Are you predetermined?
WHAT are you doing right now? Reading these words. Why? Presumably because you chose to. Even if you didn’t – if you are encountering them years in the future lining a forgotten box of crockery in the attic, say – you can always choose to look away now. You possess the nebulous quality of human free will.
Nebulous because, despite debating it for millennia, philosophers have been unable to pin it down – and although we are pretty convinced we have it, at some level it must be an illusion, rather like our sense of self is (see “Are you always the same person?”).
Let’s start with the physics. Whenever you decide something, a certain pattern of neurons fires in your brain to turn your thought into action – moving towards the kitchen to make coffee, perhaps, or formulating an utterance you will come to regret. Ultimately, that is all down to pulses of electrons – fundamental particles that follow the cast-iron laws of physics, under which everything is determined by what happened immediately before.
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That doesn’t leave much room for free will, apparently. “Physical laws, if they’re deterministic, tell me that everything that I do, everything that happens in the world, including everything that I do, including every decision I ever made, follows logically from the laws of nature [and] the initial conditions of the universe,” says philosopher of physics at Columbia University in New York. Since we control neither the laws of nature nor the initial conditions of the universe, we can’t be fully in control of our actions – can we?
Not so fast. We should define our terms first, says philosopher at King’s College London. “There’s this really strong notion of free will, which is what my students all come into the classroom with,” she says. “To have free will, I must right now be able to behave just with no connection to any contingent plan – so however I like.”
“The laws of physics apparently don’t leave much room for free will”
Even leaving physics aside, that is clearly not the case. “We think that when we make a decision, the locus of control for behaviour is inside,” says Ismael. “But really, there’s all kinds of influences: cultural influences, psychological influences, influences that are more formative of our psychology that we don’t control and so on.”
Our choices are the result of a bundle of predilections formed by genetic nature and environmental nurture – a unique product of circumstances we aren’t necessarily in immediate control of (see “How likely are you?”). Fine, but there is an argument that this is just you being “you”. You can still choose to go against the grain of what you just decided. That, after all, is the core of free will as we experience it.
And to say that this sort of free will is incompatible with deterministic laws of physics is rather to get things the wrong way round, unless you advocate some sort of mysterious, non-physical essence of the mind. “Whatever we call free will must ultimately be explicable by the laws of physics,” says Knox.
The question is how. Lifting the lid on that vexed question is the subject of a new and burgeoning field of research looking, for example, at whether the property emerges from the ability of living, conscious organisms to organise and integrate information from many sources.
But “free will” is a term so laden with baggage that those involved prefer to think in terms of a subtly different concept called agency – an undeniable, if still inexplicable, ability to bundle up hopes, dreams, desires and compulsions and use them to change the world.
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emit about three antimatter particles every minute, thanks largely to the decay of radioactive potassium-40 inside you
All of the “You: Special issue” features
- You are stardust: The long view of when your existence really began
- How nature, nurture and sheer randomness combine to make a unique you
- Think your sense of self is located in your brain? Think again
- You are not one person: Why your sense of self must be an illusion
- Why it’s the aliens living inside you that create your sense of you
- Do we have free will or are all our decisions predetermined?
- If we can’t change the world, does anything we do matter?
- Why we’re in tune with our emotions – but suck at judging our smarts
- If the multiverse exists, are there infinite copies of me?
