Free Will
Whether or not we have free will is a philosophical question that some have argued is unknowable and ultimately irrelevant. Still, our intuitions tell us it is important for establishing moral responsibility (how can someone be blameworthy or praiseworthy if they had no choice in the matter?) and, perhaps, for fending off nihilism (how could there be a point to anything we do if we are not ultimately free to do anything other than what we did?).
The question of determinism has always been entangled with inquiries into free will. Whether the determinism of an omniscient God’s will or the blind laws of a clockwork nature, it is hard to square a predetermined future with the idea of moral agents who are free to choose and are therefore responsible.
In fact, philosophers tend to fall into two camps in the attempt: Compatabilists, who believe free will can coexist with determinism as a meaningful concept, and Incompatibilists, who think that one or the other has got to go.
As an aside, when I was younger, I couldn’t understand how Calvinism got anyone to behave – if your ultimate fate was predetermined, why bother wrestling with temptation, why not sin? Only later did I realize the power of wanting to be seen as one of the Elect, how it coopted our social hardwiring into doing the work that a fear of potential eternal damnation might not be up to.
For a while, modern science seemed determined (ha!) to replace the role of God with that of a wind-up toy, as the classical mechanics of Newton and Maxwell revealed more and more of nature to be predictable and driven by laws that were understandable by man. Even the stochasticity inherent in thermodynamics could be seen as simply a failure to have enough information. Sure, maybe we can only predict the averages, but that’s just because we don’t have perfect knowledge of initial conditions. If we knew every atom’s position and momentum, we could run it forward and tell you how things end… right?
This replacement of a benevolent Creator with an uncaring system of gears, contributed, I think, to some of the angst and nihilism rampant in the modernism at the end of the nineteenth century. Dualism was going out of fashion as the purely material explained more and more, but it left a hole where the spirit had been.
But then quantum mechanics came along and upset this apple cart, injecting randomness and inescapable uncertainty into the very fabric of reality. The wave function may evolve deterministically, unfolding according to mathematical laws, but there was this completely random collapse that occurred when a measurement was taken. We don’t know - can’t know - what will happen.
But, unfortunately for those seeking meaning in free will, true randomness doesn’t rescue anything. How can our actions mean anything if they are just the result of a dice roll? How can we punish someone for rolling snake eyes and committing a grave sin? Total randomness seems just as incompatible with freedom as total determinism.
Luckily, for those not ready for the debate to end, quantum mechanics had a missing piece - any description of what happens when a measurement is taken, when an observer observes - and left it up to interpretation (of which there are many). The well-tested theory only says, “this is how things proceed up until a measurement, and then, after a measurement, you will get these outcomes with these probabilities.” It is silent as to the moment of measurement, and physicists’ response to this has mostly been to “shut up and calculate,” relegating interpretation to the realm of metaphysics for much of the last century.
Some, including Sir Roger Penrose, have posited an integral link between consciousness and the quantum world, believing that our volition springs from quantum weirdness that somehow imbues our brains with the power to choose, to operate right at the juncture between determinism and randomness. This would be a nice solution to the problem, but there’s not much evidence for it, nor any real explanation for how it works or could work. Without more evidence, it feels to me like a comforting story that lets us keep all our shibboleths while purportedly being scientific.
Others have leapt into the gap, using quantum entanglement and spooky action at a distance to justify all manner of Woo.
I have an alternate model that lets me sleep at night. I confess I have no more evidence for it than I do for the Emperor’s New Mind, but I also think it’s less hard to swallow, at least for me, than quantum weirdness being required for consciousness and evolution somehow stumbling on a completely unknown mechanism for harnessing it.
My model does involve the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which may be too much for some to swallow, so consider yourself forewarned. The Many Worlds Interpretation was put forward by Hugh Everett in his dissertation at Princeton in the mid-1950’s. It was roundly scorned at the time, leading Everett to give up physics, but has received renewed interest since the 70’s and 80’s when experimental results around quantum decoherence and entanglement cast it in a more favorable light.
In contrast to the Copenhagen Interpretation, the dominant interpretation promoted by Niels Bohr, which describes the probabilistic collapse of the wave function described above, the Many Worlds Interpretation claims that the wave function never collapses. Instead all possible quantum states are realized in a branching multiverse – the wave function continues to evolve deterministically, never collapsing. The illusion of collapse, it claims, and the randomness inherent in it, is caused by the decoherence of entangled quantum states in the different branches. Essentially this means that the evolution of the wave function in the different branches can no longer affect each other – as more and more particles become entangled, they spread out and clump in Hilbert space, with each island of probability no longer correlated with or connected to the others.
Now that’s a mouthful, but the essence is that all possible outcomes happen and the apparent randomness comes from us (and the whole universe) splitting and heading down the now-disconnected branches.
So, you might ask, what does this have to do with free will? Does this rescue it? Can we use it to salvage the idea of moral responsibility? I think it does and we can.
To explain why, let me present a thought experiment, a scenario that we can imagine playing out in the many worlds, and try to draw some (possibly not fully coherent) conclusions from it.
Imagine you are standing, angry, in front of a man, pointing a gun at his head. You’ve stumbled on him doing something horrible and, even though you’ve already stopped him, you are tempted to give into your rage and disgust and shoot him anyway. Imagine you are Brad Pitt at the end of Seven. You wrestle with yourself, your conscience torn between letting the police arrest him and taking matters into your own hands. You squeeze the trigger partway, deciding what to do.
Let’s pause the tape right here and allow you to step outside and watch two of the branches unfold. In one, you pull the trigger and Kevin Spacey falls dead to the ground – you are arrested and charged with murder and have to live with the fact that you shot an unarmed man. In the other branch, you drop the gun, fall to the ground crying, and let the police arrest Spacey.
According to the Many Worlds Interpretation, both of these happen. The wave function evolves and in one branch an electron interacts with an ion one way and you decide to pull the trigger. In the other, it interacts with a different ion and you don’t. You can’t stop either from happening. Your consciousness splits in two, each disconnected from the other, each with its own memories and sense of time unfolding.
Now the question. Which of these branches do you choose to go down? In one sense, you will go down both. But in another, you will only be aware of one path and another you, which you no longer have access to, will go down the other. Which path do you want your consciousness to continue in? Which decision do you want to remember making?
I would argue that this is what we do when we exercise our free will. We choose which branch we want to be awake in. Yes, there is another us, exactly the same up until the moment of the choice, in the other branch, but which character do you want to keep playing? If we choose one path, does it matter that there is a copy of us that chose the other any more than it would matter if we had a doppelgänger on the other side of the universe? We chose one and that’s the one we get to live.
Now how does this rescue moral agency? If both branches happen – had to happen – and unfolded deterministically, how can we assign blame or praise to either copy? There were always going to be both copies who made both choices, why punish one and reward the other?
But to me, it seems, we can and should. The consciousness, our consciousness, that went down our path actually made the choice to do so. The other consciousness, that was us up until a moment ago, made the other choice and went down the other path. We are both responsible for our choices. In each branch, we ended up there because we chose it and we should bear the consequences.
Is this a coherent story? I confess that I don’t know and that maybe it’s not. Things get dicey with consciousnesses splitting and copies being made. It’s difficult to be sure that our logic holds and we aren’t just talking nonsense.
I also realize that this is also just a comfortable just-so story, dressed up in science-y clothes, that allows me to go on believing what I want to, that I get to choose, that it matters what I choose, and that I am still a moral agent (along with everyone else).
But still, I can’t help but be drawn to it. To the idea that I’m rushing towards these choice points where the universe branches, where I don’t decide between what happens and what doesn’t, because everything does, but I do decide which version of me I want to be, the one who pulled the trigger or the one who didn’t.
Yes, it helps me sleep at night and it might not be fully coherent, but still, I choose (freely, I hope) to believe it.