Free Will (I)

It has been argued that the moment now is a mechanism where a possible future is guided to a certain determined past, a constant chain of cause and effect. Plus, because the future can be viewed as probabilistic at the very small and at the large scale. The argument goes on when choosing from a menu one is not forced to make the only one possible selection. Others have suggested that cause and effect are some how false.

Let’s tackle the others’ cause and effect narrative first.

• I have a hard time believing that people believe this, in that most of our deliberate actions are in expectation of an outcome caused by us. For example, I might swing my bat at a ball in the hope of hitting a six or a home run.
• Of course, we understand there are offsetting causes like the wickedness of the bowler or pitcher. We do understand and hope for cause and effect.
• In some ways this is not an unreasonable position. Certain interpretations of general relativity are in accord with this. Block universe is an example.
• But if cause and effect are false, we can give up of thinking of ourselves as proximately responsible never mind morally responsible for our supposed actions.

Let’s look: at now turning a possible future into a determined past.

• When I read this, I can’t help but read this as a little bit of semantic dodge. Either way, it would appear in the past we had no free will. In that it was fully determined. Not that it is necessarily true that the past is fully determined.
• Now seems like a magical moment, but for the moment let’s put aside the relativistic aspects of now. The problem of the perceived now is that it has passed; a fraction of a second in the past compared to what actually is now.
• So, the question becomes which now are we referring to? Our perceived now belongs to the determined past. Under this paradigm it is difficult to envisage free will existing.

The future can be viewed probabilistically?

• This is certainly true. Two possible reasons include that the universe is fundamentally probabilistic in a deterministic way. This quote by Sean Carroll gives a sense of what I mean here:

Quantum mechanics predicts our future in terms of probabilities rather than certainties, but those probabilities themselves are absolutely fixed by the state of the universe right now. A quantum version of Laplace’s Demon could say with confidence what the probability of every future history will be, and no amount of human volition would be able to change it.

• Bearing in mind Carroll is a compatibilist and believes in that kind of free will. But even if the probabilities are completely indeterministic, then this does not give us much hope in that our actions are a consequence of some cosmic dice shaker not our immediate will.
• Another reason the universe might be viewed probabilistically is our collective ignorance of the parameters and variables that go into formulating a non-probabilistic prediction. For example, a fully deterministic interpretation of the many worlds, superdeterminism, and perhaps Bohmian mechanics. They reduce to effectively the Schrödinger equation.
• The fact that future has to be viewed probabilistically does not help the argument for free will.

Choosing a menu item:

• The original argument suggested we are not “forced” to pick only one possible item. I would agree, often we are able to have several options available to us. Our desire (will) might not even be clear to us on perusing the menu.
• But, our ignorance of the underlying mechanism of flipping a possible future into our determined past is not a sufficient argument. And here the operative word is mechanism.
• So, the issue is not that we will choose a menu item from a variety options, because we certainly do that. It is about the nature of choice and how attached we are homuncular view of choice.

The primary objection seems to be against a predestined universe, not that we don’t have free will. I don’t know if the universe is predestined or not. While it is an interesting speculation, by and large irrelevant to the free will debate. We don’t even have to go as far back as the moment of conception, never mind the big bang to discuss this.

Plainly we are a product of the environment and the physical properties of our make-up. Some might even argue we have emergent properties of which free will is one … nevertheless it is cause and effect all the way down, all the way back and all the way forward.