Thoughts on Free Will and Determinism

Original article.

The most important problem that comes up when talking about free will is the difficulty in defining the concept. How exactly do we define free will? There are many definitions with different levels of rigorousness. One way to define free will is in terms of the absolute laws of physics. We can define free will as “the ability of a conscious entity to make choices that are not affected in any way by the events that happened to the conscious entity in the past.” This is the definition most often used by the group of people who are classified as incompatibilists. Another way to define it is in terms of other living things. We can define free will as “the freedom to chose which action to take in a particular situation without being hindered by other humans or conscious living beings.” My opinion on whether free will exists or not is highly dependent on actual definition being used. I think it is extremely unlikely (and even impossible on principle) to have the kind of free will that is independent of influence from physical law. However if the definition on free will does not mention independence from past events and only concerns itself with restrictions on choices we make by other people, then I am willing to accept the possibility of free will existing.

In the second kind of definition, we are merely stating that when faced with a choice such as “Which profession to go into?” or “Which course do I take in college?” we have the freedom to go against the advice of our parents/teachers and do whatever we feel like at the time (not everyone has this freedom 😉 ). This kind of freedom in principle exists. Although there are parents that force their children to make certain choices when it comes to college courses, the student can in principle choose not to accept that decision by ignoring or being prepared to accept the – sometimes unpleasant – consequences of their choice. That kind of free will exists and that is the picture of free will that comes to most people’s minds when they hear about freedom. In fact, this free will or “social freedom” is the kind of freedom most people expect from modern society. It is what they refer to when they talk about “Freedom of speech” or “Freedom of expression”.

However if your definition of free will that tries to say that human decisions are completely independent of the events that took place in your past, I disagree that such a kind of freedom exists. This kind of freedom is impossible to define without generating a contradiction. The human brain is a huge neural network that stores in the neurons different weights that are a result of our past experiences. These are the same neurons that make “conscious” decisions or “choices.” I think that it is impossible for a human to make a decision or a choice whose sole originator is the human in question.

Recent results in neuroscience suggest that our conscious “mind” is not really the originator of our actions see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15925808?dopt=Abstract and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12191935?dopt=Abstract
The results of these experiments seem to suggest that our “choices” are determined by the brain before our conscious mind becomes aware of the fact that we have made a choice. Results like these reduce the likelihood that the decisions we make are completely independent of past events. It may even be true that the only thing consciousness does is rationalize the involuntary actions of our sub conscious. The very idea that we have “Made a decision” may be an illusion in many situations.

I also disagree with people who simply wave their hands vaguely and say free will exists because Quantum Mechanics. While it is true that quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory,  it doesn’t help to “gift” free will to consciousness. Firstly it is highly dubious whether quantum mechanics is directly involved in human cognition and consciousness. Secondly even if quantum mechanics made our choices probabilistic it still doesn’t mean that the decisions are free decisions. Decisions can only be classified as “free” if a people have the same probability of making a particular decision when faced with a particular choice independent of the experiences these people have had in the past. A coin that lands on heads half the time does not have “free will”.

I think a lot of the confusion surrounding the debate about free will and determinism is because of the wide variety of ways in which people define “Free will”. It’s got so many definitions that it is impossible to say what people mean when they say “I believe in Free will”. If someone ever says that the very first thing I will do is to ask them how they define free will. The debate should be pretty straightforward from that point on.

-Ashwin Narayan

I don’t want to believe

“I don’t want to believe, I want to know.”

Carl Sagan

It was a clear winter evening of November, not a regular thing I know, but this just happens to be one. The wind was still darringly cold. As I chogged down some hot coffee, I looked up at the sky to notice birds flying in a “V-Shape”. Distorted the shape was, but the sight stirred my emotions. Why do they fly in a certain shape? Did someone teach them? Clearly birds couldn’t have cooked up this gimmick all by themselves?

We humans are story telling and pattern seeking animals- we tend to delude ourselves when our emotions are stirred. We have a distinct memory of the instances where a pop tune rings in our head and suddenly a friend sings it! Clearly this was no co-incidence?. We tend to, in that emotional stir, forget that our head resonates with non-sense all the time. We don’t keep a count of all the days where the tune was persistent but not the co-incidence. It’s like football, the goal keeper is commented when the opposition scores a goal whilst all the goals he saved are not discussed as rigorously.

Every phenomenon is beautiful in it’s own way. Some for example- Sunrise, X-ray diffraction have “Patterns” that can be recognized by us Humans. Other’s like- Brownian motion, Dislocations inside a Crystal do not! It’s beauty and the truth associated with it are not determined by our convenience.

We evolved from primates and hence have an affinity towards dominance heirarchy-

Let us go back to the “V- formation of the birds”. The coffe, the sky and my mood were brilliant that day(not a regular thing I know), now add to that some sort of bliss and we have a recepie for self deception. I can for instance, tell my self that some “Father figure” harnessing all knowledge and wisdom told the birds to make a “V” and not any other alphabet like a “Q” or “O” becuase he wants us to remember that he was born of a Virgin.

Or I can contend with facts, that this “V- formation” makes an aerodynamic shape, enabling the birds to travel long distances. Surely the bird in the front takes the maximum air-drag, but it makes flight a lot easier to all the others. If we carefully watch their flight we would indeed notice that, after a period of time the bird in the front “takes a break” and the next “important one” comes in the front. Something like our political campaign, the candidate “taking the heat” from criminal allegations, “steps back from the front” untill it dies down and he’s ready to compete for the next tenure(No I’m not sub-consciously thinking of Narendra Modi).

Knowing rather than hopeless rationalization or believing, helps build scientific temper. It increases the competitive edge in a world arranged on science. It also surges the awe,wonder and most importantly teaches us humility- a trait which helps us to understand our place in the universe and gives a sense of “Spiritual connection”.

Consider now a scientist working on a new theory to explain high temperature superconductivity. Not an easy thing to do really, he has to theorize something on a scale of atoms and electrons, a very unfriendly scale to humans. It is tiring for him to analyze, imagine and relate his findings from the “Sister experiments”. So he spends himself in the theory, he romanticizes it. All his social conversations at dinner tables now become awful since he is occupied with his own strife. Everything happening around him- movie songs, news titles and random family issues, remind him about his work.

He realizes now that he is now in a relation, a love affair with his own theory! Our scientist finally wraps up his whole business with the cold outside world and goes into a happy isolated affair with his theory. As the moment of truth approaches, when he puts his theory to experimental scrutiny, the numbers and results don’t matchup. Now he has to wash his mind of that mishap, he has to drain all the negativity, his partner broke up!

Our subjective reality, no matter how sweet our rationalization of the phenomenon is to us, is not a measure of truth! Science lay’s down facts with a straight face! Science is far away from knowing everything and it’s clearly not going to be easy. But this is the best thing we ever had! We should try our best to add to the body of knowledge and reduce the error margin as generations pass. We also have to tirelessly and wirelessly promote scientific thought and leave scant room for delusions and ignorance.

CHERRY

Agnostic spin

This article provides a simple insight into Agnosticism. It draws mainly from my own experiences and follows my thought processes that led to my conclusion that there may or may not be a “God” or “Gods”. (Let’s arbitrarily, stick to the singular-“God”)

I was brought up in a Christian family and followed all the Christian traditions (mixed with the so-called “traditions” of my native-Tamil Nadu as well).I am a self proclaimed agnostic (for now) , but I was not always as such. This article draws on some of the trains of thought that brought me to conclude that- Human reason as of now, is incapable of rationally justifying the belief that deities do or do not exist.

 Humans are sentient beings,that is they feel and perceive.Inquisitive as they are,they try to explain phenomena based on their earlier experiences,or come to some deductions based on what is already known. If some phenomena seemed inexplicable,they attributed it to the gods. These gods created lightning, sent rain and did other such bizarre stuff. When man in his quest encountered certain deep philosophical questions such as “What is life??”,”How did we come here??”etcetera, he fell back to the reasonable explanation that we were created! The stars , Earth  and ourselves were so complex that there had to be a sort of divine explanation.

 Now fast forward to the present day, many of the unexplainable phenomena that were attributed as “the work of deities” have been proven by science to be otherwise. Even then,the basic philosophical questions remain-“Why are we here ??” seems the biggest question of all.

We as humans need a sort of purpose to live. That purpose is given by having (I will be using the Christian paradigm as that is what I am most familiar with) God the almighty,”maker of Heaven and Earth”,who is the loving god, who looks over us. It gives people a sense of security to know that they are loved and that their lives are being guided by the goodness of the Lord. The purpose of having humans is to “praise god”.-that’s the brief gist anyway.

 The actual bottom line is that this sort of explains how we came to be,the present happenings in the world (“war,famine,natural disasters anybody ??)and the future, where we will all be judged on how good we were in this life ,which decides our fate, heaven or hell. Now this seems like a bunch of hokum ,but then ,I will demonstrate how certain factors make all this seem kind of believable to the christian community and such factors also apply to other religions. I will call these factors “the theistic sanctuary”.

The Theistic sanctuary

Now, when we start observing the world around us (world here may refer to all the natural phenomena that can be perceived by our senses or otherwise observed through scientific means),we find a lot of symmetry and complexity in nature. The most complex of formula one cars cannot hold a candle to the complexity of the compound (human) eye, a microprocesssor is no match to the ingenuity of the human brain.

 A car or chip has to be meticulously engineered and manufactured and cannot just appear on the Earth (or anywhere for that matter), even given billions of years, Earth, Human beings and the very atoms that make up everything in the universe, must have been engineered by somebody-ergo ,we were created.

 Let me put it more rationally. We are here (“we” refers to the human race), in our present state, due to an incredibly large number of factors and if we could make the assumption that “all effects have causes” and if we trace all the causes that led to us being here in our present state, we will finally reach the first cause-God.

Even if we somehow evolved from the first single celled organisms that existed around 4 billion years ago, How could we explain to ourselves how it all started?: the “Organic soup” or such did not just become living beings for no reason.and thus we have god,who sort of kickstarted life on earth for his(assuming god is male) own reasons.

 It seems highly unlikely that the amino acids in the organic soup somehow linked together to form proteins and DNA. It is akin to saying that,if bricks occurred naturally,they would form houses!

 There are a huge number of natural phenomena ,the questions regarding the origin of life, formation of the universe, that remain as of now unanswered. The only rational solution is that these phenomena are beyond our comprehension and thus we should accept that there is a divine creator who engineered the universe and created life as we know it.

 Also consider the fact that we are living in an age where war,famine,natural disasters are widespread. Human beings do not have any peace any more, constantly living in fear and anxiety,which are the hallmarks of the end of the age. The nearing of the day of judgement.

 Now I come to the major reason for the survival, or should i say mass acceptance of theism-purpose and meaning of life. Why do we even exist?- this is a question not easily answered by non-creationists (I will not use the term evolutionists because then we make the false assumption that life came ONLY either through creation or evolution.we must also give some sort of concession that there may an entirely different cause/theory for our existence) .The existence of an all seeing omnipotent God gives us a sense of security and that he sees to it that we come to no harm.

 Our life is in his hands,we may say. Religion as a whole gives human beings a sort of “Moral compass.”. Who is to say what would happen to us if we were Godless. We may become cannibals, or do terrible things-look at Hitler!! look at the Communists!!. There is always a sort of period in a human being’s life where he/she searches for the meaning of their existence. God gives them a meaning, it is comforting to know that there is someone who cares for them.

 Let me come to factors that lead to the denial of any such claims that we were not created and which leads to the conclusion that life ultimately has no meaning.these I’d like to call “the Atheistic storm”

The Atheistic storm

In the movie “Prometheus” (which raises more questions than it answers), we come across a race of “Engineers” ,who creates life on Earth by “sowing the seeds of DNA”. Even though this is just science fiction, assuming that we were created by a race of “Engineers”, would we call them Gods?If so ,who created them? We can go on speculating.

 The human crew are on a search for their creators expecting answers to questions of life and death,while the humanoid “david” is among his creators and is underwhelmed. The crew find a race of superior beings who appear Godlike in comparison to humanity, but we cannot label them Gods.

 If there existed a God-being, then how did he come to be?.

Maybe we were programmed to never find out these answers. But these are just unfalsifiable hypotheses. If god did create humanity,would he actually care about us? We may come to visualise God as a being in human form, But if you could ask a horse to paint a picture of God, it would undoubtedly paint a horse! There is no reason that, if god existed, he would consider the welfare of some humans the sole reason for his own existence.

 It is considered highly probable that there is life on planets other than our own, Intelligent or not. How can creationism explain this?? Would god just randomly create life on planets and leave them to their respective fates??

 There has been huge scientific and technological progress in the last century alone and the pace at which we are making discoveries is astounding. A lot of phenomena that could not have been explained a few decades back, can successfully be explained now. The number of phenomena which we attribute to the eternal fallback of unexplained phenomena -God, is continuously decreasing. Superstitions being proven false etc. It’s only a matter of time before we remove the “theory of God” once and for all.

 Moral compasses are present in every human being. The perception of good and bad is entirely relative and depends on a huge number of factors-the most important of which is the society itself ! Other factors include those that affect the individuals own sense of judgement.

 The claims : if we lose religion,we will become “like animals” is not justified as many religious beliefs go against the current norm of what is acceptable. Human rights, The government and the upbringing of the person will provide morality to everyone.

 These are some of the many musings and ramblings of thoughts that have gone through my mind over the years and I certainly haven’t listed all of them. These factors have made me decide that our present knowledge (as a species), is insufficient to conclude whether or not we have been created

 After all, I may just be one of the many program segments in a matrix created by a programmer.

 I hope you reach your own informed conclusions.

John