If free will existed, we might all be Charles Manson.
It is the lack of free will that keeps us sane and safe.
Discussions of free will tend to bog down in philosophical arcana, so I thought it might be instructive to look at a few scenarios, work backwards, and see what insights are available about the inevitability of life (both inside and outside the human mind). What follows, then, is an inferential “play” in two acts. It suggests, I’d argue, that free will is a logical impossibility if not a patent contradiction in terms.
I intend my title literally, by the way: If it were possible for free will to exist, it would likely be impossible for mankind to exist. We would live (if at all) in a bloodbath.
Act 1: The bowling alley.
Picture a bowling ball. It sits motionless in the curved section of the ball return. Even though the ball is round and on a device designed to facilitate movement, it will not budge on its own. It will never lurch a millimeter forward or slide a millimeter back. It is the classic Newtonian object—at rest and staying there. Now, the ball may wobble a bit if a moving van rumbles by on the street outside, or if the alley is above a California fault line. If just one such force acts on the ball it will do just one thing, while if multiple forces kick in it will act in accordance with the interaction of those forces. It may roll slightly if there’s a subtle tectonic vibration, and slightly farther if a breeze entering through an open window acts as a multiplier effect, nudging it in the same direction—or the ball may do nothing if the vibration and the breeze exert opposing forces and cancel each other. Then, depending on the ball’s direction of travel, it may encounter slightly different frictional forces in the plastic of the ball return, or even a dried drop of sugary soda spilled by a careless bowler, thus ending up a greater or lesser distance from its starting point than had it gone the other way.
Overall, the ball will do what the sum total of forces dictate. Barring such forces, that bowling ball might theoretically sit in that ball return, inert, till the end of time.
Now let’s say that our ball is picked up and thrown by a bowler. It’s impossible to account for all variables, but if we could control the force of the roll, the angle of release, the positioning and uniformity of the pins, whether or not the a/c kicks in or there’s a subtle seismic event at the precise moment we let the ball go, etc., the laws of physics tell us that we’d get the same result each time.
All strikes, all gutter balls, all whatever.
But wait, you rebut, what about randomness? Can’t the pins fly off in slightly different patterns when hit? Couldn’t the tiniest splinter pop up on one of the planks in the lane, throwing the ball off course?
This calls for a brief digression to the concept of randomness, which is widely misunderstood and misapplied. The average person uses the term to describe events of mysterious origin and/or whose outcome cannot be predicted.
But ignorance of causation ≠ lack of causation.
Take the classic example of a coin flip. As Yale materials scientist and author Ainissa G. Ramirez has explained in Ted Talks as well as in a video for Time, if we could micromanage the complex circumstances of every flip, we could guarantee the outcome as surely as if we took the coin and placed it on a surface on its head or tail. The results of an everyday coin flip merely seem random to us as observers because of those complex variables. We cannot toss the coin from exactly the same height onto the same exact point on the surface; from toss to toss, air currents may differ slightly (we may even exert a minor effect by exhaling); the coin may land on its thickest or thinnest edge. And so on.
If the identical coin could be dropped on the identical point on a surface under identical conditions you would not get the “expected” 50/50 mix of heads and tails. As Ramirez tells us, you would get all heads, or all tails — or the coin might simply land on its side, jiggle a bit and remain that way without ever falling. Every time.
So too in bowling: Once struck by the ball, the pins fly off as they must, interacting with each other, with gravity, with friction, with myriad ambient factors. Despite the appearance of glorious pandemonium when one rolls a strike, every pin will do the same on every strike if the pin itself is exactly the same (i.e. no loss of mass or change in morphology) and it is impacted under the exact same conditions.
As for the “random” split? That too was caused: It happened when it did because of its own series of antecedent events, known or unknown, as per the forces interminably ongoing in our hyper-kinetic cosmos.
Skeptical? Let us contemplate what life would be like were this not the case. To propose a world of true (rather than merely observed) randomness is to propose a world where things happen outside the normal chain of causation — where, despite identical predisposing forces, outcomes can differ.
Inescapably, this translates to a world where some things happen for no reason at all.
Say a bowling ball misses a pin by exactly 1 inch on ten consecutive rolls, and no other forces are in play — yet nine times the pin remains upright and the tenth time it falls. What is causing that pin to fall the tenth time? We already stipulated that no other forces are in play. So, the only possible answer is: nothing. That pin has now gone off the grid of the physical world.
We have entered the realm of the supernatural. Something happened for no reason at all.
A world of such true randomness would be a terrifying place. (I submit it could not be a world at all, certainly with no sustainable life in it.) Think of the consequences in any system following the introduction of the tiniest foundational error. Let’s stick with sports for a moment. Think of a fast-pitch batting cage, where the machine is precisely calibrated to hurl the ball over the plate. Now consider the tiniest aberration appearing for no reason in the orientation of the arm — again, this is not an error caused by age or rust or poor maintenance, but by a deviation that “just happens.” An error of a fractional inch at the source of the pitch would vector out to an error of several feet at the far end of the cage, where the batter ends up taking a 95 mph fastball in the middle of the forehead and is killed.
That is just one small and rather exotic example of what “life” would be like in a world that allowed for true randomness.
Were true (i.e. not merely observed) randomness possible starting tomorrow, this batting-cage effect would be reprised billions of times in billions of critical settings. I give you three:
In navigation systems on commercially scheduled flights
In hospital ICUs
At nuclear power plants
Unconstrained by the normal physical laws that govern causation, these spontaneous variables would exponentially throw off the delicate balance of life. Plus, once such random events occur they become part of a new chain of causation whose ultimate end points cannot be foreseen (and will encompass still more random events!). The smallest spontaneous aberrations would generate butterfly effects that scale up to apocalyptic catastrophe.
A world without ironclad causation — where it’s possible for previously nonexistent variables to “pop up” and inject themselves into an established sequence of events — would be not a world at all. It would be a roiling cauldron of chaos.
If randomness became possible tomorrow, there would be no day after tomorrow.
I dare say, if randomness became possible at 9:00 am, there would be no 9:01 am.
To sum up, then, if something happens, it is happening due to the confluence of an infinite number of reasons that, through their inevitable interactions, resolve into the observed event. By definition there is a reason for each reason and a reason for that reason and on and on. Causation can be regressed back ad infinitum.
In this context, then, causation = inevitability.
Act 2: The bowling alley of your mind.
Proponents of free will insist that events inside the mind are wholly different from those outside — that the rules of the physical world do not apply. Pending that Elysian day when science provides hard-and-fast answers, let’s subject such beliefs to logical scrutiny. For while the workings of the mind cannot be diagrammed as neatly as the actions of bowling balls, certain commonsense inferences surely can be drawn.
First, the exercise of free will cannot be wholly independent of the rest of your mind’s programming; Exhibit A might be the simple fact that we think in our native tongues as we weigh a decision. If the mind is informed by speech — say, if one is not free to think in any language but English — it seems reasonable to suppose that you are similarly constrained in your ability to rise above any moral or analytical languages you have onboard. A devout Catholic is a devout Catholic, and will have the beliefs that a devout Catholic has, barring any external interference. In other words, if you are a devout Catholic at 9:00 am, and nothing at all changes inside you (a stroke? the sudden emergence of a repressed memory?) or affects you from outside (the sudden death of your beloved twins), you will be a devout Catholic at 9:01 am.
Accordingly, if your “free will mechanism” relies on the brain for language — the language it has been taught — would such a mechanism not also rely on the brain for the rest of its moral and experiential knowledge? For its values? Its tastes and preferences? And what of the impact of established personality? Conscience? The lack of conscience?
If it’s of the mind, it cannot be free of the mind’s biases and predispositions. The way you form and frame arguments will be shaped by “your truth,” in current parlance.
It is as if, in arriving at a given verdict, the mind is a jury already poisoned by pretrial publicity, if you will. Any decision you make cannot be pristine. You will do what your mind “tells you” to do.
Some argue in more straightforward fashion that free will is simply what allows you to reckon the balance sheet of opposing pluses and minuses and arrive at final tally. But this seems a rather underwhelming definition for such a grandiose concept. Here’s Daniel Dennett writing about decision-making in The Atlantic:
“Neuroscientists know that for people to make any type of decision, our neurons need to gather evidence for each option. The decision is reached when one group of neurons accumulates evidence past a certain threshold.”
I ask you: Does that sound like a thoughtful, deliberative process…or more like a computer running diagnostics? An old Texas Instruments calculator could make that “decision.” (Which helps explain why evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne refers to human beings as “meat computers.”)
This brings us at long last to the largest and in my view most important point in this entire discussion — that the concept of free will, as popularly framed, is a fundamental contradiction in terms. It self-refutes.
Eschewing the dense and exotic definitions that emanate from academic philosophers, people will say that free will, broadly, is about choosing your preferred path in life. Or it’s about “choosing between some hypothetical X and Y.” We’ll get to the latter phrase presently. But I submit that even the first definition, “choosing your preferred path,” is antithetical to any meaningful concept of free will. And the problem isn’t a matter of semantics.
What I’m about to say will sound farcical on first hearing. You came this far, however, so indulge me, please.
A valid free will would be about choosing the path that you don’t want in life.
Free will would afford you the capability to not follow your desires, but to break free of the inclinations (likes, dislikes, habits, proclivities, phobias, ethics, etc.) that collectively make you who you are. Those inclinations, after all, curtail your freedom to think and feel differently.
Truly free will would imply the ability to pick the option that loses the neurological calculation to which Dennett refers — to choose course A when every fiber of your being you cries out for you to choose course B.
Of what value is a free will that “allows” you to do all the things you’re programmed to do anyway?
Perhaps at this point you’re thinking, “People do things they don’t want to do all the time!”
No, they do not. And we’ll illustrate with the case of some hypothetical member of fabled SEAL Team 6. He adores his wife and infant daughter, but when his orders come through, he flies off to his potential death in a cave in some godforsaken land. And he went because deep inside, where such decisions are made, his neurons prioritized his obligation to country and his SEAL Team brothers. If he tells you, “I didn’t want to go, but I knew I had to,” he is mischaracterizing what happened.
He wanted to go. He wanted to fulfill his obligation, because otherwise he would let his military brothers down, and he might rot in some military stockade after being convicted of desertion, where he’d be deprived of his wife and daughter anyway. (And you don’t choose your wants.) Plus there are myriad other micro-factors. Maybe he gets off on life-and-death encounters; maybe he’s a man who needs a change of scenery now and then. Maybe, oh so subtly, he has sexual curiosity about the women of Afghanistan. All of these factors will militate for his “decision” to go when those orders come through. He may cry as he embraces his wife at the airport…sure he’s emotionally conflicted…but because of who he is, he has no choice but to go. In the final analysis, as a meat computer, he did what his mind and heart told him to do.
Such are the tectonic vibrations and soft breezes of your daily destiny. As in the case of a skilled sculptor toiling over a giant hunk of stone, each additional background factor whittles away a bit more of any other possible shape, until we’re left with the only sculpture it can be. As you are left with the only choice you can make.
There is always a winning reason, a straw that breaks the camel’s back, and if there’s a decisive reason it was not a free choice.
To use another example that often comes up, I’ve heard men say, “I love and respect my wife too much to cheat on her.” Thus your freedom to cheat is constrained by your love and respect. Sometimes you’ll hear fitness freaks chide compulsive eaters: “I could eat myself sick at a buffet, too, but I don’t because I have the willpower.” Exactly. Their willpower, which they’re fortunate enough to have onboard, negates their ability to act without willpower. So they can’t eat themselves sick a a buffet. Unless, that is, for some other contributing reason the epicurean temptations overcome the frictional force of willpower, like the combination of the breeze and the tremor overcame our bowling ball’s inertia.
A valid free will also might apply in a case where Fred is passionately in love with Freda, but instead marries Farrah, whom he detests. Or he marries Frank — when he isn’t even gay — thereby overriding his sexual orientation.
Come on now, you say, what about random thoughts and impulses? Can’t simple decisions, like, say, a breakfast choice, be random?
First, random impulse is a misnomer. What we call a random impulse is one where the link from a to b to c to is unapparent or even subconscious. Which is why there’s no such thing as doing something on a whim. It only seems to be a whim, just as it only seems that the bowling ball is vibrating for no reason when it’s disturbed by a tremor too subtle for you to discern.
Consider: Logically, how is it possible to have “free-standing” thoughts that lead to random acts — which is to say, behaviors that occur apart from all those predisposing tastes, habits, likes, dislikes, loyalties, pet peeves, formative experiences, conscience attacks, and so forth? How would such a thought originate? Even if its triggers enter your mind subliminally, would the thought not have to be prompted by something?
The peripheral glimpse of a swarm of bees, a few notes from a song, a sidelong glance at a wall of graffiti, a whiff of food or sex?
And anyway, if nothing is causing the thought — if it’s truly random — then how is any behavior predicated on that thought an exercise of free will? Rather, it’s as if your mind has been hijacked by an alien entity. (If a sudden jolt of static electricity causes a computer to behave differently, it’s really the static now running the show, not the computer.)
Just as truly random physical events would play havoc with batting cages and airline navigation systems, so too truly random thoughts would play havoc with your navigation system and society’s.
If authentic random impulses existed, is it not entirely possible that one morning you might get a random impulse to run out and buy $2500 worth of mountaineering gear and climb New York’s Smullagondo Peak, even though you have never wanted to climb a mountain and no such peak exists in New York or anywhere else?
Why, after all, would a random impulse be anchored in anything like reality as it exists?
A truly random thought, then, is no more likely than your having a thought in a language that you don’t speak, as aforementioned.
Thinks of a random thought as something like a gust of wind in your mind (though of course in reality there are no random gusts of wind, either; every little breeze occurs exactly when it must). Here are some possible “mind-gusts”:
I think I’ll turn right instead of left. Or, I think I’ll slam on the brakes right here for no reason.
I should pour this cup of coffee on the floor right here.
The boss is long-winded in this meeting today. I’ll give her the finger and say “fart stink” really loud!
And certainly some random thoughts would be horrific, as there’s no reason to suppose that a random thought would be a sane, healthy thought. A spontaneously generated thought might be on the order of, “I think I’ll kill that teenage crossing guard down the block, then drive my band-new Tesla into a tree.”
Some of us do indeed have such outré impulses but fail to act on them because of conscience. But because of conscience matters! You don’t choose to have a conscience. By the time you reach adulthood, it’s either baked-in or it isn’t. So its dominion over your antisocial urges is automatic, not an exercise in free will.
Perhaps by now you’re screaming, “But why should I kill the crossing guard? I have no reason to kill the crossing guard! And I love my Tesla!” All well and good, but you’re making the case for determinism. The absence of a reason is negative causation. It takes that “choice” off the table. As does your love for your gleaming Tesla.
You do not have impulses for which no predisposing reason exists. Just as in the world as we know it, that bowling pin does not fall unless struck by the ball.
We know that a few among us do indeed act on such impulses. We must lock them away from the rest of us. However, their criminal impulses are not random thoughts, either, but a byproduct of predisposing pathology. And/or the absence of conscience. Just as you can’t and won’t kill the crossing guard, they must and will. Sick people do the things that sick people do.
For the majority of us, though, the living of a rational life utterly depends on our inability to choose freely, our inability to transcend the forces that shape and circumscribe our normalcy.
It is the lack of free will that keeps us sane and safe.
This returns us to the second observation, re the ability to “choose between X and Y.” No such choice exists. Your ignorance of the outcome does not mean the outcome was uncertain, any more than the result of a coin flip is (physically) uncertain. For all the time you spend agonizing over four pages of IHOP menu options, you were going to end up with what you end up with (for literally millions of intersecting antecedent reasons), just as a coin that lands heads was always going to land heads, and you were going to bowl the score you bowled. Whatever you didn’t choose might as well have not even been on the menu. That day. Tomorrow may be different.
All this suggests there are no random acts of violence. Or kindness. There are no random acts. Only what seem so to observers.
Keep in mind, too, that while we can usually feel the subtle breeze or tremor, we are also at the mercy of forces utterly unfelt, unseen, unremembered. Some of these factors are so obscure that it seems absurd to drag them into the discussion — but they can be decisive nonetheless, putting us where we must be like a director in old Hollywood yelling “marks!” before a scene. Events far removed from your personal radar, in both distance and time, shape the most minute events of your daily life as you read this.
We’ll illustrate by placing you in our bowling alley. Say you’re 50-ish, and you’re bowling on October 10, 2019. You take your approach and your very first roll results in the bane of the bowler’s existence, the 7–10 split.
We know that the pins did what they had to do based on the physical forces involved. But beyond that, why did this happen? The following hypotheticals, though laughable oversimplifications, suffice for our purposes.
Hypothetical 1: A sudden twinge in your side threw off your mechanics.
What caused it?
Let’s say you tweaked a muscle at work when you tripped over a box left in the middle of the floor by a normally responsible coworker who was rushing to leave after learning that his wife was in labor. Why was she in labor? Her body sent signals that gestation was complete, based on the time elapsed since conception, which, we’ll stipulate, took place January 17. Why did the couple have sex on January 17, instead of on another night, which might’ve altered her due date and your encounter with the box? But well before that, of course, your coworker and his eventual wife had to meet. Suppose that occurred in Turin, Italy, in 2006, where they were separately attending the Winter Olympics. What nurtured their respective interest in the Olympics? And so it goes. You roll your 1–10 split on October 10, 2019, in part because in Italy in 2006, some guy you didn’t know met the woman he didn’t realize he’d marry. And at this point our regression broadens to include other remote actors: Who conceived Turin’s winning Olympic bid? Why did that individual go into that line of work?
(Yes, there were myriad other intervening events, but each one had its own inevitable chain of regression/causation, both inside and outside the heads of the principals involved. All other factors/forces that coalesced into your 1–10 split could be regressed back, theoretically to the Big Bang.)
Now, is it possible you might have tripped over a box, or something else, without your coworker’s blessed event? Sure. But this much we know: They did meet, they did marry, they did procreate, he rushed out…and there was the damn box. Hence your 1–10 split.
Hypothetical 2: You rolled your 1–10 split because you threw the ball with extra force, which played havoc with your fine motor movements.
Why?
Is it because you began lifting weights again?
Again, why?
Did you see an item on Facebook a while back that reminded you of some cutting remark about your physique uttered by a female classmate in high school? What circumstances led that girl to your classroom? Did she transfer from another school after the principal of her former school, a disgruntled Vietnam vet, took political positions that outraged her conservative parents? So Vietnam and her family’s politics are factors in your 1–10 split. Or suppose Zuckerberg had never gotten the inspiration for Facebook. Now his personal circumstances figure in the equation.
And if you threw the ball with a slightly awkward motion because you were rattled by a sonic boom, it could credibly be argued that the Wright Brothers played a roll in your deteriorating bowling score
The bottom line is that for whatever inscrutable combination of reasons, it was not possible on that roll for you to throw a strike, or a gutter ball, or anything but what you threw. For you, that 1–10 split was the coin that had to come up heads.
Curtain Call
Americans especially are wont to conflate free will with democracy. Yes, in a democracy you are free within reason to do what you want. But logic and common sense suggest that your psyche is no democracy. It tyrannically tells you what you want and need, covet and fear. Rather than allowing you free will, it enforces its will on you. As with our bowling ball in the ball return, albeit at a much more complex level, the forces in your head may act as force multipliers or may cancel each other, but you will do ultimately what they dictate.
For all these reasons, I would argue, your breakfast of March 11, 2027 is already being prepared on the grand cosmic griddle. Your chances are 1-in-1 of winning the lottery that you are destined to win, even if you live in a place that presently has no lottery and you’ve vowed you’ll “never waste a dime on such scams, anyway.” (All of those obstacles will work themselves out, likely beneath your radar.) The elements that will coalesce into your marriage to someone presently unknown to you are in play, as is your shooting at the hands of that eventual ex-spouse on some night when, people will say, incorrectly, “things got out of hand.”
Almost surely, in the grand scheme, nothing gets out of hand. Everything happens on schedule. Including each and every one of your thoughts and behaviors. Nothing “just happens.”
1Dennett belongs to a camp of observers who favor a hybrid outlook known as compatibilism. I find it overly rationalized and unconvincing.
2 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/