If I were writing this essay three years ago, I would be attempting to explain how determinism necessitates that we don’t have free will. Now, although I am unsure about the deterministic nature of the universe, I still believe in our inherent inability to escape from its 14 billion-year-old causal chain of events. Yet, now I also believe we have free will. In fact, I think I would agree with my 18-year-old self on most of my thoughts about free will, yet we would still disagree on whether or not we have it. This is because the discussion of free will in my mind, and in the world also, is largely a verbal dispute. The story of free will has been through many iterations from the many dogmas that have arisen on Earth. Still, as it stands today, the semantics of free will, not the concepts themselves, are what philosophers disagree on most.
Why is free will such a hotly debated topic anyway? Why has it become a cliche for every smoke sesh to inevitably turn to the topic of free will? Why does every high schooler who just discovered their first philosophy podcast feel the need to assert their dominance by asking why I believe in such an ill-informed notion like free will? In many ways, it is the most fundamental question about our humanity. Intuitively, it's the thing that separates us from robots and what gives us the motivation to do better. “When we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair” (Dennett). The thought that I lack any bit of control over everything I have done or will ever do is a terrifying thought. Free will is also what many people believe is the basis for moral responsibility. While some philosophers like Baruch Spinoza believe that moral responsibility exists even in a world with no free will, most people intuitively believe that you are only morally responsible for doing something if you did it freely. This is why some criminals are acquitted based on grounds of insanity. Instinctively, we assign less blame to people when they have less autonomy over their actions, so without free will, our modern conceptions of justice would disintegrate altogether. Furthermore, how good is a god that punishes people for actions they couldn’t take freely? Without free will, all religions that deal with sin and judgment would be entirely contradictory. So, there’s a lot at stake here.
As I stated previously, free will has adopted many definitions over the years; let’s first look at the one that reigned supreme for most of human history. This is the dualist view, that free will necessitates some kind of soul or spirit that compels you to do things. In this view, actions that this soul makes are free, but any actions that are derived from purely physical interactions are not free. This is what Dennett calls the “real magic” version of free will: magic in the sense that it’s mystical and nonphysical and real in the ironic sense that it doesn’t exist. Descartes held a view like this (aptly named the cartesian view) that there is a little “self” in the middle of the brain where the immaterial soul intervenes and makes executive decisions. Descartes believed that the pituitary gland, in particular, was where the soul interfaces with the brain.
Dennett argues that this view arises from a combination of wishful thinking and a deep trepidation of the nihilism that arises from a lack of free will. But is this view even that optimistic? Is this a view that we would even want to have about free will? The cartesian view doesn’t solve the problem of free will, it simply pushes the problem off to the soul: it hides “the problem behind an impenetrable shield of mysterious stuff” and “postpones the problem indefinitely” (Dennett). If the soul makes all of its decisions freely and isn’t caused or influenced by the physical world in any way, then what is it even basing these decisions on? Randomness? God? However, if the soul does interact with the world, or shares some bilateral communication with the brain, then the whole hierarchy of self seems to collapse to a single mind, and the soul just becomes an abstraction of the real world. On one side of the spectrum, this soul would make decisions randomly or through being coerced which isn’t a kind of free will many of us care about. On the other side, the soul would make decisions based on our past events, wants, desires, and preferences, in which case the soul is just as determined as the brain. Either way, this line of reasoning isn’t a useful definition of free will. Furthermore, dualism and the cartesian view of free will are highly unpopular in the philosophical world now. This is largely due to the decline of secular ideologies in mainstream philosophy and the discovery that the pituitary gland regulates growth, metabolism, and reproduction, not our ability to interface with the supernatural.
Now, this leads us to the definitions of free will that don’t necessitate a nonphysical self. One quite popular view, called the libertarian view of free will, is that doing something freely is synonymous with having the ability to have done otherwise. It’s also called the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) because it declares that free will necessitates the existence of possible alternative outcomes. Intuitively, this view makes sense. If every action I take is the only action I could’ve taken, then how could you argue that any of these actions were free? Most people would agree that freedom requires choices or alternatives, so how could you possibly be acting freely if you have no ability to choose another option? In the domain of moral responsibility, PAP states that you are morally responsible for your actions if and only if you could have chosen to do otherwise.
Several famous counterexamples make this view seem like not a very useful definition of free will either. These are called Frankfurt cases which are named after Harry Frankfurt who first wrote about the possibility of scenarios where someone is morally responsible for an action even though they could not have done otherwise. For example, imagine a man, Joe, who shot and killed his wife. Obviously, he’s morally responsible for doing that. What if I told you that someone implanted a chip in Joe’s brain that would’ve made him shoot her if he decided that he didn’t want to anymore? Since Joe decided to kill his wife on his own accord, the chip never had to be used, but Joe is obviously still morally responsible. However, he didn’t have any other choice because if he had chosen otherwise, the brain chip would’ve made him do it anyway. Frankfurt cases disprove PAP as a complete and useful definition of free will because there are cases where the ability to do otherwise doesn’t make someone less morally responsible.
PAP is also not compatible with determinism. Since PAP is the definition that I had for free will 3 years ago, and I believed that the universe was deterministic, I did not believe in free will. Again, it is also unclear why we would even want this definition of free will. Let’s say that last night, I decided to bike to my fraternity’s chapter meeting instead of driving there because even though it was cold, I enjoy being active and am trying to minimize my carbon emissions. If this action was free, then under PAP, there must have been a possibility that I could’ve done otherwise: if we went back in time a million distinct times to the moment that I decided to bike, at least some of the times I would have driven to the meeting. Given the same external conditions, mental state, desires, preferences, etc., I would’ve made different decisions. Similarly to the cartesian view, what am I basing my decision on then? Presumably, I am always trying to make the best decision given my current mental state, so if sometimes I make a different decision even though I had the exact same mental state, then that decision must have been random. Is a random decision really free? Having the ability to have done otherwise is the same as introducing randomness into the meticulous process of decision-making.
We probably don’t have free will in either the cartesian sense or the libertarian sense, but neither of these is a useful definition of free will anyway. Dennett puts it this way: if by free will you mean an “immaterial soul that hovers happily in your brain, shooting arrows of decision into your motor cortex” or some fuzzy notion of being able to do otherwise, then we don’t have free will; however, “we can have all the varieties of free will worth wanting” (Dennett).
This “free will worth wanting” that Dennett describes is a modern form of free will called compatibilism, named after its compatibility with determinism. The fundamental idea of compatibilism is that free choices are choices that someone makes based on their desires and preferences, not because of the influence of some external agent. Whether or not you were bound to make a particular action since the dawn of time is irrelevant. Instead, the only factor that matters for free will is the degree to which an action is caused by your desires, preferences, memories, and personality and not by external coercion. Intuitively there is a large difference between an action that results due to your own desires and actions that do not. For compatibilism, this is the only distinction that matters, not whether you could’ve done otherwise or whether there was an immaterial being causing it.
Analyzing the universe in terms of many, many quantum events may seem to leave little room for anything that seems like freedom, regardless of whether these events are deterministic or random; however, we can describe a causal story of the world in multiple levels of abstraction with all of them being simultaneously true. We can look at atoms colliding as one way of analyzing the world, or quantum fields, or quarks, or whatever else may lie below them, but you could also analyze some groups of these atoms–our brains–in terms of abstract mental states. Mental states, even if they are a product of quantum states, are where we should be looking for free will, not at these minuscule levels of detail that don’t apply to human reason or decision-making. Free will is the brain’s ability to compute things, to make decisions based on your preferences and desires. It requires reflective psychology and an ability to reason about decisions. As Dennett puts it, “the key to understanding real free will is recognizing that it does not reside in some concentrated internal lump of specialness, but in the myriad relations and dispositions of an enculturated, socialized, interacting, acknowledging human agent” (Dennett). Free will is nothing more than our ambition’s role in the great cosmic performance.
This may seem like a contrived definition of free will that was constructed with the sole purpose of appeasing philosophers’ fear of sliding into nihilism. It might appear as a “useful fiction” as Richard Dawkins once called it. Free will itself is a social construct, and it may seem like changing the definition to get the answer that we want is unfruitful and ignorantly optimistic. However, in reality, compatibilism changed the definition of free will to one that we want, and it just so happens that we also have this version of free will. The compatibilist definition doesn’t rely on real magic or supernatural forces like the cartesian view. It also doesn’t require any sort of randomness or a vague sense of alternate possibility that PAP requires. Compatibilism simply states that if we have a thought process that causes us to make a decision without being coerced, then that decision is free. Any other definition of free will doesn’t even make sense.
At the end of the day, this debate is primarily about definitions. Besides the cartesian view of free will, which isn’t a common view to have in the world of philosophy anymore due to advances in neuroscience, the other views of free will largely agree on the underlying physics of the world but just arrive at different conclusions. A philosopher who believes in PAP would argue that our actions being determined implies that we have no agency or capacity for choice, and thus we cannot be free. A compatibilist would agree that we are determined but would say that we have free will because why would we even want the ability to have done otherwise? Spinoza and a compatibilist would agree that the world is determined, and they would agree that humans are moral agents that hold moral responsibility. Still, they would disagree on whether humans have free will. Clearly, they agree on the underlying reality but simply disagree on what we should call free will. I hope I have convinced you that the compatibilist definition is the one we care about.
Our brains are designed and optimized in a manner to create predictions and make decisions based on those inferences that best suit our needs. Whether or not there exists randomness in the universe, we take inputs from the world and try our best to reason with them to create the best outcome. I use my perception, memories, and knowledge to carry myself in the best way possible. If that’s not free will, then I don’t want to be free.