Nudists vs. Buddhists; an examination of Free Will
Don't worry if the clickbait title got you. It was already determined
Part 1: Robert Sapolsky’s latest book, summarized via Socratic dialogue at a Wendy’s
Me: “Hey, did you know that free will doesn’t exist?”
Underpaid cashier working two jobs to support her nana: “Sir, this is a Wendy’s. Do you have anything that you would like to order?”
Me: “Well, actually it’s funny you say that, because no matter which choice I make — whether I pick a Whopper or a Big Mac — it will have been determined by the past. You see, according to Sapolsky’s latest book, Determined, everything we do is dictated by a causal chain. Basically all the things that happen in the present moment is an inevitable result of everything that came before. This is called determinism.”
Cashier: “Again, this is a Wendy’s, we don’t have a whopper or —”
Me: “Sapolsky uses the arguments of his previous book, Behave, to elaborate on this point. In the seconds before I make any decision, my choice is determined by the synapses in my head. In the minutes before, it’s determined by the hormones coursing through my body. In the hours and days and weeks before, it’s determined by the various bodily processes and life circumstances I undergo, such as a fight I might’ve had with my girlfriend, or the stress of a new job.”
Cashier: “I doubt you have a girlfriend, or a job. Maybe I can put you down for a baconator?”
Me: “Our fetal development, our DNA, and the evolution of our species all influence the decisions that we make in the current moment. And most importantly, all of these timescales are happening simultaneously.”
Cashier: “You realize I’m going to spit into your food right? But whatever, I’ll bite. I agree with you that things cause other things, but surely there are some points in the causal chain that we have control over, right?”
Me, very clearly holding up the line, causing the baby boomer behind me to get hypoglycaemia: “Well not really. If you examine anything that happens, the decisions we make can ultimately be traced back to something outside of our control. You’re mistaking free will for voluntary action. Just because you don’t have a gun to your head doesn’t mean you have free will.”
Cashier: “I would rather have a gun to my head right now — but what about fortitude? What about gumption? Don’t we see evidence of people making good decisions all the time?”
Me: “Yeah, but this is just a function of a properly functioning dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. You see, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is a brain region where —“
Cashier: “I know what a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is. I have a PhD in neuroscience. Fine, even if there isn’t free will from any point within the causal chain, can’t free will be an emergent property of the causal chain, the same way consciousness emerges?”
Me, confused: “Wait, you know about complexity and emergence?“
Cashier: “Yes, I have a masters in physics.”
Me: “Wait, you have a PhD in neuroscience and a masters physics? Why do you work at a Wendy’s?”
Cashier: “For the same reason you’re trying to explain free will to me; this is a completely contrived scenario in order to summarize Robert Sapolsky’s book in an interesting manner. Wouldn’t free will be an emergent property?”
Me: “Maybe — in all the places that we might find free will, it’s probably through emergence. Still, complexity and emergence just shows us how small things end up becoming big things. For example, physics gives rise to chemistry, which gives rise to biology, which gives rise to evolution and life, which allows for more abstract concepts like culture and incentive structures. Just because things look fancy in a macro state doesn’t mean that there’s any downward causality. John Conway’s game of life is the perfect example of this. You can see these fascinating structures emerge with time, but any individual square is just following a set of basic commands.”
Cashier: “So if everything is just an application of physics, how come we can’t just plug in the particles into some mathematical equation and predict the future?”
Me: “Because complex processes are fundamentally chaotic, hence making them unpredictable. A three body problem and what not. It’s only through experiencing them in a step wise fashion that we actually understand how things unfold. For example, the weather is a complex process. Small changes in the inputs can produce extremely different results in the outputs. That’s why we can only predict a few days in advance, but never years in advance.”
Cashier: “Exactly — if life and the people living within it are fundamentally unpredictable, doesn’t that make room for free will?”
Me: “No, just because something is unpredictable, does not mean that it’s undetermined. If you rewind the tape of the world and play it back, it unfolds in the same way, just like Conway’s game of life. The only assumption we need to make is the same set of initial conditions.“
The baby boomer standing just behind me in line: “Sir, please order your food or I swear to God I’m going to buy another house for $300,000 above asking price.“
Me, not caring because I’m already too broke to afford a house: “The simple truth of the matter is, the longer you look, the more you realize free will is an illusion.”
The cashier: “What about quantum indeterminacy? Subatomic particles can be in superposition right?”
Me: “How the hell do you know about — oh right, the masters in physics. That’s right, things can be in superposition, where a sub atomic particle can occupy multiple states simultaneously. And for this reason, what I said before isn’t entirely correct. The universe is not like a movie. If we pressed rewind and then hit play again, our world probably wouldn’t play out the exact same way. But again, just because you have indeterminacy, that doesn’t sneak in any free will. Schrödinger’s cat might be dead and alive simultaneously, but in neither scenario did the cat actually choose its fate.”
The baby boomer, revealing himself to be Hulk Hogan: “You’ve been holding up this line for too long, brother.”
*He hits me with a stone cold stunner or whatever his signature move is, idk I don’t watch wrestling. Everybody at the Wendy’s claps, and the scene comes to an end.*
Part 2: The quantum superposition of our nostrils
Contrary to popular sentiment, I occasionally slither out from the rock in which I was born under and have conversations with people in meat space. I call it “Podcasting IRL”. Considering the subject of free will has been on my mind for the last little while, I have been shoehorning it into every conversation.
I find that people basically have two reactions to the idea that we have no free will, depending on the type of community that I’m interacting with.
The general public: “Of course we have free will. Look, I am [PERFORMING SOME BASIC BODILY ACTION WITHOUT COERCION, LIKE RAISING AN ARM]. I did that of my own free will. What are you, stupid?”
The rationalist community: “Of course we don’t have free will. You needed to read a book in order to tell you that? You didn’t derive a Laplacian demon from first principles? What are you, stupid?“
The vast majority of free will proponents reason it exists based on their intuitions. They either refuse to acknowledge it an illusion — or, more disconcertingly, they believe when the illusion becomes strong enough, it ceases to be an illusion at all.
It brings to mind one of the older slatestarcodex posts that was recently recirculated, regarding the various developmental milestones that people go through. I’m beginning to think that an unsettling amount of the population simply cannot acknowledge a convincing illusion as an illusion.
Take the dress, for example. You’ve already seen it. Black and blue versus white and gold, blah blah blah.
I’ve only ever seen white and gold, although I’m told the actual dress is black and blue; nevertheless, even after hearing this information, it doesn’t change how I perceive the picture: to my eyes it’s still white and gold.
Yet this doesn’t put me into an existential panic; I don’t need to explain how the whiteness and goldness is such a convincing illusion that it’s actually the truth.
This is essentially how proponents of free will argue that it exists. The most notable proponent is Dan Dennett, who uses masters degree arguments to come to a middle school conclusion.
By analogy: if we close one eye, we can see our nose in front of our face. If we close the other eye, the nose shifts slightly. Open both eyes, and our nose essentially disappears. Now, the very obvious conclusion is that our eyes simply filter our nose out from our visual system.
But there might be some academic intellectual out there — we’ll call him Ban Bennett — who might give an alternative explanation as to why we no longer see our nose:
“We know that, at the subatomic level, particles can be in multiple states simultaneously — superposition. It’s clear that when we have both eyes open, our nose is actually in a superposition of being there and not there. That’s why we do not see our nose, but can still touch it, use it to smell, etc.”
Obviously this sort of logic is absurd, because we are using the wrong level of description — using quantum states to explain macro behavior. And yet this is how Dennett argues for free will:
“We are shaped by evolution, and evolution gave us a prefrontal cortex, and because of that prefrontal cortex we make good decisions, thus free will arises.”
I’m being snarky, but it’s not really a strawman of his arguments. If you disagree, here is a debate between Sapolsky and Dennett where you can hear his arguments in his own words.
Despite the Snark, I truly do understand why there’s a strong negative sentiment against the illusory nature of free will; to acknowledge that we have no free will societal implications, such as…
Part 3: Free Will Hunting, or why it’s not your fault
If there is no free will, we have to acknowledge that anything that happens at a particular point in time is inevitable given all of the things that happened prior to it across different times scales. And this fact effectively abolishes any notion of moral superiority or inferiority; concepts such as “deserving” an outcome, good or bad, essentially go out the window.
In order to truly accept this, we become Matt Damon’s character in this iconic “it’s not your fault” scene.
Taken in the abstract, we can make such a concession; in practice it violates the intuition of our psychology to an extreme degree. To illustrate the point, let’s take three scenarios.
A) The case of Mary the elephant. In the early 1900s, Mary was put on trial for killing multiple spectators during a circus performance. Like, she had a lawyer and everything. Ultimately she was sentenced to hanging in front of spectators.
B) Charles Whitman, the famous tower shooter who killed over 30 people before committing suicide. When his brain was autopsied, they found a tumour pressing against his amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for hyper aggression.
C) A hypothetical scenario, where, instead of simply shooting his victims, Whitman might have sexually assaulted them.
In scenario a) we can readily acknowledge the barbarism and absurdity of the situation. In fact we might be angry at everybody except for the elephant.
In scenario b) we might look at Whitman’s case as tragic; I would estimate that around 80% of people might see the tumour as exculpatory, while the remaining 20% still might feel as though he still could’ve acted differently — that, at the very least, he might have killed him himself preemptively instead of going on his terrible killing spree.
In scenario c) I would estimate that percentage of people who would look at the tumour as an exculpatory would go down to about 30—40%, due to the nature of the crime.
To accept that we have no free will is to accept that all three scenarios are exactly the same in that the actions were inevitable, given the inputs — and that is what makes it extremely unpalatable.
“So, what? You’re saying that we should let murderers go free?”
Of course not — given what has already happened, they need to be regarded as defective machines. And in many cases, we can reasonably assure be assured that these machines will never re-integrate into society in any meaningful way, and therefore require stringent separation.
But the idea of “tit for tat” punishment goes out the window; the need for retribution in any scenario becomes just as absurd as desiring retribution against Mary the elephant.
Again, it’s an extremely tough pill to swallow; it violates my own psychology. In this scenario I’m the one looking at the dress, refusing to believe that it’s actually black and blue.
And then there is the other side of the coin: we are no longer free to provide any moral attribution to those who succeeded. Once more, given the confluence of events which happened prior to it — events which, as we’ve already established, leave no room for free will — the successes of the present become inevitable.
The people in life who have achieved success have no doubt put in tremendous amounts of hard work and gumption, but these attributes ultimately stemmed from things which we had no control over. And once more this is extremely unpalatable.
“So, what, you want neurosurgeons and CEOs to make the same amount of money as minimum wage workers? You’re saying that we should just be a communist utopia?“
Again, no. Status games are perfectly fine, just as long as the main driver of these status games is to incentivize and disincentivize behavior. And yet the concept of “deserve” — at some grand cosmic level — becomes utterly meaningless.
Again, I suspect nobody will actually have their minds changed on these points. Those who intuitively agree with my conclusion will be frustrated that I made the arguments this way instead of that way — that I'm just badly regurgitating something they heard in a Sam Harris podcast; those who disagree accuse me of being some sort of criminal apologist/communist.
Which brings us to…
Part 4: Speculations and Conclusion
Personally I don’t think the question of free will is going to be definitively proven one way or another any time soon. Or if it is, it will be solved as a byproduct of solving the problem of consciousness, as well as the nature of the self. For reasons that go beyond the scope of this post, I believe that all three issues are effectively the same.
Nevertheless, in having these conversations, I find that pretty much everyone has an intuition about whether free will exists; and so it would be interesting to conduct further studies about who intuitively believers vs skeptics.
For example, based on my own nonrepresentative experiences and discussions, I have found that that:
STEM majors are more intuitively inclined to believe free will is just an illusion, as opposed to humanities majors. I suspect this is because STEM majors tend to be more deconstructionist in their mindset. Once they understand the concept of a Laplacian demon and emergence they tend to be on board.
Men tend to be more extreme in their views regarding free will. I think this comes from two competing mindsets; the first is already elaborated in the first point, as men tend to be disproportionately represented in STEM. The second is the fact that men tend to be more in favor of Ayn Randian style libertarians.
Non-religious people tend to reject free will at greater rates than religious people. Again, this is something that I don’t really have a lot of data for, considering I don’t tend to interact with highly religious people on a regular basis. Nevertheless, my hypothesis is that it’s hard to believe that you have the ability to choose whether you get into heaven or hell if it’s already determined from the outside.
Liberals tend to reject free will at greater rates than conservatives. I think this is just a hybrid of points 2) and 3); additionally, people with a more left-leaning ideology tend to be systems level thinkers where they can recognize the impact of overarching incentive structures beyond any person’s control (critical theories, patriarchy, blah blah blah). And yet I admit this clashes with point 1) as humanities majors tend to also have a systems level mindset, where they attempt to place people and events in context of greater models rather than deconstructing them.
All this is to say that more studies on the subject would be interesting.
Hope you learned something. And if you didn’t, it’s not your fault. Or mine, for that matter.
“Wait, are you going to explain the whole nudists versus Buddhists thing in the title?”
Oh, right.
The original comment comes from within Sapolsky’s book. I thought it was funny, and in the original iterations of this post, the socratic dialogue at Wendy's was actually going to take place between a nudist and a Buddhist. But, you know, revisions and stuff.
Anyways, here’s some more picture of quantum nostrils.
Great piece! Have you read Chiang's "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom"? It offers an interesting perspective on the free will question.
another banger, i'm gonna marinate on this one for awhile