology’s comfort with mystery, philosophy cannot rest upon dogmas of its own manufacture. A naturalistic philosophy needn’t agree that the kind of ordinary free will needed for personal responsibility has to pass the FoW criterion. That criterion is itself unreasonable. In fact, on closer inspection, any unnatural free will trying to meet the FoW criterion must itself be unreasonable.

  Freedom from Reasonableness

  An unnatural will able to meet the FoW criterion must be a very strange sort of entity, strange in more ways than just being unnatural. Not only must it be independent from the natural world, it must be independent from reasonableness too. This odd result is far from the intention of passionate defenders of freedom of the will, who pronounce that a free will ensures more reasonable outcomes than any driven by mere bodily desires. Nevertheless, the odd job that an unnatural and transcendent free will must perform leaves it unable to answer even to reason.

  The example of prominent Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne illustrates the unreasonableness of a free will. He asserts that “an agent [has] ‘free will’ insofar as the agent acts intentionally without their intentions being fully determined by prior causes.” For Swinburne, free agents must try to determine their intentions, the preferred decisions to do some particular action. He next endorses the typical test for whether this free will can be exemplified in action, which is called the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP): “PAP: A does x freely only if he could have done not-x that moment instead.”

  In order for a person to form an intention freely, it mustn’t be the case that the intention was caused by other mental information available to the mind. At this point Swinburne’s position completely breaks down. Consider this example. If a person knows of overwhelming evidence weighing in favor of a scientific theory, the reasonable thing to do would be to accept that theory, but in such a case the agent cannot freely accept the theory. Only if it was possible for the agent to ignore all that evidence and instead (possibly) decide against that theory could this choice be free. What could make a person ignore overwhelming evidence? Perhaps this person has a strong desire to remain loyal to her religious faith, and that desire causes her to ignore the evidence and reject that theory. But in that case, such a strong desire controlled her choice, so it wasn’t free.

  It appears that Swinburne must admit that acting from good reasons or strong desires won’t be done freely. In fact, Swinburne must also admit that his position requires that we are most free about our choices when we have the least reasons to make them. A person’s ability to freely choose comes at the price of never being able to freely choose the obviously right and reasonable option, or even to freely choose to satisfy the strongest desire. Instead, a free choice mustn’t be determined by any strong reasons at all—only extremely weak or evenly matched reasons open up an opportunity for an uncaused mental process of deliberation to make a decision. Matters get even worse when he considers cases of conflicting desires, or evenly matched moral reasons:

  If . . . we have two (or more) conflicting desires of equal strength to do alternative actions, or we believe that it wo
uld be equally morally good to do any of two (or more) alternative actions and our desires do not favor one over others, we have to make a decision; but we believe that it doesn’t matter how we choose. (Ibid., p. 197)

  So, summing up, Swinburne thinks that we wouldn’t feel free, and wouldn’t really be free, if we went along with a strong desire, or if we affirmed a belief with good reason to do so. Nor would we feel that anything special was happening when we had to pick between equally strong desires, or even when we had to choose between one moral action or another. When would we be acting freely? Swinburne reserves free will for only those occasions where situations call for tough moral choices to override powerful desires. Only then does this free will throw in its powers to tip the scales towards doing the right thing:

  Our strongest desires are our strongest inclinations and will inevitably determine what we will do unless we force ourselves to do the best action. So the brain processes causing the agent’s strongest desires will inevitably determine what he will do, unless he interferes in the process. And alone in this situation of having to make a difficult moral decision, unlike in the other situations, the agent has good reason to interfere in the brain processes. My guess is that on average humans are faced with such choices maybe once a day; but clearly there are conscientious people who are faced with such choices much more often than that, and other people less sensitive to moral dilemmas who face difficult moral decisions only perhaps once a month. But for everyone surely the occasions on which they face a difficult moral decision are very rare in comparison to all the other occasions on which they form intentions. (Ibid., 197)