Do criminals have free will – or is it all down to good and bad luck?
02 Wednesday May 2018
Written by Charles Harris in Books, Life, Mental Game, Psychology, Reviews, Training
Tags
determinism, DNA, free will, Galen Strawson, Oliver Burkeman
Do criminals have free will?
If you ever thought philosophy was for people with glasses and sticking-out ears who need to get out more, you may be in for a shock. Every
crime thriller you’ve ever read is steeped in philosophy. As is every courtroom drama – real or fictional.
For one thing, there’s ethics – the branch of philosophy which asks piercing questions about right and wrong. No crime novel or TV series could survive without right and wrong – however blurred they may become.
But most of all, there’s the hot potato that’s free will.
Personally, I love philosophy. It forces my brain to work more deeply than almost anything else I read. I’ve been studying it much more recently, to help develop some of the deeper themes in a novel I’ve been working on.
And one of my essential weekly reads is Oliver Burkeman’s column This Column Will Change Your Life in Saturday’s Guardian. He always inspires me to think in a surprising way about some aspect of our brains, our ideas or our philosophy.
This week he focused on the chapter on free will in the latest invigorating book by philosopher Galen Strawson Things That Bother Me.
Is it possible to have free will?
The question of free will has occupied philosophers throughout history. But it has become more and more acute as science has grown more all-embracing. The more we know about the world, the more everything seems predictable – from the colour of you hair to the diseases you’ll be prone to.
Even our minds are a mix of genetic programming and nurture. Every thought a series of electronic impulses, caused by other electronic impulses.
So, do you have any free will at all. Is what you do down to you? Or to your DNA? Or your upbringing?
Luck swallows everything
If you won the Booker Prize, Strawson and Burkeman would say that’s no reason to praise you. It’s just luck. You had the right genes, the right teachers, the right opportunity. Inherited the self discipline you needed.
On the other hand, if you broke into a house, or knifed a man in the street, that would be bad luck. Genes, parenting, where you were born.
Suppose you argue that you taught yourself the self-discipline that won you the Booker? “Still luck,” says Burkeman, channelling Strawson. “You were gifted with the sort of character capable of cultivating self-discipline.”
And as Strawson goes deeper, Burkeman says, everything “gets a lot more uncomfortable.” Whatever you achieve or fail to achieve, if you search back far enough, you find some starting point that wasn’t your doing.
Or in Strawson’s vivid image, “Luck swallows everything.”
The free will con trick?
We might think we have free will but that – according to determinists like Strawson – is just an illusion.
We are caught tight in the bind. Everything is caused – every thought, every feeling. Even the feeling that we have free will. But in fact we have no free will. None of our choices are really ours.
Therefore nobody is at fault for anything. Not the serial killer. Not the drug dealer. Nobody.
(Is your brain hurting yet?)
Strawson says that his philosophy students all end up agreeing with him. Every single one. (Of course, you might say: they would, wouldn’t they?)
But still, reading that summary of Burkeman’s, something felt wrong. For all the hard logic, I felt I’d been conned.
Three problems
Here are three problems I have with Strawson’s argument:
1. The entire argument is based on an a priori statement – that’s to say, a belief that we must take for granted. It assumes from the start that everything is caused. Worse…
2. The argument itself is circular. Essentially, Strawson says, “Everything is caused, because everything is caused.” The statement is called on to prove itself.
3. It’s so all-encompassing as to be effectively useless. In that way, it reminds me of arguments for and against the existence of God, which can call on any conceivable event to prove (or disprove) that God exists.
In the same way, it’s impossible to imagine any event that could prove the existence of free will to a determinist. Whatever decision I might make, he could argue that something must have caused it, even if he didn’t know what this was.
Choice or no choice
But despite Strawson and his obedient students, there is an alternative way of seeing the world. Suppose I began with a different assumption. Suppose I assumed that we always have a choice.
Of course, it’s not an entirely free choice. You can’t snap your fingers and find yourself on a beach in Bali (unless you actually are reading this on a beach in Bali, that is).
But you always have a choice between different possibilities. Whatever the limits of my intelligence, I have choices I can make. However rich or poor my parents, there are some things I can accept or decline.
Even if someone holds a gun to my head, I can choose whether to obey or not.
And, following Burkeman, I can keep going back in time and at every point find I had a choice that could have gone differently. Yes, I can only play with the cards that life deals me. But I can still choose how to lay them down.
Of course, some of those choices may have been unconscious. But your unconscious mind is still a part of you. A very important part.
It’s your choice
My point is that you can propose a theory that everything we do is by choice and the world that results is indistinguishable from the world we live in.
Just as with determinism, you can’t imagine an action that could disprove that. In fact, there is one advantage, which is the general belief that we do have free will.
Determinists deal with this by calling it an illusion. But maybe it isn’t. We are free, indeed, to choose to disagree.
Feel free to disagree with me too. If you see logical flaws here, feel free to shoot them down in flames. I look forward to reading what you think.
It’s your choice.
Links
Oliver Burkeman’s column – Your success isn’t down to free will
11 Comments
May 12, 2018 at 4:40 pm
The problem does not exist. In a world of perfectly reliable cause and effect, it is still we ourselves that are doing the choosing.
Deciding for ourselves what we “will” do, “free” of coercion or other undue influence, is literally a “freely chosen will”, or simply “free will”.
Our mental process of choosing happens to be a deterministic event. When we reason out what we should do, our reasons logically lead us to a specific choice. This choice could, “in theory”, be predicted in advance by anyone with sufficient knowledge of how we think and feel about things.
Our ability to implement our choice requires a universe of reliable cause and effect. Without a deterministic universe, we’d have no freedom to do anything at all.
The free will skeptic imagines that determinism is itself an entity that exercises control over us, but that is a reification fallacy.
Reliable cause and effect is not an external force controlling us. It is us, just being us and doing what we do. Our DNA is us. Our brain is us.
And when we choose to do something wrong, then it is that choosing process that requires correction and rehabilitation.
May 12, 2018 at 5:45 pm
Thank you for your thoughtful words, Marvin. Very interesting. I totally agree that free will is impossible without a deterministic universe. And your point about reification is well put. Many problems in our minds are created when we start turning actions into things.
Charles
May 31, 2018 at 10:11 pm
I have a problem whether determinism even exists. At the macro level yes, everything looks as if it follows cause and effect. But at the quantum level there is no direct cause and effect. Just quantum probability. At the macro level we tend to say we could explain everything with cause and effect if we knew all the conditions but chaos theory shows we can’t know all the conditions. And the final killer is Turings Halting problem which shows that some things cannot be computed using functions so causal logic which is functional and deterministic is also at risk But this does not resolve free will. What we think is free will may just be quantum uncertainty in our brains. Roger Penrose had an interesting approach which has since been proven to be at least partially wrong but some of his points are still valid.
May 31, 2018 at 10:39 pm
Wayne, Free will is when we decide for ourselves what we “will” do, when “free” of coercion or other undue influence. Because reliable cause and effect is not in itself coercive, and certainly not undue, it poses no threat to determinism. And, because our decisions are reliably caused, by our own purpose, and our own reasons, free will poses no threat to reliable cause and effect. So, there is no natural conflict between these two concepts.
The reason we love determinism is because it gives us hope that we might discover the causes of events that affect our lives, like diseases. The faith that there is a cause that we might understand gives science the assurance that there are answers out there. Once we know that a specific virus causes polio, we were able to develop a vaccine.
But all of the value of determinism comes from knowing the specific cause of a specific effect.
Now, there is a logical implication of reliable cause and effect, that everything that ever happens is always causally necessary or causally inevitable. However, this logical fact should not be confused with a meaningful or relevant fact.
Something that is true all the time, in every case and in every event, is a triviality. It is like a constant that always appears on both sides of every equation, and it can be subtracted from both sides without affecting the result.
The only rational response to this fact is to acknowledge it, and then ignores it. Trying to draw meaningful implications from it only leads to mental errors and paradoxes.
June 3, 2018 at 6:00 pm
Thank you, Marvin.
Of course, free will would be impossible without determinism. I can’t freely decide to make an egg sandwich if I didn’t trust that the bread is going to stay on the plate and the water boil the egg, etc.
But it’s a huge jump from there to saying that I have no choice as to whether I make it or not.
June 3, 2018 at 6:25 pm
Exactly. In fact, perfect determinism should imply that it was causally inevitable that it would be you, and nothing but you, that would make that choice.
June 3, 2018 at 5:56 pm
Hi Wayne – absolutely. As you say that doesn’t get us out of the free will question.
June 16, 2018 at 9:13 pm
Does an ant have free will when it follows a trail of other ants towards a source of food?
I think there’s something that people aren’t talking about here. When you say “I am choosing to make an egg sandwich of my own free will”, I think that what should be debated is not what you mean by ‘free will’, but what you mean by the word ‘I’.
I believe that ‘I’ am a collection of atoms and particles, whose interaction determine what I do, but which operate according to laws over which I have no control.
In other words, I think the debate between determinists and proponents of free will, should actually be framed as a debate between those who hold a purely biological conceptualisation of the self, and those who believe that there must be something else, something that exists outside of this crude biological matter. Some people might call it a ‘spirit’, perhaps ‘soul’, or you might call it consciousness. Whatever, I think these are all illusions that we have invented in order to make us feel better, to delude ourselves into thinking that we have free will, because the alternative is so disconcerting.
I disagree with the idea that determinism makes us feel better because it gives us hope in finding universal systems of cause and effect. The pure biological determinism I’ve outlined can be deeply depressing, suggesting as it does that we are trapped by our biology, that it’s futile to even try to direct our lives differently. This is why I believe human societies, as soon as we developed the human capacity for conscious self-reflection, also developed ideas of the self-spirit, of agency and free will, that were necessary in fuelling the delusion that our lives had a higher meaning and purpose.
We have never, to the best of my knowledge, discovered a renegade ant, following his own path irrespective of what the laws of science dictate that he will, inevitably, do. I believe the actions of all ants can be reduced to a sequence of bio-chemical events which can, in theory, be fully understood if given enough time. Why should humans be any different?
June 17, 2018 at 8:35 pm
Good question, Adam. There are two dangers here. One of prior assumptions and the other of category error.
The first danger is that we assume an ant has no choice, because it seems to have limited choice. Watching a line of ants, most go along a fairly predictable line. But each individual ant has a number of choices to make, including some which wander off the line altogether.
We could assume that even the wanderings are pre-determined – but there is no reason to do so. We could as easily assume that they aren’t.
The second danger is to say that, because everything is made of atoms, therefore atoms explain everything. But that is a category error.
A copy of “Hamlet” could be reduced to ink and text as its constituent parts. But while ink and text are essential to conveying the meaning of the text, the meaning itself functions in a different category of existence.
June 17, 2018 at 2:06 am
Adam, It should not be disconcerting that everything that happens is causally inevitable, as long as we remember that this includes us and our choices as causal agents.
Any decision we make, that is reliably derived from our own purpose and our own reasons, is both authentically free will and authentically deterministic. It is as if we get to choose what becomes causally inevitable.
The only source of discomfort arises at the thought of determinism as some kind of boogeyman or puppet-master controlling our lives. Determinism does not exist as an actor in the real world. It merely asserts that the actual objects and forces that make up the physical universe will always behave in a reliable fashion.
We, on the other hand, actually exist in the real world. And we go about causing stuff to happen, and causing it to happen in a way that suits us. Determinism can only sit in a corner, watching us, and take notes.
We exist as a whole living organism. A cooperative venture of a bunch of living cells, which have bumped up decision making to the neurological system. The neurology comes with a problem to solve: how to keep the living organism, as a whole, alive.
It does this by modelling the external and internal environment into something we call “reality”. None of the individual atoms or molecules are capable of performing this process.
So, no, we are not governed by the physical interaction of atoms. We are governed by our own neurology. As the guy who did the PBS series say, “We are our brain”.
June 19, 2018 at 6:01 pm
Re our discussion, you may be interested in this thought-provoking if sometimes wacky annual conference about consciousness https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/19/out-of-their-minds-wild-ideas-at-the-coachella-of-consciousness