Free Will and Determinism
A student of mine now at Princeton sends a link to a long discussion of free will and determinism ("Luck Swallows Everything") that attempts an analysis of possible rational positions on the subject: we have no free will; we have some free will; we have absolute free will. After pages of Enlightenment argument, exhausting in trying to be exhaustive, the article concludes with a Romantic implication: truth is a matter of individual opinion. This is what happens when one worships human reason.
The most annoying passages in the article attempt to assess whether we have “ultimate responsibility” for our choices, as if human free will could ever be ultimate. (However we have come into being, we have certainly not created ourselves.)
Such a discussion may be useful for intellectual training. It is not a path to truth.
Here are my own guidelines for thinking about free will and predetermination:
1. Oedipus Rex is the extra-biblical world’s most powerful articulation of the relation between free will and fate, which, in a mystery, are one. Reading it is humbling tonic.
2. In The Ethics of the Fathers, Rabbi Akiba says, “All is foreseen and free choice is given . . . .” He is asserting that God (the only possible bearer of “ultimate responsibility”) foresees everything and gives man free will. The implication of this condensed statement is that we live in mystery and must live with paradox, and that our mission is not to solve the mystery or resolve the paradox but to choose the good. The sentence concludes, “and the world is judged by goodness and all is according to the amount of work.” That is, God is good in his judgment and rewards virtuous deeds, assertions that would be pointless if we had no free will.
3. Dante agrees. In the Paradiso he asserts that free will is God’s greatest gift to man, that God predestines all things, and that no created being can comprehend the divine predestination or its relation to our free will.
4. Milton agrees. In Paradise Lost, he asserts that God’s foreknowledge does not limit man’s freedom of choice, the only basis for the justice of reward and punishment, whether human or divine.
5. The modern concept of predetermination depends on the belief that all events are physical, every event being a deterministic function of all previous events. But since it is not provable or disprovable that all reality is comprehended by the physical universe, the actual existence of free will remains a matter of faith, not knowledge. The strictly deterministic science of physics itself arrives at quantum theory, which paradoxically contradicts absolute physical determinism. (As Jeffrey Satinover argues in The Quantum Brain, quantum indeterminacy may be the very locus of our freedom.)
6. Belief in the absence of human free will goes against the mainstream of Western intellectual and religious tradition, and the question of the precise relation of free will to determinism is a profound mystery that cannot be solved by the human mind. (Those who think otherwise, despite their apparent commitment to Enlightenment rationality, are fantasizing.)
7. Mary Holmes said, “It doesn't matter whether we actually have free will; we think we do.” We experience ourselves as making choices, an experience not altered by imagining the choices to be illusory. Every participant in the upcoming colloquy, however deterministic his abstract picture of reality, will nonetheless be living in practice under the assumption that he is making free choices. Thus it seems silly to embrace a philosophical position that posits that a universal foundation of the thought and behavior of actual human beings—even determinists—is an empty shell. One might as soon believe that desire, language, or breathing were illusory.
My advice is to laugh at them.
The most annoying passages in the article attempt to assess whether we have “ultimate responsibility” for our choices, as if human free will could ever be ultimate. (However we have come into being, we have certainly not created ourselves.)
Such a discussion may be useful for intellectual training. It is not a path to truth.
Here are my own guidelines for thinking about free will and predetermination:
1. Oedipus Rex is the extra-biblical world’s most powerful articulation of the relation between free will and fate, which, in a mystery, are one. Reading it is humbling tonic.
2. In The Ethics of the Fathers, Rabbi Akiba says, “All is foreseen and free choice is given . . . .” He is asserting that God (the only possible bearer of “ultimate responsibility”) foresees everything and gives man free will. The implication of this condensed statement is that we live in mystery and must live with paradox, and that our mission is not to solve the mystery or resolve the paradox but to choose the good. The sentence concludes, “and the world is judged by goodness and all is according to the amount of work.” That is, God is good in his judgment and rewards virtuous deeds, assertions that would be pointless if we had no free will.
3. Dante agrees. In the Paradiso he asserts that free will is God’s greatest gift to man, that God predestines all things, and that no created being can comprehend the divine predestination or its relation to our free will.
4. Milton agrees. In Paradise Lost, he asserts that God’s foreknowledge does not limit man’s freedom of choice, the only basis for the justice of reward and punishment, whether human or divine.
5. The modern concept of predetermination depends on the belief that all events are physical, every event being a deterministic function of all previous events. But since it is not provable or disprovable that all reality is comprehended by the physical universe, the actual existence of free will remains a matter of faith, not knowledge. The strictly deterministic science of physics itself arrives at quantum theory, which paradoxically contradicts absolute physical determinism. (As Jeffrey Satinover argues in The Quantum Brain, quantum indeterminacy may be the very locus of our freedom.)
6. Belief in the absence of human free will goes against the mainstream of Western intellectual and religious tradition, and the question of the precise relation of free will to determinism is a profound mystery that cannot be solved by the human mind. (Those who think otherwise, despite their apparent commitment to Enlightenment rationality, are fantasizing.)
7. Mary Holmes said, “It doesn't matter whether we actually have free will; we think we do.” We experience ourselves as making choices, an experience not altered by imagining the choices to be illusory. Every participant in the upcoming colloquy, however deterministic his abstract picture of reality, will nonetheless be living in practice under the assumption that he is making free choices. Thus it seems silly to embrace a philosophical position that posits that a universal foundation of the thought and behavior of actual human beings—even determinists—is an empty shell. One might as soon believe that desire, language, or breathing were illusory.
My advice is to laugh at them.
posted by G.Rap | 11:29 PM
6 Comments:
I like Raymond Smullyan's dialogue: Is God a Taoist?
I agree with Rabbi Akiba, Dante, Milton, and Smullyan that God's foreknowledge of our choices does not preclude free will. I do not, however, see it as a paradox or a mystery.
Any given event is either predetermined or random. A random event won't lend itself to foreknowledge (that's what random means), so God's foreknowledge implies determinism.
But determinism does not preclude free will!
Free will means that I do things because I want to do them -- that my actions are determined by my desires. Notice the word "determined." Randomness (whether quantum or otherwise) is what would preclude free will -- by nullifying the causal link between wanting and doing. Determinism, therefore, is not opposed to free will, but is necessary for it.
(To be sure, the universe does seem to have non-deterministic aspects to it. But they don't seem relevant to the free will debate. Random events at the quantum level aren't choices.)
I also agree with the whole of paragraph seven.
I'm glad Maurile agrees with as much as he does.
The Raymond Smullyan dialogue is very entertaining, and salutary up to a point. That point is where Smullyan pretends to rope the Creator into his own utilitarianism, which makes pleasure and pain more fundamental principles than good and evil. This assertion about God begs the question. Smullyan complains that morality gets in the way of utilitarianism. But if good and evil are more basic than pleasure and pain, then utilitarianism gets in the way of morality. Utilitarians find decrease of pain and increase of pleasure to be the only justification for doing good. Believers in morality find that good can justify and even redeem pain. To each the other is inverting reality. But only faith, not reasoning, can choose between them. Hence my statement that we live in mystery.
As entertaining as Smullyan’s dialogue is, it is the dialogue of logicians. The narrowness of the logician’s view of God and morality is seen in the fact that Smullyan could find no better representative of traditional religion than “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” No wonder that he sets his heart on a Taoist relief from Western religion if that is his picture of religion. But the greatest people of faith, unbeknownst to Smullyan, are not simply primitive moralists. They have undergone an encounter or meeting (as Martin Buber calls it) with that Other who includes but is not themselves, who includes but is not Nature, who includes but is not limited by the necessity of things and the giving of the gift of free will. I think it is also Buber who says that a man may think he has encountered the divine when he has not, but no man who has experienced a direct encounter with the divine can think he has not. Smullyan is sure he has not, and, to his credit, he is certainly right about that.
The reason we would not give up our free will is not only that we wish not to cause pain. It is that having been given it, we recognize that only with it can we say “yes” (instead of merely “huh”) to the meaning of things—to truth, justice, love, beauty, and goodness, whether hidden or revealed. If Smullyan is right that no sentient, conscious being could exist without free will, then what we are being grateful for is that we are sentient, conscious beings. That free will inevitably goes with consciousness (if in fact it does) does not make it any less a gift.
Finally, whether Smullyan’s pantheistic utilitarianism makes more sense than belief in God is, once again, a question that cannot be decided by reason. It is a matter of faith. Were Smullyan’s dialogue thirty times longer and more exhaustive than it is—and God defend us from the task of plowing through such a document!—it could not bring us one step closer to a true answer to such a question. One’s conclusion will inevitably be present already in one’s premise.
The mystery of the coexistence of determinism and free will is not only real it is beautiful. I am astonished at the fact of their coexistence because of the Other that allows them to coexist. The One who spoke ex nihilo and created the heavens is the Other that encountered Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That He allows me the choice to acknowledge Him or not is a mystery to be sure, but I am inclined to bow and tremble in the face of that mystery. In that place, I find myself awestruck by its implications. Who is like this Other that we speak of? He is altogether lovely and astounding in beauty as the Song of all Songs proclaims. Yet His beauty is forced on no one. This Other pleases to give us daily tokens of His surpassing glory as we look to the heavenly bodies, or in nature, or in the good deeds of some person. Yet He does not force us to behold that glory, though it would utterly astonish us and cause us to say along with that great shepherd-psalmist David,
One thing I have desired of the LORD,
That will I seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the LORD
All the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the LORD,
And to inquire in His temple.
Why is it so that such a Beauty forces Himself on no one? What a divine mystery truly beautiful in its implications.
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The comment I ascribed to Buber above may be that of C.S. Lewis. I shall have to do some homework to find it. Neither would disagree with it, I fancy.
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