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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Thank you to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. Patreon.com slash philosophizethis, philosophizethis.org for everything else. I hope you love the show today. So today we're going to be exploring the question of whether or not free will is an illusion.
And if you're coming to the podcast here today with some reservations about the subject matter, you know, maybe it seems overly abstract. Maybe it seems a bit too self-indulgent. Maybe your long-lost father, who you hadn't seen in 30 years, met up with you at a KFC Taco Bell and rambled to you about free will for 30 minutes. And maybe it seemed much more interesting to him than it ever seemed to you. If that's the kind of stuff you're coming to the podcast with, well, then I hope by the end of the episode, I can offer you a slightly different association on all that. Let's make some new memories together.
Because just like we talked about with the nature of consciousness on episode one of this series, this relationship between free will and determinism, I mean, I get it on one level, right? It can definitely seem like one of these overly philosophical things to be spending your time worrying about. But in reality, if we're just being honest, I think this topic actually affects everybody around us on a level that's pretty easy to overlook if you're not paying attention.
Whether or not you are truly making free decisions when you think you are, that affects the rich person just as much as it does the poor person. It affects people at every social, cultural, or educational level. It affects the way we see ourselves. It affects all these things. Because what's at stake at bottom, whenever people stop and try to have one of these conversations about free choice, is the very concept in our lives of moral accountability. Whenever somebody does anything in this world, good or bad,
The question is always, how much can we hold them accountable for those good or bad decisions that they made? And the very structure of human civilization is founded upon the idea that we can hold people accountable. In fact, somebody could make the case that not only is this not an overly philosophical thing to be worrying about, but that if you ever wanted to be able to call yourself an informed citizen in any real sense of the term...
Again, this isn't a fun, wacky conversation. No, you have a responsibility to understand the different sides of this debate and how it affects people. You know, every smart person out there always has to remain careful about falling into that trap of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where you're overestimating your level of understanding about something because you haven't really taken the time to hear the full complexity of what's being discussed. And then you're smart, so you come up with convincing arguments for bad ideas.
And while there's no definitive answer yet as to the question of whether free will is an illusion, there's undeniable value in knowing the state of the conversation, where you fit into it, where other people are coming from with their positions that you may disagree with. At some point, you just got to decide how self-aware are you going to be of the ideas that you're carrying around.
Now, there's a lot to talk about. Can't possibly cover it all in 30 minutes, but I think we can make some real progress. So let's start with some historical context. If you look back at the discussions that have gone on in the history of Western philosophy, whether or not free will is an illusion, this conversation, is a topic that stands out among others as pretty unique. It's unique because most conversations in the history of philosophy are the flavor of whatever time period they happen to be discussed in.
It all usually goes the same way. Philosophers will argue about something for a while, and then one of about three things eventually happens. They'll come to an agreement about it and move on to something else. They'll argue about it, can't agree, and then realize years later they've been arguing about all the wrong things entirely.
Or the conversation remains something open, almost like a collaborative Google Doc, where philosophers will come in and keep trying to make contributions over the course of the next few decades. Some of those problems eventually get solved. Some of them evaporate. But the discussion around whether or not free will is an illusion, that's an example of an open dialogue that's been going on for the last 2,500 years. And that's just where the historical record ends, by the way. No doubt it was going on a long time before that.
Now, it's very important to state here that the people talking about this stuff back then were not talking about free will and determinism as we'd be talking about them in 2023. Both of those terms come highly loaded with thousands of years of discussion behind them. Back then, what they were talking about probably would have more closely resembled the distinction between free action and fate as predetermined by a god.
But that's not what we're talking about here today. We're trying to examine the very specific question of whether free will is an illusion. So the natural follow-up question has to be: What exactly do we mean when we say that a person has free will? It may be useful to think of the concepts of free will and determinism as being two opposite directions that exist on a spectrum that explains the level of agency of our actions.
Picture the further left you get on this spectrum, the more you believe that we're making free choices. And the further right you get, the more you believe our choices are determined by outside preceding factors. Well, there aren't too many people out there in today's world who would say they believe that we're totally free, you know, completely unencumbered by anything else in the world around us.
I mean, almost everyone sort of acknowledges, clearly, there are things about the choices you're making that are determined by prior events. Unless if you speak German, you're not free to speak German. You have very real physical limitations. You're a human being. You can't lift 10 million pounds over your head. You can't box jump a skyscraper.
Bro, your legs are spaghetti. And on a totally different level, you clearly are heavily influenced by the experiences you've happened to have in your life, the people you've happened to know, the ideas that you've happened to be exposed to. The question for most people isn't whether or not we're influenced by things in our lives. The question is, to what extent do these things dictate our behavior? And to what extent is our free will able to step in and transcend those influences?
On one end of the spectrum, you have proponents of what's called libertarian free will, where the belief is that despite these obvious influences, we always have the capacity to freely choose a particular course of action. On the other end of the spectrum, though, we have what's known as hard determinism or causal determinism.
And no doubt because of how great science has been at predicting things in our lifetime, there are a lot of people living in today's world that think it very well may be the case that if we had an exhaustive understanding of the laws of the universe and the psychology of the beings living within it, that everything about your behavior could be perfectly predicted by referencing a prior cause. This is an extension of the famous thought experiment of Laplace's demon.
Pierre-Simon Laplace, in his work all the way back in the late 1700s, says to imagine a hypothetical demon that exists, where if it knew the exact position of every piece of matter in the universe, and it had total knowledge of the laws of physics that govern the universe, then that demon could perfectly predict every future physical event that was ever going to happen. Obviously, the idea is that if every piece of matter is subject to the same constant laws of physics, then we could just play the tape out, so to speak, fast forward.
And this is nothing new. This is how astronomers can predict exactly where, you know, Jupiter's going to be 20 years from now. Well, the question you got to ask yourself here is, if we can predict where Jupiter's going to be 20 years from now, can scientists, can Neil deGrasse Tyson predict where you're going to be 20 years from now? And God, I hope not. The question is, in theory, if we had a total understanding of the universe and every event proceeding back to the Big Bang,
could we, in theory, predict exactly what it was that you were going to do next? On that same note, could we predict what everyone is going to do next? Hard determinists believe that with enough knowledge of the facts that underlie these events, everything is predictable based on prior causes, regardless of whatever illusion people may have in their heads about how it feels like they're making a free choice. This can get pretty heavy. A hard determinist might tell someone who believes in libertarian free will, "You know, let's say that you are making free choices for a second.
The thoughts that you're having, that you're ostensibly choosing between, those are not things that you're consciously producing. You're not sitting in a chair thinking really hard, straining like, hmm, I'm going to generate some thoughts about what's going on right now. No, to a hard determinist, these thoughts are just arising, seemingly out of nowhere. And that's because they are generated by every prior experience you've ever had, filtered through whatever mental architecture you currently have.
So at best, what you're doing is you're freely choosing between thoughts that you're not choosing. And more than likely, a hard determinist would argue, that very process of you seeming to be able to make a choice is also dictated by your prior experience in mental architecture. In fact, this goes even further. Some hard determinists in the past have gone so far as to make the claim that hard determinism taken to its logical ends...
It is not unreasonable to think that one day, the very idea of chance or randomness altogether may become an outdated concept. That anything that seems random to us right now is really just a marker of something that we haven't studied enough yet to be able to understand all the causal mechanisms at work that determine what's going to happen. And that given enough time, the idea of randomness could eventually be seen as a foreign concept in a hard determinist society.
It's interesting to imagine what it would feel like to live in a world like that, and we're going to talk about what a hard deterministic society may look like a little later on in the episode. But now that we've laid out the polar opposites of this free will determinism spectrum, I think it's very important for us to talk about all the different shades of gray that lie in the middle of those two. See, because if you're a hard determinist, free will cannot exist for your position to remain coherent.
And if you're a libertarian free will kind of person, then hard determinism can't be true. So what you end up getting in the middle are a lot of theories that try to find ways to reconcile free will and determinism. You know, is it possible that reality is structured in such a way where we of course are affected by outside factors, society, your parents, the media you consume, etc. But that at the same time, at some other level of your experience, you really are capable of freely choosing between multiple different options.
Theories that land in this area of the spectrum are going to be known as compatibilism. And at the risk of sounding redundant, remember, a compatibilist doesn't need to believe in free will in the sense that you're freely choosing all of your actions. Their job is to figure out to what extent are you free? What specific portion of our thinking or our minds are actually making these free choices? It doesn't need to be an all or nothing. Answering these questions becomes one of the main challenges of the work of a compatibilist.
And what you'll see if you read the story over the centuries of people making progress in the area of free will is that a lot of the progress that's made comes about because people are being more rigorous about how we define free will. They're getting a more and more nuanced understanding of what specific parts of our behavior we're talking about when we claim to be making a free choice.
And let me give a very broad strokes overview as to how this is typically gone. You know, back thousands of years ago, the conversations people were having about freedom were more centered around something like freedom of action. The basic idea was, what does it mean to be free? Well, that simply means that you are doing the things that you want to do. But it's not long before people realize that that definition's incomplete. For example, if somebody has a gun to your head and is forcing you to do things,
Technically, you don't want to die, so you want to do the things the gunman's telling you to do. But at the same time, that's not your free choice that's going on there. You're being heavily coerced from the outside. So when it comes to moral accountability and how much we can blame someone for their actions, either in a court of law or in our personal lives, obviously, we just don't see someone who has a gun to their head through the same lens of moral judgment.
So a tempting place to go from there is to say that an act of free will is just when somebody does something that they actually want to be doing when there's not a gun to their head. But that definition starts to run into problems. For example, picture somebody who's addicted to smoking. Now, nobody has a gun to this person's head, and they absolutely do want to smoke a cigarette whenever they get a craving. But if we're talking about the kind of freedom to be able to make the choices that you want to make in life,
It's hard to ignore the fact that this person has a very real physical dependency on the substance that's impacting the way they're thinking about it. In other words, their choices are again being heavily coerced by this totally outside factor. That's why most of the time as people, we see someone who's addicted to something through a different lens of moral accountability than someone making that same decision who is not addicted.
And how different that is will come down to your own individual views on it. Maybe it's not that different to you. I'm a philosophy podcaster, by the way. I'm not trying to make claims about addiction here. The point is to illustrate how this conversation about free will has evolved over the years. And if we're going to examine and try to get to the bottom of exactly where our free choice exists, these are things we have to consider. So philosophers take a look at this and they say, well, maybe our whole understanding of the free choices we're making is way off.
Maybe we don't have freedom over what we want, like when we want a cigarette. In fact, when you think about it, you can want a million different things in your life. You can want mutually exclusive things at the same time. Philosophers thought maybe what we have control over isn't what we want, but what we can will ourselves to do.
The thinking is, you can only really have one will that you're willing yourself to do in any one moment. Maybe that's what we have control over. But freedom of the will just runs into a lot of the same problems that the wants ran into. For example, how can you ever really know if the things you're willing yourself to do are things that you're freely choosing? How can you know if your will isn't being hijacked by social pressure, culture, media? Can we say that you're truly free if you're making a decision in the face of all that?
And at this point, I feel like I have to bring up a thought that's no doubt arising in some of your brains right now. The thought is, "Oh, I see what you're doing here." You're just going to keep zooming out to less and less aggressive methods of influencing people's behaviors and then continue asking the question, "Well, are we truly free if this other thing is impacting your behavior? How can you say that we're free?"
But on another level, isn't that just what life is? Don't things just impact your behavior? That's what happens? Under that line of thinking, taken far enough, can we ever hold anyone accountable for anything they do? To which someone engaging in this discussion might say back, yeah, exactly. Look, almost nobody out there wants a world where we can't hold people accountable for the things that they do.
So the question we're challenging and trying to get to the bottom of is when specifically can we hold people accountable? What sort of choices do people have control over? Because as we've established, we don't hold someone as accountable when they have a gun to their head. We don't hold a grizzly bear accountable on the same level we do a human. Philosophers have tried to answer these questions in recent years. Let's give a couple examples. First up is a classic from the work of a guy named Harry Frankfurt.
And if you're going to be able to hang in one of these modern conversations about free will and determinism, you're going to have to be familiar with the part of his work that talks about first and second order desires. People are going to use that terminology in these conversations. It's good to know what it means. To explain it, you can start with a basic question. What is the difference between a dog's level of freedom and a human's level of freedom? Why do we hold people more morally accountable than we do animals? Well, let's think about it.
What is it like when a dog makes a decision? A dog can do a lot of things. A dog can feel hungry. A dog can want to eat the food inside of its bowl. It can will itself to eat the food inside of its bowl. All of these things and more you could think of as a sort of first order of desires that a dog experiences. And people obviously experience these too. But this is where we diverge. Something we can do that
that it doesn't seem like a dog's able to do, is that we have the ability to wish we had other desires than what we have. We have a second-order ability, Frankfurt says, to reflect on the desires that we have in a moment and then either wish that we didn't have a desire that we do or to wish we had a desire that we don't actually have. Think of the smoker that's addicted to cigarettes and then lives their life tortured, wishing that they weren't the kind of person that wants to smoke so bad.
Or the person that wishes they were the kind of person that wanted to read books more often. That seems to be a level of reflection about our experience that a dog is just not participating in. I mean, say what you want about the similarities between people and dogs, but...
There is no dog out there saying to itself, what I would give to not be the kind of dog that loves bacon so much. Somebody help me over here. It's no, maybe the person that's addicted to smoking who sees no problem with their behavior is free because their behavior corresponds with both their first and second order desires. They don't wish they were anything different than what they are.
But maybe the person who's addicted to smoking that doesn't want to smoke anymore and yet still does it every single day, hating themselves, tortured inside, wishing they could stop, but they can't. Maybe that's the person who isn't free. Now, it needs to be said in the work of Harry Frankfurt, these first and second order desires sometimes need to line up in ways that are pretty complicated, given the circumstances you're talking about.
There's a lot more to it. Highly recommend reading his work if you're interested. But again, the point of this here today is to give an example of how a compatibilist might try to offer an explanation for how free will and determinism can coexist. How even if the contents of every potential decision you're making are ultimately generated outside of your conscious control, could it be that this second order level of reflection is the one location in our minds that we are capable of choosing between different desires?
Alternatively, could it be that the freedom we have at a conscious level is simply the ability to veto decisions that are formulated at the unconscious level? Free won't, as the neuroscientist Benjamin LeBay called it. Regardless of whether any of these prove to be true or not, hopefully it's clear by now that there's a considerable amount of work left to be done in this area.
We can't prove that free will exists. We can't prove that free will is an illusion. But let's say that we could prove it for a second. Let's say tomorrow, neuroscientists and philosophers gathered together. They all rode their horses up to the top of a mountain. Sam Harris gets up on top of a boulder. He's wearing the pelts of several small rodents that he's slain in the woods around him.
And he gets up on the boulder and he says, "The age of free will is officially over. The age of causal determinism shall now begin." How would our societies have to be restructured if we could somehow verify that even though it may look like people are making free decisions, even though it may feel like it to them, that everything they're doing is ultimately determined by a prior cause? How would that change the way that we see people in a hard determinist society?
Now, the obvious first thing that everybody talks about when they imagine this sort of society is that we'd probably have to make considerable changes to the way that we view criminal justice. The thinking there is that the entire foundation of our criminal justice strategy hinges on the fact that when someone commits a crime, they had a choice in some other course of events that could have occurred to not commit that crime. But if we found out that when someone commits a crime, that they actually could not have chosen other than the way that they did...
Can we, in that world, in good conscience, really lock people in prison for 20 years of their life for carrying out a causal chain of events that they didn't choose to be born into and they had no real control over? Maybe in a society based on hard determinism, criminal justice would be less about divvying out punishments designed to deter bad decision making, and maybe the strategy would be more about rehabilitation or education.
Maybe people would focus more on the causal mechanisms that they think lead to criminal behavior in childhood, in underserved communities, in the school system. Maybe that society would try even harder than we do now because they'd be forced to acknowledge that sitting around blaming people accomplishes nothing in a hard deterministic society. And criminal justice, again, is a really interesting example that people offer when talking about a society like this.
But to me, the more interesting things are the broad social implications of what we're talking about here. In other words, it's not just about criminal justice. How do you create incentives for anything in a hard determinist society? Because this doesn't just apply to bad behavior. How do you reward people for good behavior? How do you justify paying someone three times as much as someone else, even if they're working three times as hard, if both people literally could not have chosen to do otherwise?
How do you award scholarships to certain students over others? Think of how different the outcomes of people's lives turn out. Think of the varying levels of health and fulfillment, political representation, and think about how under hard determinism, those outcomes ultimately come down to being born into the right or wrong causal chain of events.
How do you justify people being rewarded with such different lives when no one really made a choice either way? The only way you can in our current setup is to say that people always have the free will to choose to work harder. Think of another incentive structure that exists in the world now that would be called into question. How about the very basic idea of when we say that someone is a good person or not? Can you even make the claim that someone is good or bad in this world?
I mean, that whole value judgment is based on the fact that people can choose to make good or bad decisions. Would people in a hard deterministic society see the act of sitting around blaming people, labeling them as good or bad? Would they see that as just a waste of time? Would there be more compassion in a society like that? Because there'd be a perspective shift from blaming people to just trying harder to understand what's causing a particular behavior.
And that of course wouldn't mean that there's never going to be times you don't want a particular person in the orbit of your life where their behavior negatively affects you. You might do that all the time. But that ritual of blaming the person that we currently do, would that all seem pretty nostalgic from a hard deterministic point of view? Another example of something that might change. How about certain business practices or marketing practices? How about those teams of people on something like YouTube that sit around trying to come up with ways to keep people on their app for longer? How would we see them?
I mean, these people are transparently using tendencies not only in human psychology in a macro sense, but through algorithms. They're catering things to take advantage of your personal tendencies to keep you scrolling, keep you spending your time looking at the spectacle on your phone, all of this for the sake of generating the most profit. Now, people are okay with this in the current setup of our society. I mean, the story is that if there's anyone out there who's wasting thousands of hours of their life on an app,
and they have other things in their life that they really want to get done, but then they get sucked into this abyss every day that feels incredibly hard to get out of. The story currently is that that's okay, because that person can always just stop watching. They always have the freedom to delete the app, be responsible, and get their life together. And
And for the record, that would still be true in a deterministic society. But if everybody suddenly became a hard determinist, and people were aware of how the aggressive influences around us often lead people down roads where their life ends up being a mess, would the public view the people that are making and perfecting these algorithms differently? Would they start to see them as people that are manufacturing addiction? You know, almost like if there was a chemist that created a drug in a lab that's specifically designed to be addictive to people.
Like the chemist makes it so that it targets parts of the brain that makes it way harder for people to ever stop. That person would be considered evil in our current setup. But how about people aggressively influencing behavior in other ways? Would the people making the algorithms be prosecuted in a hard determinist world? What would that prosecution even look like, given how the criminal justice system might have changed?
But anyway, hopefully it's evident at this point that if society underwent a massive shift where everything was structured around the precepts of hard determinism, a lot of stuff would have to change. And maybe to some of you, these changes don't sound that bad at all. But at the very least, what I think anybody having this conversation has to concede is
is that if we ever went in that direction, we'd definitely be running some brand new experiments that really haven't ever been tried at the largest scales of society. There's no guarantee that anything like this actually works in practice. In fact, another interesting angle to all this is that there are real people out there that argue that if we were somehow ever able to conclude that the universe was causally deterministic, these people argue that the best thing we could do in that situation would be to not tell anybody.
They say it's almost like if NASA found out there's an asteroid headed towards Earth and there's nothing anybody could ever do to stop it, should we tell the public about it? Similarly, these people argue that every piece of the way we organize our societies is founded upon the idea of moral accountability. What if this whole experiment just doesn't work without that ingredient? What if the best thing we could do would be to let people keep on believing that they have free will even if they don't?
Regardless of what you think the social policy should be, and regardless of what you think may be going on at the level of the universe, we're all ultimately responsible for a totally separate endeavor, which is coming up with a personal policy about how we're going to view this stuff in our own lives. A passage from William James comes to mind when I think about this.
He has a great essay. It's called The Dilemma of Determinism, 1884. And in it, he talks about how you can view the entire history of the world, everything that's ever happened, through the lens of both determinism or free will. He says you can see history as the intersection of millions of free-acting moral agents all making decisions, working together, those decisions colliding with each other sometimes in extremely random and violent ways over the years. You can see it that way.
Or you can see history as a chain of causally related events, all unfolding based on a predictable order that's written into the structure of the universe and into human psychology. But he says regardless of how you view history, there's only one rational way to be looking at the future of your life, and that is under the pragmatic assumption that you do have free will. He famously says, "...my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."
And I think no matter what you do when you're deciding where you're going to land on this stuff when it comes to your personal life, I think it's important to remember that there's definitely downsides to being too extreme into one camp or another. If you lean too far in the direction of free will, then you run the risk of becoming someone that sits around blaming yourself all the time, hating on decisions that you should or shouldn't have made in moments in the past.
But if you lean too far in the direction of determinism, you run the risk of externalizing everything, never taking accountability for yourself, and really just becoming a victim. Maybe there's a case to be made, even if you're a hard determinist when it comes to the universe. Maybe there's a case to be made for being a compatibilist when it comes to your relationship to yourself. That said, I want to close today by giving one more example of something that may change if we were living in a hard determinist society.
And I waited until the end here because it has to do with conversations about AI, which the next two episodes of the show are going to be going into pretty heavily. What I wanted to say is that artificial intelligence, when you think about it, gives us a pretty unique perspective on free will. And it's a perspective that I don't think humanity has had directly available until very recently. When you look at something like a self-driving car, for example, that car and the artificial intelligence that navigates it
From an ignorant, total outsider's perspective, that car appears to be making free choices. It is stopping at stop signs, it is merging, it is parking, it is altering the route home because there's less traffic on the back roads. To a total outsider, this AI appears to have free will. But of course we know, because we are the ones that programmed it, that it doesn't have free will. It is entirely deterministic based on complex algorithms and programming.
Well, it's interesting to consider: can artificial intelligence appear from the outside to be doing things that seem borderline magical, that it's not actually even close to doing if you understood the internal architecture of how the thing is programmed? Next episode, we're going to be talking about John Searle and, among other things, his now infamous thought experiment, widely known as the Chinese Room Argument. Hope you enjoyed the episode here today. I'm going to keep it up, releasing on this more frequent schedule.
I just ask you to please tell a friend about the show at some point if you feel like I've given you something worth sharing to them. Thanks to everyone on Patreon. Shoutouts this week. Yintong Chin, Kyle Smalling, CJ Brandmeier, Fabian Chernizky, and a very special birthday shoutout to Luca Alberto Rizzo. Apparently he's been a fan of the show for a really long time. I appreciate you. So happy I can give you something in your life that you look forward to every day, man. Thank you to everyone out there. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.
