- It's very often that in the conversations about free will,
you find people who believe in free will
contrasted with determinists,
who just think the laws of physics are gonna tell us
what happens in the world.
'Determinism' is a statement
about how the laws of physics work.
It goes back to Pierre-Simon Laplace
explicating the implications of classical mechanics,
a la Isaac Newton.
He says, "If you knew the position
and velocity of everything in the world,
the equations of classical physics
deterministically predict what will happen next."
There's no randomness:
you know exactly what's gonna happen in the future.
To me, this is one of the biggest mistakes we could make.
Not that you should be determinist or not,
but that there is some relationship
between determinism versus non-determinism,
and free will versus non-free will.
Those are two separate questions.
'Libertarian free will' is truly an ability to make choices
and do things in the world that cannot even, in principle,
in any way, be explained
by stuff obeying the laws of physics.
Immanuel Kant and other people put it in these terms:
They said, "There's no way of thinking of a human being
as somehow a collection of physical things
obeying the laws of physics."
There is something that is inescapably human
that cannot be reduced to an understanding
of ourselves as just mindless pieces
conglomerated together to make something with a mind.
Now I would say, no modern scientist believes in that-
to say no is an exaggeration.
There's probably some who do,
but the overwhelming majority of scientists
take seriously the idea that we know what we are physically.
We are collections of atoms, molecules, etc.-
that, in principle, obey the laws of physics.
And where you get into a little bit of tension
with the underlying laws of physics is you say,
"Okay, I'm describing myself.
You know, I have some knowledge,
but I also have some preferences.
I have some desires, I have some values.
I have some feelings, I have some emotions.
And you're telling me that I'm also a collection of neurons.
And then you're telling me that those neurons
are made of atoms and particles
and they obey the laws of physics.
And once I get to the level of neurons,
much less the level of atoms and molecules,
there's no feelings there."
And so this is where we enter
into the idea of 'compatibilist free will.'
Compatibilism says that we can still talk about human beings
as agents making choices, while also agreeing
that we don't violate the laws of physics.
And to say, "Well, how are those two things compatible?"
That's a perfectly fair question,
and the answer is 'emergence.'
The answer is layers of reality.
The answer is there are different ways
of talking about the world
that are compatible with each other,
but very, very different.
When I open the closet door in the morning
and say, "Should I wear the blue shirt or the red shirt?"
It doesn't help me to say,
"Well, I'm gonna do whatever my atoms want me to do."
My atoms have no wants.
There is something that I have that is a want,
and the fact that I'm made of atoms
doesn't make that go away.
The compatibilist position is not
one that denies determinism
or indeterminism-it doesn't care.
What it's saying is
that you can both be a law-abiding thing in the Universe,
a physical system subject to the laws of nature,
and it makes sense to talk about you
as an agent making choices because you're talking
about a different level of description-
a higher-level, emerging kind of phenomenon.
I think that the best objection
to my own view about free will, the compatibilist view,
the emergent view, is that it's a little loosey-goosey
in some sense, right?
I'm saying I can talk about human beings,
a level of human beings,
or I could talk about atoms and so forth.
Well, where do I draw the line?
The non-compatibilist could say,
"Well, what if someday I'm able
to read your microexpressions on your face
and exactly and reliably predict what you will do next?
Would you still have free will?"
And my answer is: "Maybe not."
My answer is: "I can imagine in principle, getting so good
at predicting how human beings actually behave
on the basis of truly accessible information,
that the concept of free will
no longer becomes helpful or necessary."
That's just an improvement in our scientific understanding.
Do I think that actually will ever happen?
No, for lots of good reasons.
Human beings are incredibly complex.
There's chaotic dynamics, there's quantum fluctuations.
There's a whole bunch of reasons why we should expect
to never give up on the picture of human beings
as agents making decisions.
A lot of people who are anti-free will
the way they phrase it is:
"I will believe that there's free will
if there's a way that I could have acted differently."
And what they have in mind
is they are collections of particles
or, you know, whatever physical system,
that is obeying the laws of physics-
and, in fact, they could not have acted differently
'cause the laws of physics are the laws of physics.
But the reality is,
given the actual information you know about yourself,
you could have acted differently
because the information you have about yourself
is wildly incomplete.
It's compatible with all sorts
of different microscopic arrangements
of what's going on in your brain and your body.
That incomplete information
is why we're not perfect reasoners about the future.
We have an ability to reason counterfactually:
to think not about just what will happen,
but of various things that could happen,
and then pick the one that we think is a good one.
And since we don't know the positions and velocities
of every molecule in the Universe,
we can't say what would happen
just given the laws of physics.
What we have to say is,
"Given the choices I make,
what is the future that I'm going to help bring about?"
So like it or not, the world that we really know and live in
is one where our choices matter.
That's where meaning comes from,
from recognizing that in the real world
of the knowledge that we have
and our computational boundedness,
we have some responsibility
for bringing about what is going to happen next.
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