philosophy, science, freewillI was wondering which model of free will atheists believe in, or best conforms to an atheist worldview. For instance, the concept that all actions are a consequence of the laws of physics/science, following from the purely deterministic model, seems most coherent with naturalism and empiricism, but does it follow from atheism?
Everything is a consequence of the laws of physics but I think you have a created a false dichotomy. The option is not ‘free will vs physics’ but ‘free will vs determinism’.
I am free to choose anything I like but my choices are limited by what is possible and my own limitations of knowledge and ability. I married a woman from a place half way around the world from where I live. It was not easy to set up the marriage and I could have quit at any time. Without the ease of communication we enjoy and the availability of air travel we would never have met each other. We both made choices that led us to marriage and living together as a couple. There was nothing deterministic about it but without many modern inventions our lives would be very different.
I am an atheist and my theoretic model of the world includes free will. I don’t see how I could go without it.
The difficulty of the topic lies in the fact, that the brain can be thought of as a machine, a miniature laboratory, in which chemical and electrical events happen according to the laws of nature, maybe deterministic (later, later) and correlated to thought we have, decisions we make, and so on.
We cannot reconstruct a dream from outside the brain by measuring something there, and maybe we will not in 50 years, 100 years or 500 years.
An uncle of mine has posters from Toulouse-Lautrec in his house. Every time I see a picture or poster of Toulouse-Lautrec, I have to think of that uncle. Am I free not to think of him? Well, I’m not absolutely sure that I really think every time of him. Thoughts are sometimes so elusive.
Now let’s do a thought experiment: Here is a cup of coffee, and a coin. I flip the coin - if it shows a number, I will drink the coffee with sugar, if it shows the head I will drink it without. Am I free to do either so or so, just depending on the unpredictable outcome of the coin-experiment? Well - what does the experiment tell us? Well, one single experiment: Not so much, because maybe I threw a number, and drank with sugar, but maybe I would haven’t drunk it without, even if I threw it with the head upside? But I can repeat and repeat the experiment, and if I throw it 10 times, the chances that I always match what I wanted to do anyway gets smaller and smaller, 1/(2^10) = 1/1024.
But now look back what I made: I set up a total deterministic regularization to prove that my actions aren’t determined; absurd? Have I been free to interrupt the experiment at every time, or was I punished by an inner or outer force to do what I did? Well - it was just a thought experiment - it didn’t prove anything so far, as long as I didn’t do anything for real. Did I? And I can tell you: yes, I did, and so can you! And I can assure you, it’s a surrealistic experience to think about your freedom to violate the rules in every step. 10 cups of coffee is a lot of coffee if you like to get things done - here is a minor modification of the rules, which you can test immediately:
* Throw a dice, or pull from a deck of cards, or use a random generator, to produce some numbers.
* Knock according to what you have thrown on something in your reach - if you threw a 3, knock 3 times, if you pulled a 8 knock 8 times, for As 1x and for King, Queen, ... 10x, Joker 0x.
* Repeat it 5 to 10 times, but choose how often before, and write it down, because else you could fool yourself, it's very easy. :)
For Linux-users, and maybe BSD: here is a small shellcommand if you’re too lazy to search cards or dice:
for i in {1..10}; do echo -n $((RANDOM%10))" "; done ; echo
So did you do that? Now either there was an implausible luck. I don’t think so. 1/(10^5) = 1/10 000, 1/(10^10) = 1/10 000 000 000. Or else, you were free to choose to stick to the rules and follow them slavishly, but were forced to knock how often the rules told you to do. Or you stopped the experiment, and now you know you’re not free to follow such an experiment :) Are you free?
Doesn’t this count, because it is of minor importance to you, how often you knock on wood? But importance and freedom are orthogonal concepts, aren’t they? If you’re free in important decisions, you’re free in less important ones and vice versa - no?
Some people seem to think that freedom would mean that you decide what to do without influence from your culture and from your history. But you and me, we are historic beings, we have a history, we have experiences, values. We have time to prove our values every day, and we decided to stick to them, and sometimes we didn’t.
So if I do something today, which is pretty predictable, for example I prefer a bit of sugar in the coffee - that’s my freedom. My freedom is to decide on my own whether I fear to get fat and ugly from too much sugar, or not. Whether I prefer a sweet taste or a bitter one. Of course it is influenced by my history and it might correlate extremely with neurons in my brain which could be measured. But if I change my decisions, the neurons would behave in another way. But there is no distinction between what the neurons do and my decisions. You have to admit that those neurons in action are my free thoughts. It’s a different kind of perspective, it’s looking at them with a microscope. You don’t see much if you come too close.
Only if you claim that your brain isn’t you, that it is something foreign, that electrons, neurons and nerves - that it isn’t you, but your brain which is thinking, that you can make a distinction between your thoughts as a physical/chemical/biological event and an historical/juristic/philosophical one; only then you can fall into the illusion of being a heteronomous robot.
Don’t forget your experiment! ;)
And hey! It’s 21st century, you just have to knock on wood, not to sacrifice your son, like Abraham. :) But that was another experiment. It dealt with obedience.
Determinism is a difficult subject and not an easy one to find an expert on. I wouldn’t say it is a required belief for atheism. As long as you don’t believe that something supernatural determines your actions or that you or anything else can break the laws of physics using your mind, you’re still an atheist.
It is perfectly clear that humans alter their actions on the basis of things that they perceive and experience. If you view humans as a unit, then yes, of course, humans obviously have free will.
It is also perfectly clear that atoms and photons and vibrational states and whatnot do not have volition of their own. They are not free.
All one has to do to be an atheist is deny the existence of God. You could still believe in demons and wind spirits and reincarnation and astrology and (etc. etc.). But if you’re going to be an atheist on the basis of scientific knowledge having rendered invalid most of the justification for gods, then you also pretty much have to agree with the two points above.
At which point, I’m not sure whether asking if humans have free will is a particularly productive activity. We are beings of amazing self-direction, yet build out of components that have no direction at all. Pretty weird! Maybe instead we should ask: How does that work?!
Your question starts from a false premise, i.e. that free will and the laws of physics/science are opposites and mutually exclusive. Well, that’s wrong. Free will is part of the laws of physics/science, and a direct consequence of them. See Searle’s biological naturalism, for example.
So, atheists believe in the laws of physics/science, and therefore in free will.
Free will is the necessary counterpart to a moralistic conception of responsibility. An ideal agency exerting its will without undue influence from other agencies is effectively required to hold another living being ‘responsible’ for a past action; free will is a necessary presupposition for punishment, even and especially if it is in many cases just or nearly an illusion.
At any rate, a real problem is the meaninglessness of free will in a closed society. My suggestion might be to consider how the notion of a free will is symptomatic of a kind of reactionary ideology embedded in a social structure (the arch-conservatism of antiquity ossified into an image of thought.)
Finally, while most atheists wouldn’t try argue free will away, some of them might argue you down the line that in the light of indeterminacy that ‘free will’ is basically a misunderstanding or error in attributing causality.
So it should be noted that this position is not without a certain persuasiveness, as plenty of other illusory entities have fallen to the razor of critical scientific investigation – from the luminiferous aether all the way to the immortal soul.
I am an atheist, and don’t understand determinism. I know some smart who people accept it and I’ve heard them try to explain it. But I am still not convinced, and it certainly seems counter-intuitive. So while I allow for the possibility that determinism is right, for now I count myself as an a-determinist.
Why is free will hard to understand or believe in? We don’t know the deep details of the functioning of the brain, but we do know that:
Given this level of uncertainty, perhaps indeed randomness, why is it hard to believe that free will is a function of or related to chaotic starting conditions and non-replicable decision trees?
Personally, I believe that given the same inputs and the same state, the human brain will give the same output, even when it’s trying to be “random” (Because much like a computerised RNG, truly random actions are impossible)
So, in that way, I guess you could say I don’t believe in free will in that if you knew every single variable and could process faster than me, you could predict my actions with perfect accuracy. However, because we can’t do that, and foreknowledge of my actions would change my brain’s “state”, thus letting me act differently, it’s an irrelevant point.
I have free will in that nothing is controlling me and my choices are my own. Just because if you could rewind time I would make the same choice over and over doesn’t change that. Having free will and everything being the consequence of the interaction of particles according to scientific principals are in no way incompatible. Free will does not mean the ability to act truly randomly, it’s simply that you can make your own decisions.
I take issue with using the word “believe”. What does Belief have to do with it? Personally I form an understanding of the world around me by my observations and experiences - I am convinced of something. I rarely if ever believe in something.
Freewill is a quality assigned to our minds by our minds. It indicates that the mind is capable of selecting or choosing between different options on a unique basis that is not determined by any other factor except for the impetus of the mind itself. This leads to an irreducibility of freewill as it takes one mind to exhibit one freewill.
Many scientists theorize the mind is the product of a functioning human brain. The brain, being a physical object, is subject to and completely determined by the laws of physics. But if the mind is the product of the brain and the brain is determined by physical law then so to determined must be the mind- and all it’s qualities, including freewill. But this contradicts the definition of freewill.
Or does it? Freewill is a quality measured by minds. If the reduction of the mind to the laws of physics is not within the resolution of the mind then we cannot recognize the reducibility of freewill. This could result from the complexity of the systems in the brain that are necessary to generate the mind. This is the chaos ObdurateDemand refers to in his answer. While such systems are determined by the laws of physics- we may never be able to achieve the precision of measurement necessary to accurately determine certain qualities of the mind. As such, we will only be able see freewill as the irreducible concept defined above. Logical proof/disproof if systems can achieve this complexity could come along with the logical proof/disproof of math’s analog of the decidability of systems: the P vs. NP problem.
This is my current understanding of the freewill problem. I feel it does not conflict with my atheism or my adherence to the principles of physics. So yes, this atheist believes in freewill, as I have outlined it.
I expressed my viewpoint on free will as an answer to another question about whether we can choose what we believe:
http://atheism.stackexchange.com/questions/1766/do-we-choose-what-to-believe-about-anything-we-claim-to-have-a-belief-in-n/1810#1810
The main point I was making was that I believe that questions about the nature of “free will” are more easily answered and understood when we get more explicit about what “choice” means. When we’re talking about “choice” here’s what I think is actually going on:
There is a set S of perceived (or predicted) outcomes. When we make a “choice”, we select exactly one element from S.
Suppose S has two elements: A and B. What is the process by which we decide whether to select A or B? I contend that the process is complex but can be described simply: We measure both A and B according to which we find the most desirable. If desire(X) is a function of how much we desire outcome X, then if desire(A) > desire(B), then we select A from S. That’s it. The complexity of the desire() function is something for another discussion.
Now maybe this is something we feel is intuitively true, but I think actually writing it out is important, at least to me. It reveals a couple of things:
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