This is despite three great advances in science that critically depend on the existence of real chance in the universe and two developments in logic and mathematics that question the status of philosophical certainty.
We briefly review philosophers since Kant who expressed important views on freedom, and then examine some failed suggestions to include real chance and quantum indeterminacy in the process of free will. We can broadly classify these thinkers as determinists, compatibilists, or libertarians,
Individuals might think marriage was their decision, but since the number of total marriages was relatively stable from year to year, Quételet claimed the individuals were determined to marry. Quételet used Auguste Comte's term "social physics, to describe his discovery of "laws of human nature," prompting Comte to rename his theory sociology.
A few thinkers questioned the idea that individual random events were actually determined simply because their statistical averages appeared to be determined. Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) and Franz Exner (1802-1880) were both professors at Prague in the 1830's and 40's. They had a famous correspondence in which they discussed the possibility of free will. Bolzano, a Catholic priest, was stripped of his teaching post because his ideas were anathema to the Catholic Austrian government that paid his salary. One outcome of the revolution of 1848 was a reform of Austrian education aimed at diminishing the power of the Catholic religion, especially in education. Exner was the principal architect of this curriculum reform, and a central secular tenet was to teach the concept of probability, to encourage students to take responsibility for their own lives.
James very likely had the model of Darwinian evolution in mind. Unlike his colleague Charles Peirce, from whom he learned much about chance, James accepted Darwin's explanation of human evolution.
Heisenberg used Schrödinger's wave functions to calculate the "transition probabilities" for electrons to jump from one energy level to another. Schrödinger's wave mechanics was easier to visualize and much easier to calculate than Heisenberg's own matrix mechanics.
More popularly known as the
Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanics, it states that the exact position and momentum of an atomic particle can only be known within certain (sic) limits. The product of the position error and the momentum error is greater than or equal to
Planck's constant
h/2π.
ΔpΔx ≥ h/2π
Indeterminacy (
Unbestimmtheit) was Heisenberg's original name for his principle. It is a better name than the more popular uncertainty, which connotes lack of knowledge. The Heisenberg principle is an
ontological as well as
epistemic lack of
information.
Later in 1927, Bohr announced his complementarity principle and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics that argued for a dualist combination of wave and particle aspects for atoms and electrons.
Schrodinger argued vociferously against the random quantum jumps of Bohr and Heisenberg and for a return to his easily visualized deterministic and continuous physics.
Albert Einstein,
Max Planck,
Schrödinger, and other leading physicists were appalled at Born's assertion that quantum mechanics was probabilistic and Heisenberg's claim that strict causality was no longer tenable. Einstein's famous remark was "The Lord God does not play dice." Planck said, "the assumption of absolute chance in inorganic nature is incompatible with the working principle of physical science." "This means that the postulate of complete determinism is accepted as a necessary condition for the progress of psychological research."
43
Just a few years earlier, in 1919, Schrödinger and his mentor
Franz Serafin Exner (son of the 19th-century educator) had been strong disciples of
Ludwig Boltzmann. They were convinced that Boltzmann's kinetic theory of gases required a microscopic world of random and chaotic atomic motions. Why did Schrödinger switch from an indeterminist to a determinist philosophy, then adhere to it the rest of his life? Perhaps because his work now put him in the company of Einstein and Planck? Planck stepped down from his chair of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin and gave it to Schrödinger, who won the Nobel prize in 1933. It took nearly thirty more years and another world war before the Nobel committee gave Max Born the prize for his probabilistic interpretation of the wave function.
In his Gifford Lectures of 1927,
Arthur Stanley Eddington had described himself as unable "to form a satisfactory conception of any kind of law or causal sequence which shall be other than deterministic."
44 Eddington had already established himself as the leading interpreter of the new relativity and quantum physics. His astronomical measurements of light bending as it passes the sun had confirmed Einstein's general relativity theory.
A year later, in response to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Eddington revised his lectures for publication as
The Nature of the Physical World. There he announced "It is a consequence of the advent of the quantum theory that
physics is no longer pledged to a scheme of deterministic law,"
45 and enthusiastically identified indeterminism with freedom of the will.
But Eddington left himself open to the charge since Epicurus' time, that chance could not be identified with freedom. He was apparently unaware of the work of William James or Henri Poincaré to make deliberation a two-stage process - first random possibilities, then a choice. A decade later, in his 1939 book
The Philosophy of Physical Science, just a few years before his death, he reluctantly concluded there is no "halfway house"
46 between randomness and determinism - an echo of Hume's "no medium betwixt chance and an absolute necessity."
Niels Bohr mentioned the free will and causality discussions in 1929, but he spoke vaguely, with his vision of complementarity, and likened them to subjective and objective views:
"Just as the freedom of the will is an experiential category of our psychic life, causality may be considered as a mode of perception by which we reduce our sense impressions to order...the feeling of volition and the demand for causality are equally indispensable elements in the relation between subject and object which forms the core of the problem of knowledge." 46a
The German philosopher
Ernst Cassirer was close to many of the physicists in this debate and had a profound influence on some of them. Cassirer also influenced the predominantly deterministic views of other philosophers, themselves untrained in physics, who tried to understand the implications of quantum indeterminism for their philosophies. In his 1936 book
Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics, Cassirer made the case an ethical one, saying
"all truly ethical action must spring from the unity and persistence of a definite ethical character. This in itself shows us that it would be fatal for ethics to tie itself to and, as it were, fling itself into the arms of a limitless indeterminism." 47
Max Born had been first to see that chance and probability were essential to quantum mechanics, as they had been to the statistical laws of physics since Boltzmann. Unfortunately Born was strongly influenced by Cassirer, the non-scientist philosopher who said "we cannot do away with the guiding concept of determinism." Born concluded somewhat dialectically that free will was just a subjective phenomenon,
"I think that the philosophical treatment of the problem of free will suffers often from an insufficient distinction between the subjective and objective aspect." 48 (Cause and Chance, p. 127).
Born approvingly quotes Cassirer, from the last chapter of
Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics,
"whether causality in nature is regarded in the form of rigorous 'dynamical' laws or of merely statistical laws...In neither way does there remain open that sphere of 'freedom' which is claimed by ethics." 49 (source, Cassirer, p. 209)
Some biologists quickly objected to the idea of physical uncertainty in the human mind because large amounts of matter insure adequate regularity of the statistical laws.
50 (C.G.Darwin, Science, 1931).
But physicist
Arthur Holly Compton defended the Eddington suggestion, with the idea of an amplifier that would allow microscopic random events to produce macroscopic random events.
51 Four years earlier, the biologist Ralph Lillie had argued that natural selection was such an amplifier of microscopic randomness. (in Science, 1927, Arthur Holly Compton, Science, 1931).
This naive model for free will came to be known as the massive switch amplifier. It was open to the ancient criticism that we can not take responsibility for random actions caused by chance. Compton defended the amplifier in
The Freedom of Man (1935), but like Eddington, later denied he was trying to show that human freedom was a
direct consequence of the uncertainty principle. If physics were the sole source of our information, he said (in
The Human Meaning of Science, 1940), we should expect men's actions to follow certain (sic) rules of chance.
52
In the
Atlantic Monthly of 1957, Compton saw the two-stage process of chance preceding choice.
"When one exercises freedom, by his act of choice he is himself adding a factor not supplied by the [random] physical conditions and is thus himself determining what will occur." 52a
John Eccles, the great neurophysiologist, took Eddington's suggestions seriously and looked for places in the brain where quantum uncertainty might be important. He decided on the synapses, where the axon of one neuron communicates with the dendrite of another neuron across a narrow gap (less than 1000 Angstroms). In his 1953 book
The Neurophysiological Basis of Mind, Eccles calculated the positional uncertainty of the tiny synaptic knob. He found it to be 20 Angstroms in 1 second, a relatively tiny but perhaps significant fraction of the synaptic gap or cleft.
One other scientist and sometime philosopher,
Henry Margenau, saw quantum uncertainty as necessary for free will, but that there were "more steps" needed to explain freedom. In his Wimmer Lecture of 1968, he said
"Freedom cannot appear in the domains of physiology and psychology if it is not already lodged in physics...embracing the belief that freedom is made possible by indeterminacies in nature will not solve the problem of freedom...it permits only one first step towards its solution." 52a.
Ιnstead of Ernst Cassirer's view "that it would be fatal for ethics to tie itself to and, as it were, fling itself into the arms of a limitless indeterminism," Margenau embraced
indeterminism as the
first step toward a solution of the problem of human freedom.
Margenau lamented that his position "forces us to part company with many distinguished moral philosophers who see the autonomy of ethics threatened when a relation of any sort is assumed to exist between that august discipline and science." Margenau clearly means his longtime mentor.
"Ethics, says Cassirer, should not be forced to build its nests in the gaps of physical causation, but he fails to tell where else it should build them, if at all."
Then in his book
Einstein's Space and Van Gogh's Sky of 1982, Margenau condensed his model into a single paragraph, with two components - Compton's
chance and
choice.
Our thesis is that quantum mechanics leaves our body, our brain, at any moment in a state with numerous (because of its complexity we might say innumerable) possible futures, each with a predetermined probability. Freedom involves two components: chance (existence of a genuine set of alternatives) and choice. Quantum mechanics provides the chance, and we shall argue that only the mind can make the choice by selecting (not energetically enforcing) among the possible future courses.
We note sadly that Margenau does not cite the earlier work of Compton (or the philosopher
Karl Popper's adaptation of Compton - see below). Perhaps because free will was not a topic for mainstream scientific journals, he felt no need for rigorous references and scrupulous priority of ideas. But then his own work does not get referred to by later thinkers.
Most other Nobel-prize-winning scientists and their philosophical interpreters could not reconcile quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle with human freedom, concluding only that strict determinism was certainly not the case for the physical or phenomenal world.
We should mention a few bizarre suggestions by scientists of how some of the more mysterious properties of "quantum reality" might help explain consciousness and free will.
Roger Penrose claims, in his 1989 book
The Emperor's New Mind that non-locality and quantum gravity are involved in the mind. Like Eccles, he speculates that single-quantum sensitive neurons are playing an important role deep inside the brain. But he needs large numbers of neurons to cooperate:
"Such co-operation, I am maintaining, must be achieved quantum-mechanically; and the way that this is done is by many different combined arrangements of atoms being 'tried' simultaneously in linear superposition perhaps a little like the quantum computer...The selection of an appropriate (though probably not the best) solution to the minimizing problem must be achieved as the one-graviton criterion (or appropriate alternative) is reached - which would presumably only occur when the physical conditions are right" (p. 437)
David Hodgson extended Penrose's ideas in his 1991 book
Mind Matters. He claims that
"My discussion of quantum mechanics has confirmed [the mind's] indeterministic character; and has also suggested that quantum mechanics shows that matter is ultimately 'non-material' and non-local, and that perhaps mind and matter are interdependent." (p.381)
Penrose went further in 1994 in his book
Shadows of the Mind, calculating that tens of thousands of neurons could exist in a coherent correlated superposition of states for one-fortieth of a second (the fundamental alpha-rhythm rate). He cites the idea of a dualistic "mind-stuff" influencing the "quantum choices" with its "free will."
"With the possibility that quantum effects might indeed trigger much larger activities within the brain, some people have expressed the hope that, in such circumstances, quantum indeterminacy might be what provides an opening for the mind to influence the physical brain. Here, a dualistic viewpoint would be likely to be adopted, either explicitly or implicitly. Perhaps the 'free will' of an 'external mind' might be able to influence the quantum choices that actually result from such non-deterministic processes. On this view, it is presumably through the action of quantum theory's R-process that the dualist's 'mind-stuff' would have its influence on the behaviour of the brain." (p.349)
This resembles
Eddington's rough ideas and later remarks by
Eccles that since wave functions are neither matter nor energy they are the ideal vehicle for the interaction between non-physical mind and physical matter. Eccles said this idea was suggested by
Henry Margenau.
Penrose provides considerable evidence for correlated states in the microtubules within the cell's cytoskeleton, then descibes chemical evidence for connecting the microtubules and consciousness in anaesthesia. (p.357-370)
Henry Stapp is another physicist employing quantum strangeness. In his 2003
Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, Stapp argues that mental intentions and strong "mental efforts" can influence quantum wave functions and produce correlated behaviors over large regions of the brain. Resembling Penrose's arguments (without any reference), Stapp says:
"It should be mentioned here that the actions P are nonlocal: they must act over extended regions, which can, and are expected to, cover large regions of the brain. Each conscious act is associated with a Process I action [collapse of the wave function] that coordinates and integrates activities in diverse parts of the brain. A conscious thought, as represented by the von Neumann Process I, effectively grasps as a whole an entire quasi-stable macroscopic brain activity." (p.252)
In 2009, the neurobiologist and geneticist
Martin Heisenberg, son of quantum physicist
Werner Heisenberg, found evidence for a combination of random and lawful behavior in animals and unicellular bacteria.
Evidence of randomly generated action — action that is distinct from reaction because it does not depend upon external stimuli — can be found in unicellular organisms. Take the way the bacterium Escherichia coli moves. It has a flagellum that can rotate around its longitudinal axis in either direction: one way drives the bacterium forward, the other causes it to tumble at random so that it ends up facing in a new direction ready for the next phase of forward motion. This ‘random walk’ can be modulated by sensory receptors, enabling the bacterium to find food and the right temperature.
In higher organisms, Heisenberg finds that the brain still may include elements that do a random walk among options for action.
As with a bacterium’s locomotion, the activation of behavioural modules is based on the interplay between chance and lawfulness in the brain. Insufficiently equipped, insufficiently informed and short of time, animals have to find a module that is adaptive. Their brains, in a kind of random walk, continuously preactivate, discard and reconfigure their options, and evaluate their possible short-term and long-term consequences.
(Nature, 14 May 2009, p.165)
This is clearly another example of a
two-stage model for
"free" followed by "will."
Recent Philosophers who Specialize in the Free Will Problem.
In the late 1950's,
Mortimer Adler compiled a massive two-volume history of
The Idea of Freedom. It covers at great length ideas of political freedom and freedom from external constraints, as well as the central freedom of the individual will to choose from among possibilities that are not necessary or predictable.
In an attempt to classify types of freedom, Adler invents three categories that he hopes are "dialectically neutral" - the circumstantial freedom of self-realization (freedom from coercion, political end economic freedom, etc.), the acquired freedom of self-perfection (making decisions for moral reasons rather than desires and passions), and the natural freedom of self-determination (the normal freedom of the will).
Self-perfection is the idea from Plato to Kant that we are only free when our decisions are for reasons and we are not slaves to our passions. Adler also includes many theologically minded philosophers who argue that man is only free when following a divine moral law. Sinners, they say, do not have free will, which is odd because sinners are presumably responsible for evil in the world despite an omniscient and omnipotent God.
Self-determination covers the classic problem of free will. Do we determine our will, or is it simply part of a causal chain? Most of Adler's natural freedoms are compatibilisms. They include Hegel's freedom of a stone falling according to Newton's law of gravity.
In his over 1400 pages, Adler devotes only six pages to brief comments on quantum mechanical indeterminism 53 (v.1, p.461-466). Adler depends heavily on the thoughts of Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger, who along with major thinkers like Einstein, Louis de Broglie, and David Bohm, rejected indeterminism.
The philosopher
Karl Popper had a famous collaboration over some decades with the neuroscientist
John Eccles. The two were mind/body or mind/brain dualists who hoped to discover the mind to be more than a mere "epiphenomenon" of the material brain. They briefly considered quantum effects, initially to dismiss them, and then to reconsider them.
In their dialogue X, Eccles said, "It is not possible I think to utilize quantum indeterminacy." Popper replied, "I do of course agree that quantum theoretical indeterminacy in a sense cannot help, because this leads merely to probabilistic laws, and we do not wish to say that such things as free decisions are just probabilistic affairs. The trouble with quantum mechanical indeterminacy is twofold. First, it is probabilistic, and this doesn't help much with the free-will problem, which is not just a chance affair. Second, it gives us only indeterminism."
54
To this point, Popper reflects the overall negative reaction of the scientific and philosophical communities to indeterminism. But in his 1965
Arthur Holly Compton memorial lecture
Of Clouds and Clocks, Popper celebrated Compton's contributons to the question of human freedom, including the insufficient idea of the quantum uncertainty amplifier. But then he goes on to describe a two-stage decision process modeled on Darwinian natural selection. Can we doubt these were directly inspired by
Compton's later remarks and Compton's 1931 references to Ralph Lillie and evolution?
Any intelligible explanation for free will must include both indeterminism and adequate determinism, as does biological evolution.
"New ideas have a striking similarity to genetic mutations," Popper says, "Mutations are, it seems, brought about by quantum theoretical indeterminacy (including radiation effects). On them there subsequently operates natural selection which eliminates inappropriate mutations. Now we could conceive of a similar process with respect to new ideas and to free-will decisions. That is to say, a range of possibilities is brought about by a probabilistic and quantum mechanically characterized set of proposals, as it were - of possibilities brought forward by the brain. On these there operates a kind of selective procedure which eliminates those proposals and those probabilities which are not acceptable to the mind."
55(The Self and its Brain, 1977, pp.539-540)
In 1977 Popper gave the first Darwin Lecture, at Darwin College, Cambridge. He called it
Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind. In it he said he had changed his mind (a rare admission by a philosopher) about two things. First he now thought that natural selection was not a "tautology" that made it an unfalsifiable theory. Second, he had come to accept the random variation and selection of ideas as a
model of free will.
The selection of a kind of behavior out of a randomly offered repertoire may be an act of indeterminism; and in discussing indeterminism I have often regretfully pointed out that quantum indeterminacy does not seem to help us; for the amplification of something like, say, radioactive disintegration processes would not lead to human action or even animal action, but only to random movements.
I have changed my mind on this issue. A choice process may be a selection process, and the selection may be from some repertoire of random events, without being random in its turn. This seems to me to offer a promising solution to one of our most vexing problems, and one by downward causation.
Popper is thus the third thinker (or fourth, if we liberally interpret
Compton) to describe a two-stage mental process, after James and Poincaré. He also solves the problem of
indeterminism directly causing our decisions. Note Popper's not so subtle shift of the realm of chance to the material body (his "World 1") and the realm of determination to the mind (his "World 2"). The traditional
dualism from the ancients to Kant made the material body the realm of phenomenal determinism and the mind or spirit the noumenal realm of freedom, God, and immortality.
The physicist
Richard Feynman also proposed a Compton-style Geiger-counter event followed by a bomb explosion. This caught the attention of
Wittgenstein scholar
Elizabeth Anscombe in her inaugural lecture at Cambridge University, where she said
It has taken the inventions of indeterministic physics to shake the rather common dogmatic conviction that determinism is a presupposition or perhaps a conclusion, of scientific knowledge. Feynman's example of the bomb and Geiger counter smashes this conception; but as far as I can judge it takes time for the lesson to be learned. I find deterministic assumptions more common now among people at large, and among philosophers, than when I was an undergraduate.
In his 1961 landmark essay
Freedom and Resentment,
Peter Strawson changed the subject from free will itself to the question of
moral responsibility.
60a Strawson said he could make no sense of the truth or falsity of determinism, indeterminism, or free will. But even if determinism were true, he argued, we would continue to act as if persons were morally responsible and deserving of praise and blame, gratitude and resentment.
Strawson was following
David Hume's
naturalist arguments that our moral sentiments are simply given facts beyond the skepticism of logic and critical thought.
Hume the Naturalist had no problem deriving
Ought from Is - something shown logically impossible by
Hume the Skeptic.
In 1969
Harry Frankfurt changed the debate on free will and moral responsibility with a famous thought experiment that challenged the existence of
alternative possibilities for action. The
traditional argument for free will requires alternative possibilities so that an agent
could have done otherwise, without which there is no moral responsibility.
Frankfurt posited a counterfactual demon who can intervene in an agent's decisions if the agent is about to do something different from what the demon wants the agent to do. Frankfurt's demon will block any alternative possibilities, but leave the agent to "freely choose" to do the one possibility desired by the demon. Frankfurt claimed the existence of the hypothetical control mechanisms blocking alternative possibilities would be
irrelevant to the agent's free choice. This is true when the agent's choice agrees with the demon, but obviously false should the agent disagree. In that case, the demon would have to block the agent's will and the agent would surely notice.
Compatibilists had long been bothered by alternative possibilities, needed in order that agents "
could do otherwise. They knew that determinism allows only a single future - one actual causal chain of events - and were delighted to get behind Frankfurt's examples as proofs that alternative possibilities, perhaps generated in part by random events, did not exist. Frankfurt, like Strawson, argued for moral responsibility without libertarian free will.
Note, however, that Frankfurt assumes that genuine alternative possibilities
do exist. If not, there is nothing for his counterfactual intervening demon to block. Furthermore, without alternatives, Frankfurt would have to admit that there is only one "actual sequence" of events leading to one possible future. "Alternative sequences" would be ruled out. Since Frankfurt's demon, much like Laplace's demon, has no way of knowing the actual
information about future events - such as agent's decisions - until that information comes into existence, such demons are not possible and Frankfurt-style thought experiments, entertaining as they are, can not establish the compatibilist version of free will.
Daniel Dennett, perhaps the leading spokesman for
Compatibilism, is a strong critic of any genuine indeterminism in free will. Yet in his book "Brainstorms" in 1978, he proposed an influential "model of decision making" with a two-stage account of free will. In his chapter "
On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want" (p.286), Dennett clearly separates random possibilities from determined choices.
57
But does Dennett, following James, Poincaré, and Popper, see that this solves the problem of indeterminism in free will that has plagued philosophy since Epicurus' "swerve" of the atoms? He says, a bit sarcastically, that his model "puts indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all [my emphasis]."
And after giving six excellent reasons why his suggestion is what libertarians are looking for, Dennett then suggests that the randomness generator might as well have been a computer-generated pseudo-random number generator. He says "Isn't it the case that the new improved proposed model for human deliberation can do as well with a random-but-deterministic generation process as with a causally undetermined process?"
This completely misses the libertarian's point, which is a randomness that breaks the causal chain of pre-determinism back to the universe origin.! But then Dennett's argument for libertarianism may just be a compatibilist's straw man. He does not pursue it in his later works, such as Elbow Room, The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Dennett, 1984) or the more recent Freedom Evolves (2003).
Dennett's model was inspired by many sources. One was David Wiggins' Towards a resonable libertarianism, which cited Bertrand Russell and Arthur Stanley Eddington as suggesting quantum indeterminism. . Another was Herbert Simon's 1969 two-stage "generate and test" model for creating computer artifacts 59 (Simon, 1969, p.), itself a computer version of Darwin's random variation and natural selection model for biological evolution. Another source was Hadamard's book. Dennett (p.293) quotes the poet Paul Valéry (from Hadamard, p.30), who imagines two agents (in one mind?)
"It takes two to invent anything. The one makes up combinations; the other one chooses." 60
But as we have seen, this was Poincaré's idea which Valéry picked up at the 1937 conference. Some evidence now exists that Poincaré's work was in fact inspired by
William James. They both say that
alternative possibilities "present themselves."
Nevertheless, Dennett's article is so influential in the philosophical community that two-stage models for free will are sometimes called "Valerian." We discuss Dennett's seminal article, with significant excerpts, in
Giving Determinists What They Say They Want.
The (politically) Libertarian philosopher
Robert Nozick sketched a view of free will in his 1981 book
Philosophical Explanations, but admitted he found the problem intractable.
Peter van Inwagen, in his 1983 "An Essay on Free Will," caused a stir by arguing that
compatibilism is demonstrably false, even admitting Frankfurt's denial of alternative possibilities, in what has come to be called the
Consequence Argument. In short, if compatibilism
traces the causes of our actions, in the one "actual sequence" of events, back to events before we existed, then our actions are simply the consequences of those earlier events and are "not
up to us." Speaking as a logical philosopher, he concludes that "the free-will thesis and determinism are incompatible. That is,
incompatibilism is true." "To deny the free-will thesis is to deny the existence of moral responsibility, which is absurd...Therefore, we should reject determinism."
61 This has been obvious to libertarians since Epicurus, and was argued for example by
Carl Ginet in 1966.
Robert Kane is the leading spokesman for
Libertarianism. Before Kane, in the late twentieth century, Anglo-American philosophers had largely dismissed free will as a "
pseudo-problem." Although like the others, Kane does not find any libertarian position, including his own, "intelligible," he developed the view that even if most of our actions are determined entirely by our character, these "self-formed actions" can be free if we at times in the past freely created our own character (and if we remain free to change it). This was Aristotle's view and agrees with Buddhist ideas of Karma.
In his 1985 book Free Will and Values, aware of earlier proposals by Eccles, Popper, and Dennett, but working independently, proposed an ambitious amplifier model for a quantum randomizer in the brain - a spinning wheel of fortune with probability bubbles corresponding to alternative possibilities, in the massive switch amplifier tradition of Compton and Gomes. Kane says (p.147):
"neurological processes must exist corresponding to the randomizing activity of the spinning wheel and the partitioning of the wheel into equiprobable segments (red, blue, etc.) corresponding to the relevant R-alternatives."
Kane's model combines free will
and values. Kane claimed his free choice is
moral and made in accord with Kant's concept of duty. This may be an
ethical fallacy.
"the succession of random selections among equiprobable alternatives is meant to be a continuing reminder (a mental or neurological representation) of the fact that the reason sets of other persons are to be treated equally."
Kane is not satisfied with his solution. He explains that the main reason for failure is
"locating the master switch and the mechanism of amplification...We do not know if something similar goes on in the brains of cortically developed creatures like ourselves, but I suspect it must if libertarian theories are to succeed." (p.168)
Kane's basic failure is his
location of indeterminism in the decision process itself, making
chance the direct cause of action.
Kane's major accomplishment, however, is to identify "torn" decisions that were made at random, but because there exist equally good reasons whichever way the decisions go, the agent can still claim
moral responsibility, against the critics of chance who say that indeterminism necessarily destroys the kind of
control needed for moral responsibility.
Kane claims that the major criticism of all indeterminist libertarian models is explaining the power to
choose or do otherwise in "
exactly the same conditions," something he calls "dual rational self-control." Given that A was the rational choice, how can one defend doing B under exactly the same circumstances? (Kane, 1985, p.59) Kane is concerned that such a "dual power" is arbitrary, capricious, and irrational.
Apart from the fact that information-rich systems with a history are never in the exact same conditions, and ignoring the fact that random alternative possibilities are unlikely to repeat, an adequately determined will would very likely make the same choice, for the same reasons, from the same set of alternate possibilities. But it might on the other hand exercise its irrational prerogative! We humans are unpredictable, which makes us occasionally capricious and arbitrary. Why the problem?
Richard Double, in his 1991 book
The Non-Reality of Free Will, agrees with Kane that libertarian free will must have the "dual ability" to choose otherwise with rational control. But he says:
"My conclusion is that the deep reason why no libertarian view can satisfy all three conditions [ability-to-choose-otherwise, control, and rationality] is that the conditions are logically incompatible. Hence, libertarianism, despite its intuitive appeal, turns out to be incoherent." (p.190)
There is a rich history of linguistic and logical quibbles among compatibilists over the ability to
do otherwise.
G. E. Moore and
A. J. Ayer said that one could have done otherwise,
if one had chosen to do so, i.e., if things in the past had been different. But since the "fixed past" could never be different (in retrospect) one could not have so chosen, according to compatibilists (and determinists).
In 1987 two classicists,
Anthony Long and
David Sedley, speculated that
Epicurus' swerve of the atoms might be limited to providing undetermined
alternative possibilities for action, from which the mind's power of volition could choose in a way that reflects character and values, desires and feelings.
"It does so, we may speculate, not by overriding the laws of physics, but by choosing between the alternative possibilities which the laws of physics leave open."
Sedley and Long assume a non-physical (metaphysical) ability of the volition to affect the atoms, which is implausible. But the idea that a physical volition chooses - (consistent with and
adequately determined by its character and values and its desires and feelings) from among alternative possibilities provided randomly by atomic indeterminacy - is quite plausible.
Ted Honderich - the major spokesman for "
Hard Determinism" - in 1988 published his 750-page
The Theory of Determinism, with excursions into quantum mechanics, neuroscience, and consciousness.
Unlike most of his colleagues specializing in free will, Honderich did not succumb to the easy path of Compatibilism, by simply declaring that the free will we have (and should want, say some) is completely consistent with determinism, namely a "voluntarism" in which our will is completely caused by prior events.
Nor does he go down the path of Incompatibilism, looking for non-physical substances, dualist forms of agency, or simply identifying freedom with Epicurean chance, as have many scientists with ideas of brain mechanisms amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminism to help with the uncaused "origination" of actions and decisions.
Honderich does not claim to have found a solution to the problem of free will or determinism, but he does claim to have confronted the problem of the consequences of determinism. He is "dismayed" because the truth of determinism requires that we give up "origination" with its promise of an open future, restricting - though not eliminating - our "life hopes."
Though he is determinism's foremost champion, Honderich characterizes it as a "black thing" and passionately feels the loss when he follows his reason to accept the truth of determinism.
Honderich faults the Compatibilists and Incompatibilists on three counts. First, he says that moral responsibility is not all that is at stake, there are personal feelings, reactive attitudes, problems of knowledge, and rationalizing punishment with ideas of limited responsibility. Second, these problems can not be resolved by logical "proofs" nor by linguistic analyses of propositions designed to show "free" and "determined" are logically compatible. And third, he faults their simplistic idea that one or the other of them must be right.
And unlike some of his colleagues, Honderich does not competely dismiss indeterminism and considers the suggestion of "near-determinism." He says, "Maybe it should have been called determinism-where-it-matters. It allows that there is or may be some indeterminism but only at what is called the micro-level of our existence, the level of the small particles of our bodies." 63
Albert Mele, in his 1995 book
Autonomous Agents, argued, mostly following Dennett, that libertarians should admit that the final stages of deliberation are (
adequately) determined and only allow indeterminism in the early stages of the decision process. While he himself has made no commitment to such indeterminism, and wonders how it could be physically possible, he offers the idea to others as a "modest libertarianism."
62 (p.211-220). Mele's model satisfies the
temporal sequence requirements for libertarian free will, even if he does not see the possible
location of indeterminism in the brain.
Paul Russell, also in 1995, suggested that the
location of the break in the causal chain might be put between
willings, which might be uncaused, and
actions, which would be determined. This goes against the common sense use of the word "will," but Russell correctly puts something "free" before a final "will."
Randolph Clarke assessed the Dennett and Mele suggestions in his 2003
Libertarian Accounts of Free Will and found them inadequate. His work, he says, was carried out by thinking alone and required no specialized knowledge of natural science. At best, he concludes, indeterminism in processes leading to our actions is superfluous, adding nothing of value and possibly detracting from what we want. In a 2000 article called "Modest Libertarianism," he ignores Mele's suggestion and "places indeterminism in the direct production of the decision," as did
Kane and
Laura Waddell Ekstrom.
Robert Kane, in addition to his work to find some pathway through the "free will labyrinth" to an intelligible account of freedom, in 2002 assembled in one place perhaps the best collection of modern positions on free will, from theology and fatalism to mostly dualist libertarian perspectives. His massive sourcebook,
The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, has contributions from over two dozen contemporary philosophers with strong ideas about free will. Sadly most continue to be wordy jargon-laden debates and attempts to logically refute one position or another.
That there is nothing new, that it is mostly compatibilist, and that overall it is dismissive of freedom as either "unintelligible" or "metaphysical," makes the Oxford Handbook an accurate reflection of the current state of the free will problem. Kane cites Anscombe's remark, that determinism is becoming more common, and insightfully notes that "One may legitimately wonder why worries about determinism persist at all in the twenty-first century, when the physical sciences - once the stronghold of determinist thinking - seem to have turned away from determinism." Indeed, today it is determinism that is "metaphysical."64
Then in 2005, Kane published A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, a comprehensive survey of the recent positions on free will, perhaps the most comprehensive since Mortimer Adler. Kane adds two more freedom classifications to Adler's three categories.
Self-control is a variation on Adler's acquired freedom of Self-perfection to include the arguments of the many "New Compatibilists" who are more concerned about moral responsibility than free will, such as Harry Frankfurt and John Martin Fischer.
Self-formation is a variation of Adler's Self-determination to include Kane's own "self-forming actions" (SFA) that are a subset of self-determining actions. Kane requires that an SFA is an indeterministic "will-setting action" that helps form our character. Later, other actions can be determined by our character, but we can still assert "ultimate responsibility" (UR) for those actions, because they can be traced back to the SFA.
Besides Kane, a few more recent libertarian philosophers defend "incompatibilism," but cannot agree on an "intelligible" account of
how, when, and perhaps most importantly, where indeterminism enters the picture - without
making our actions purely random.
They include
Randolph Clarke,
Laura Waddell Ekstrom,
Carl Ginet,
Timothy O'Connor,
Peter Van Inwagen, and
David Wiggins.
David Widerker has extended Kane's strong 1985 criticism of Frankfurt-style examples, in defense of incompatibilist libertarian free will.
Unfortunately, their works are full of a dense jargon defining (sometimes obscuring) subtle differences in their views - agent causation, event causation, non-occurrent causation, reasons as causes, intentions, undefeated authorization of preferences as causes, noncausal accounts, dual control, plurality conditions, origination, actual sequences and alternative sequences,
source and
leeway compatibilism, revisionism, restrictivism, semicompatibilism, and narrow and broad incompatibilism.
See our
Glossary of Terms for clarification of this dense jargon.
A few compatibilist/determinist philosophers have, following
Peter Strawson, turned the conversation away from the "unintelligible"
free will problem to the problem of
moral responsibility. Peter's son
Galen Strawson is one. He accepts determinism outright on the grounds that a
causa sui is simply impossible. Where Sir Peter says that the truth of determinism would not change our attitudes about moral responsibility, his son says it makes moral responsibility impossible.
John Martin Fischer calls his position semicompatibilism. Also included are Derk Pereboom, and Saul Smilansky, followers of Ted Honderich's hard determinism, who define their position as "hard incompatibilism," denying both human freedom and moral responsibility.
Fischer says free will may or may not be incompatible with determinism, but his main interest, moral responsibility, is not incompatible. Fischer has recently edited a 4-volume, 46-contributor, 1300+ pages compendium of articles on moral responsibility - entitled Free Will, a reference work in the Critical Concepts in Philosophy series (Routledge 2005).
In it, Fischer explains his colleagues setting aside the "unintelligible" problem of free will.
Some philosophers do not distinguish between freedom and moral responsibility. Put a bit more carefully, they tend to begin with the notion of moral responsibility, and "work back" to a notion of freedom; this notion of freedom is not given independent content (separate from the analysis of moral responsibility). For such philosophers, "freedom" refers to whatever conditions are involved in choosing or acting in such a way as to be morally responsible. (Vol.1, p.xxiii)
Pereboom, Smilansky, Galen Strawson, and the psychologist Daniel Wegner are hard incompatibilists who follow many earlier thinkers and say that free will is merely an illusion. Strawson argues that moral responsibility is impossible.
Unlike the others who find it uplifting and therapeutic to disabuse the public of illusions about free will, Saul Smilansky may share the "dismay" that Ted Honderich sees in the apparent loss of control implicit in determinism. Smilansky thinks we need to maintain the public illusion of free will as a contribution to maintaining public morality.
Taxonomies of Free Will and Determinism Positions
Determinism is the position that every event has a cause, in a chain of causal events with just one possible future.
"Soft" and "hard" determinism are terms invented by
William James who lamented the fact that some determinists were co-opting the term freedom for themselves. He called them "soft" determinists, "because they abhor harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, say that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom."
"Hard" determinists (
Honderich) simply deny the existence of free will.
Compatibilism (
Dennett) is the most common name used for James's category of soft determinism.
Semicompatibilists (
Fischer) are narrow incompatibilists who are agnostic about free will and determinism but claim that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism.
Hard incompatibilists (Pereboom) think both free will and moral responsibility are not compatible with determinism.
Illusionists (
Smilansky,
Wegner) are hard incompatibilists who say free will is an illusion and usually deny moral responsibility.
Impossibilists (
Galen Strawson) are hard incompatibilists who say free will and moral responsibility are impossible.
Let's also look at a taxonomy of indeterministic positions.
Indeterminism is the position that there are random (chance) events in a world with many possible futures.
Libertarians believe that the indeterminism makes free will possible. Note that there many philosophers who admit indeterminism may be true but that it does not provide free will ("hard" indeterminists?). See the
standard argument against free will.
Agent-causal indeterminists (
O'Connor) are libertarians who think that agents have originating causes for their actions that are not events. Actions do not depend on prior causes. Some call this “metaphysical” freedom.
Non-causal indeterminists (
Ginet) simply deny any causes whatsoever for libertarian free will.
Event-causal indeterminists (
Kane) generally accept the view that random events (most likely quantum mechanical events) occur in the world. Whether in the physical world, in the biological world (where they are a key driver of genetic mutations), or in the mind, randomness and uncaused events are real. They introduce the possibility of accidents, novelty, and human
creativity.
Although random quantum mechanical events break the strictly deterministic causal chain, which has just one possible future, they nevertheless are causes for successive events. They start new unpredictable causal chains. They generate unpredictable futures. They are said to be causa sui. They need not be the direct cause of human actions.
While microscopic quantum events are powerful enough to deny determinism, the magnitude of these events is generally so small, especially for large macroscopic objects, that the world is still overwhelmingly deterministic. We call this "adequate determinism."
Soft causalists (Doyle) are event-causalists who accept causality but admit some unpredictable events that are causa sui and which start new causal chains.
Soft causalists say that indeterministic event acausality should be considered a prerequisite for adequately determined agent causality.
Compatibilism and Incompatibilism
We can combine these determinist and indeterminist taxonomies with a taxonomy of incompatibilist positions. The result is a bit complex, because incompatibilists contain both determinists and libertarians, making for a very confused debate by thinkers who are nominally committed to clear concepts as called for by analytic language philosophy.
Incompatibilists who are “hard” determinists (denying free will) have recently assumed extreme positions that they call "
hard incompatibilism." Some of them attempt to remain agnostic on free will and determinism, but others are willing to call free will an "
illusion" and moral responsibility "
impossible."
Incompatibilists who are indeterminists generally accept the view that random events (most likely quantum mechanical events) occur in the world and are important for free will.
Broad incompatibilists think both free will and
moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism.
Narrow incompatibilism is the idea that moral responsibility is
compatible with
determinism, even though free will is not compatible. This is similar to
semicompatibilism.
Soft incompatibilism is the idea that both free will and moral responsibility are
incompatible with strict
determinism (really
pre-determinism) but both are compatible with
adequate determinism.
Comprehensive compatibilism is a new term proposed by Doyle. It describes his
two-stage model that reconciles free will with both a limited determinism and a limited indeterminism. Doyle
locates the first-stage indeterminism not in any particular time and place in the brain, but the result of inevitable noise in any information processing system. Noise shows up in the brain as (storage) errors of perception and (retrieval) errors of memory recall.
John Searle recently wrote in his 2007
Freedom and Neurobiology, "The persistence of the free will problem in philosophy seems to me something of a scandal. After all these centuries of writing about free will, it does not seem to me that we have made very much progress."
65 (p.37) In a breakthrough of sorts, Searle admits that he could never see, until now, the point of introducing quantum mechanics into discussions of consciousness and free will. Now he says we know two things, "First we know that our experiences of free action contain both indeterminism and rationality...Second we know that quantum indeterminacy is the only form of indeterminism that is indisputably established as a fact of nature...it follows that quantum mechanics must enter into the explanation of consciousness." (p.74-75)
Indeed
it does. Despite a century of failed attempts, can we convince Searle and other philosophers that indeterminism followed by an adequate if not strict determinism is the right two-stage model for free will? It will depend in part on our successful
location for indeterminism in the brain and the great simplicity of the amplification process, compared to previous models. See our
Cogito model.
Why have most philosophers been unable for millenia to see that the common sense view of human freedom is correct? It is partly because their logic and language preoccupation likes to say that either determinism or indeterminism is true, and the other must be false.
Determinism and indeterminism are the horns of the dilemma presented as the standard argument against free will, which we can trace back unchanged to the earliest discussions of freedom, determinism, and moral responsibility.
Our physical world includes
both, though the determinism we have is only an adequate description for large objects. So any
intelligible explanation for
free will must include both a limited
indeterminism and an
adequate determinism, in a
temporal sequence that creates
information.
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Notes:
1. Leucippus, quoted by Kirk, G.S., J.E.Raven, and M.Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, Second edition, Cambridge, 1983, Fragment 569 (from Fr. 2 Actius I, 25, 4).
2. Aristotle, Physics B4, 196a24.
"We often allege chance (τυχη) or spontaneity (ἀυταματον) as causes, saying that something came about 'by chance' or 'spontaneously.'"
Metaphysics, 1025a25.
"Nor is there any definite cause for an accident (συμβεβηκός), but only chance (τυχη), namely an indefinite (ἀόριστον) cause."
Metaphysics, 1065a33.
"Causes from which chance results might happen are indeterminate; hence chance is obscure to human reason and is a cause by accident."
3. Cicero, cited by Augustine, City of God, Book V, Ch.9,
See also De Divinatione Book II, x 25
si enim provideri nihil potest futurum esse eorum quae casu fiunt, quia esse certa non possunt, divinatio nulla est
4. A.A.Long, Problems in Stoicism 1996, R.Sorabji Necessity, Cause, and Blame 1980, p.70
"In antiquity the Stoics gained the reputation of being strict determinists, and this reputation has generally persisted up to the present day.", Long, p.173.
"the Stoics committed themselves to postulating that all events occur of necessity.", Sorabji, p.70.
5. Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics, p.73-76.
...further light is shed on Aristotle's rejection of determinism in his statement on chance: "Causes from which chance results might happen are indeterminate; hence chance is obscure to human calculation and is a cause by accident." Expressed in the language of modern determinism this would mean that according to Aristotle even a Laplacean intelligence could not predict events of the sub-lunar world because they are contingent by their very nature, and may happen thus or otherwise.
Obviously the Stoics had to discard the former notion of the possible which signified an objective contingency in a non-deterministic world, and to replace it by something compatible with determinism. They did so very logically by making it a subjective category and basing it on human ignorance of the future... The meaning of "chance" underwent a change which was linked up with the new significance of the possible. It is interesting to note that the Aristotelian definition of tyche was taken over literally by the Stoics and thereby the "obscurity to human calculation" was given a new meaning.
6. Sharples 1983, p.8, Long, 1986, p.101, Sharples 1996, p.8.
"For Chrysippus argues thus: ' If uncaused motion exists, it will not be the case that every proposition (termed by the logicians an axiom) is either true or false, for a thing not possessing efficient causes will be neither true nor false; but every proposition is either true or false; therefore uncaused motion does not exist. If this is so, all things that take place take place by precedent causes; if this is so, all take place by fate; it therefore follows that all things that take place take place by fate.'" Cicero, De Fato, X, 22
[Concludit enim Chrysippus hoc modo: 'Si est motus sine causa, non omnis enuntiatio (quod αχιωμα dialectics appellant) aut vera aut falsa erit, causas enim efficientes quod non habebit id nec verum nec falsum erit; omnis autem enuntiatio aut vera aut falsa est; motus ergo sine causa nullus est. Quod si ita est, omnia quae fiunt causis fiunt antegressis; id si ita est, omnia fato fiunt; efficitur igitur fato fieri quaecumque fiant.']
But Long is convinced that Chrysippus thought men were free and that Stoics had a positive conception of freedom, that freedom was the "possibility of determining one's actions."
"The Stoics, though removing the possibility of choosing and performing either of two contrary actions, assert that what occurs through our instrumentality (δι ημων) is attributable to (in the power of, εφ ημιω) us. For, they argue, since things and events have different natures ... the result of any individual's action accords with its specific nature." Long, p.180.
7. Sharples 1983.
"One crucial point that is however clear is that Alexander's own conception of responsibility is a libertarian one." Sharples, p.21
Alexander himself denies the gods have foreknowledge.
"To say that it is reasonable that the gods should have
foreknowledge of the things that will be, because it is absurd to say
that they fail to know anything of the things that will be, and assuming this, to try to establish by means of it that all things come
to be of necessity and in accordance with fate — [this] is neither true
nor reasonable." Alexander, De Fato, XXX, 1
8. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will.
"God foreknows all the things of which He Himself is the Cause, and yet He is not the Cause of all that He foreknows. He is not the evil cause of these acts, though He justly avenges them. You may understand from this, therefore, how justly God punishes sins; for He does not do the things which He knows will happen.", Book Three, IV, 40
9. Aquinas, Duns Scotus
10. Maimonides, see the Argument from Free Will in the wikipedia.
"Does God know or does He not know that a certain individual will be good or bad? If thou sayest 'He knows', then it necessarily follows that [that] man is compelled to act as God knew beforehand he would act, otherwise God's knowledge would be imperfect..."
11. Islam
12. Hinduism, Buddhism
13. Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno
14. Lorenzo Valla, Pietro Pomponazzi
15. Erasmus, Martin Luther
16. Descartes
17. Spinoza
18. Thomas Hobbes
19. John Bramhall
20. George Berkeley
21. John Locke
22. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p.171. See also the later Enquiries, pp.95-96, where Hume said:
...liberty when opposed to necessity, not to constraint, is the same thing with chance; which is universally allowed to have no existence.
23. Isaac Newton
24. Leibniz
25. Kant
26. Darwin
27. Ludwig Boltzmann
28. Werner Heisenberg, Max Born
29. Bertrand Russell
30. Kurt Gödel
31. William James
32. Thomas Hobbes, William James
33. Libertarian
34. Incompatibilism
35. G.W.F.Hegel
36. Arthur Schopenhauer
could do otherwise if we had a different character.
37. Bertrand Russell
38. Charles Sanders Peirce
39. Poincaré, Science and Method, 1914, pp.62-63.
41, Hadamard, 1949, pp.29-31.
43. Planck, 1933, p.154-5.
64. Kane 1985, p.9, and Handbook of Free Will 2002, p.7
