I'll be the first to admit: there are several things that I do not understand. Some things simply elude my comprehension and I require additional explanation and elaboration in order to fully grasp them. Much like anyone else who is of an intellectually honest, forthcoming, and humble character really. It is during these instances I've found it's good practice to try and outline as clearly as possible the information (in this case, an argument) one is not familiar with. So, I'll be giving the materialistic determinism argument against free will this treatment.
The argument, in a nutshell, goes something like this:
Free will, that is, the ability to choose given choices, is an illusion. Choice plays out as a consequence of actions and processes acting before it--these actions and processes are largely beyond our consciousness, nevermind our control. Therefore we cannot say we freely choose in any sovereign fashion outside of the constraints imposed by the decision.
To better illustrate the argument, I'll offer up an example. Suppose it is 4:30pm in the afternoon and it is time for a work break. You saunter over to the café counter, with your go-to order of a medium, lightly-roasted, black coffee in mind. Along the way you brush past a sharply-dressed gentleman; a new face you've never seen in the building before. He looks young. New intern? No, he doesn't have that doe-eyed, 'lost' look to him. His demeanor seems relaxed and lackadaisical; probably government, not contractor. Anyway, once arriving at the cashier to give them your order, you have a second thought; encountering that young man in his exceptionally dapper attire reminded you that you have a presentation early tomorrow morning. A caffeine infusion at this point in the afternoon would only negatively affect your sleep later on. With this in mind, you make the decision to order a small Earl Grey tea in lieu of your usual coffee.
Intuitively, it seems like this choice, of choosing the Earl Grey over the coffee is an exercise of free will. You had a choice, between the tea and the coffee, and given the circumstances, you used your reasoning to choose tea over coffee. No one coerced you into choosing it; you voluntarily did it. You could say that the condition of 'has an early meeting tomorrow' effectively limited your choices, but it isn't as if the condition rendered a choice absolutely impossible. You could've very well been irresponsible and chosen the coffee instead. Hence, it was a 'free' choice, meaning that you had the ability to choose otherwise.
But did you really have a choice to begin with? This is where the argument against free will begins. From the above scenario, you have to momentarily disassociate from the macroscale picture and approach from the realm of the microscale. The way I see it, in order for this argument to work, you need to accept four major premises:
Premise I There is a finitude to the observable universe, temporally speaking. From the start of the universe to the present moment, there was a finite amount of time that had elapsed.
Premise II Matter in the observable universe (including people, animals, buildings, stars, asteroids, etc.) is comprised of molecules, which in turn are comprised of atoms. We can also further decompose this into sub-atomic particles if we want, but it isn't salient in appreciating the argument and will be briefly addressed later.
Premise III These molecules/atoms behave in accordance to physical laws. For instance, the covalent bonds that hold a molecule of water together can be described as electromagnetic interactions between the charges of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Similarly, the trajectory of a droplet of water through space can be described by knowing its mass, position, velocity, and acceleration across all points in time.
Premise IV From the beginning of the universe to the present moment, every molecule/atom and their interactions have abided by physical law. Every interaction has a cause and an effect, where the cause entails the effect, and the effect is dependent on the cause. The effect of one process can be the cause of another. This is the principle of causality.
The argument against free will makes the case that the phenomenon of choosing something isn't anything special, but the fulfillment of a rather large chain of causally-linked macroscale events that can be decomposed into similarly causally-linked microscale atomic/molecular interactions.
So let me roughly (very roughly, since there is an indeterminate amount of processes that could've taken place between steps) draw a road map here, coming back to our example.
01.) The universe begins.
02.) From this birth, matter went flying through space.
04.) Some other matter clumped up, drawn by the gravitational field of the Sun. We'll call it Earth.
05.) Earth has some carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms in it.
06.) These atoms bounce around according to physical laws, collide, and form new molecules.
07.) These new molecules such as sugars, amino acids, DNA, similarly interact and form life.
08.) Of this life are plants, and quite a bit later on, people. People begin to grow and eat plants.
09.) Cabbage farmers exist, some even pickle their cabbage into kimchi for sale.
10.) You're born, you age. You buy such kimchi and eat it as part of dinner one night.
11.) Your gut bacteria absorb its nutrients. In their infinite gratitude, pump out serotonin molecules.
12.) These serotonin molecules are transported to the synapses of your brain.
13.) A neuron fires, due to the combined input of a neighboring neuron and the threshold modulation of the serotonin.
14.) This lone neuron firing sets off a cascade of other neurons firing. You go for coffee.
15.) All these neurons firing leads to the mental state of 'having second thoughts'.
16.) 'Having second thoughts' leads to firing of more neurons, leading to mental state 'choose tea over coffee'.
It all sounds very absurd, since an event as grand as the start of the universe telescopes into painfully mundane events such as eating kimchi or electing to drink tea, but it is all coherent and valid. There exists a causal lineage of events for each and every particle in the universe, and thus every process, from the largest scale such as stars exploding to simple neurotransmitter production. As an aside, I cannot help but think how romantic it is to think of events unfolding in this way. How many conditions had to be just right? How many preceding events had to occur in the correct order? How many particles had to be in the right place, at exactly the right time, behaving in precisely the correct manner to allow you to be where you are right at this moment. And that's applied towards a mundane moment of you sitting there, merely existing. When thinking about chance encounters of people you may come to adore, of memories being fashioned in good company, one can quickly come to appreciate that so much had to be exactly right for all of it to occur. Romantic sentiment aside, to people who subscribe to a purely scientific worldview, this all seems reasonable, to be accepted regardless of the consequences such thinking can bring.
Being as difficult as I am, I happen to think it breeds a predominantly negative attitude and outlook of the world. What is to become of a person that is stripped of their agency? More importantly, what system of morality can stand if there is no free will? It is often said that a person is not held accountable for committing an atrocity if they had no choice in the matter; this would mean that the most heinous of crimes would have to go unpunished since the perpetrator truly isn't in control of his actions. He's a mere meat bag taking a long series of causally-linked physical processes to their inevitable conclusion at a certain point in space, in a certain point in time. Perhaps even more dastardly, what of things such as love and accomplishment? You don't truly love your spouse (since you choose who you love), nor were your hard work and effort your own. As before, these phenomenon are just another link in the causal chain. That last one, regarding love, I've actually heard broadly applied to human emotion in general by a particular orange acquaintance of mine. I find it funny that such a person seems to be okay with the silly notion during times of peace and stability, but when someone transgresses against them they suddenly act as if their free will and emotions exists and/or matters.
So, I offer two errors I see with this deterministic argument. The first, I see the entire argument as logically incoherent with one of it's basic premises, therefore rendering it unsound. Namely, Premise IV, the premise on causality. Whilst I don't doubt that causality is a thing or sensible on any given local scale timeline (pick any two points that are on the timeline of the universe. Causality holds between them) it breaks down when one of the points in the timeline include the beginning of the universe. As I've mentioned before in post ID #20181216, the scientific account of the origins of the universe hits a dead end, running headfirst into Aristotle's concept of the unmoved mover. So in the deterministic argument against free will, we're told that free will is an illusion; it is more of the natural outcome of several processes all causally linked together, whose origins can be traced back to the beginning of the universe. Wait, but what are we supposed to do once we reach the beginning of the universe? Abandon the principle of causality? You cannot simply apply causality as a universal principle everywhere except for one place where it becomes inconvenient. Either it applies for everything, or it doesn't apply at all; that's how universal rules and principles work, else they're not universal rules and principles. My stance is that the origins of the universe are at the moment, poorly understood by science--so anyone that is trying to make a sweeping conclusion that includes any sense of absolutism on the origins of the universe is doing so out of either arrogance or ignorance.
I've also heard somewhere along my learning that causality is not a principle intrinsic to reality, but rather a cognitively-created framework employed specifically by humans to make sense of it. If anyone has the source or further reading on the idea, please contact me! It's an extremely interesting notion I'd like to know more about. (Update edit: Found it! It's one Kant's categories of the mind, found in his work Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.)
Secondly, I see the argument as a perfect example of a category error being made. The materialistic deterministic (we could simply say 'hard scientific' to be more colloquial) outlook on reality is a powerful one. Several phenomenon in the universe are accounted for with this outlook, and civilization has been greatly advanced thanks to that mode of thinking. It is very tempting to think that it is the superior or perhaps the only mode of thinking, given all of its self-evident merit. However, it is important to realize that there are limits as to what science can and has provided explanation, with human consciousness and free will being one of the most troublesome phenomena science has yet to account for. As far as I know, human consciousness isn't well understood much at all, and there have been no conclusive research that illuminates its true nature; most of the literature regarding it is speculatory or describes the underlying biology of elements of consciousness (decision-making, alertness, attention). By no means is any of it comprehensive. Truly this is where I take issue with the argument: given this knowledge--that human consciousness and free will is poorly understood at the moment--how could one possibly make the assertion that free will is illusory on the basis of scientific, deterministic principles when the empirical evidence even establishing such a connection is non-existent? To me it seems like a gross overreach and basic arrogance.
The reason why I call the argument a paragon of a category error is because it's fallacious to assume that just because a system features characteristics of one flavor means that the entire system can be characterized by principles that govern those characteristics. In other words, just because the neurobiological processes underlying free will follow deterministic principles doesn't mean that the entire process of free will abide solely by deterministic principles. This manifests as a common objection to the argument: the case of quantum mechanics. Deterministic, classical physics isn't the only game in reality that governs phenomenon. However, one should exercise caution when applying quantum mechanics to the free will argument, since changing "'free will' is just the playing out the inevitable conclusion of an indeterminate number of preceding, physical processes" to "'free will' is just the playing out the inevitable conclusion of an indeterminate number of preceding, physical, and random processes" isn't much of an upgrade.
Ignoring the quantum mechanical account against free will for the moment, what is preventing there from being something else to the process of free will? Physicists for the longest time thought that classical physics were the absolute rules of reality, then came along electromagnetism, general relativity, and now quantum mechanics. So why is there such a necessity for faulty extrapolation and overreach of our current knowledge base? Why make foolish claims to things we simply don't understand quite yet? My main gripe with the argument, why I think it is so dangerous, is this: it leads to a certain harmful mode of thinking and robs people of the sovereignty that quintessentially makes them human and potentially virtuous. And for what? For the sake of remaining consistent in a fetish for empiricism when there is next to none empirical data on the matter? Seems like an awful trade-off if you ask me.
[end transmission]
