You can look at this as a combination of hardware and software. Your genes determine your intellectual capacity, your hormonal influences, your physical attributes and several other parts of the hardware. Your life experiences, your education, the social influences that act on you, the exposure you get to various ideas are all components of the software. Given exactly identical hardware and software, the decision made by that particular combination under certain specific conditions will be the same every time it is asked to make that decision.
So, if, at 8.37 a.m. on the 25th of January in the year 2007 you bust a red light while driving, you will still bust that red light if we could rewind time and take you back to that very instant and make you face that same choice (without, of course, any memory of subsequent events such as an accident that may have occurred as a result). All the components of hardware and software leading up to that moment are still the same. In other words, the configuration of the black box responsible for making the decision is the same. The inputs that go into it are the same. There is no reason for the output to be different. Therefore, the decision made by that combination of hardware and software will be the same. If you argue that randomness can cause a change, you will have to agree that it is randomness and not free will.
This is a counter-intuitive notion and there are differing opinions on the subject. But philosophically and scientifically, I find it hard to see how something called "free will" can exist or what logical reason could cause a different decision to be made at that point of time.
This also raises very interesting questions on the subjects of morality, justice, motivation, effort and personal responsibility. The absence of free will does not mean that we should stop striving to improve ourselves. It does not imply that we should deny responsibility and ownership for our choices and decisions. It does not suggest that we should simply refuse to get out of bed. It just means that we have to rethink and, perhaps, revise certain intuitive notions that we hold about how we make decisions in our minds about our lives. Who is the 'we'? How is that 'we' different from the physical brain that houses the thought process? Therefore, how are 'we' and 'our minds' influencing 'our lives'?
There are many leading thinkers who have expressed their opinions on this subject, ranging from Albert Einstein to a whole array of philosophers and scientists.
I happen to have read, in the past few months, the opinions of a few writers on this topic. One person who has expressed the concept very lucidly is Sam Harris. Here are a few articles that I found particularly interesting:
1. Morality without "Free Will" - where he argues against retributive justice
1. Morality without "Free Will" - where he argues against retributive justice
2. Free Will (and why you still don't have it) - where he responds to reactions to his earlier article
3. You do not choose what you choose - where he quotes Einstein who himself quoted Arthur Schopenhauer and said, "Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills."
4. A video talk by Harris in which (from minutes 4:43 to 14:52) he talks about free will
I also came across this interesting thought experiment that seeks to demonstrate how, contrary to our intuitions, it is logical to conclude that we will always make the very same choice if we were able to go back in time to the point where we had to make it.
Some time ago, I had a debate on this subject over email with a friend who was arguing that there was no such thing as 'free will' and I was trying to state that there was. I now realize that he was right and I was wrong. It took me a while to overcome my intuitions on this but I am now convinced about the deterministic nature of human thinking. I know there are many who will not accept this argument. In fact, I have still not been able to convince the Supreme Editor despite having had a very, shall we say, "intense" discussion on the subject. But I am sharing this just to provoke thought in the minds of readers. Beyond that, only determinism or "free will" will decide whether their minds will change!
Of my own volition, I have determined that I agree :)
ReplyDeleteThat said, I have a slight spin on this: Free Will is the perception from the "inside", of what determinism from the "outside" is already prescient. So, in a sense, both views co-exist. We think we are making choices; choices make themselves through us.
Yep, you could look at it that way :)
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed reading your article.
ReplyDeleteI think though that randomness may have a more fundamental role to play. Don’t neurons, function more as fuzzy logic elements than binary elements? Our brain aggregates their myriad individual outputs into a single decision. The neuron states in turn are influenced by chemicals, which are affected not only by the food you eat, air you breathe but also by various electromagnetic fields and to stretch it a bit, cosmic particles meandering through our neighborhood.
So, your scenario of busting a red light could unfold exactly the same way ten times but turn out to be different a eleventh time. Yes randomness caused the change but at a level indiscernible by humans including the cop who might hand you a ticket.
Determinism, randomness and free will may be different sides of the same coin depending on how you define your universe.
Thanks, Shankar. I find it difficult to reconcile randomness with free will from an objective point of view but it is very likely that our brains have evolved to interpret things such that the concept of free will appears intuitive. It is perhaps practical in many ways to make that assumption.
ReplyDeleteDeterminism is predicated on causality. If you repeat an experiment involving human choice 10 times, while moving forward in time each time, it may have a different outcome the 11th time. But if you "rewind" the clock and "redo" the same event 10 times, it will play out in exactly the same way the 11th time too, because exactly the same factors that drove the choice will come into play in exactly the same way, every time. The entire universe plays by the rules of causality, and true randomness defies causality. (Which is why we can only generate faux-random numbers, not real ones - every conceivable 'random number generator' is a machine driven by causality.) The only truly random thing that ever happened was the Big Bang (even if, actually, that was not what happened).
ReplyDelete