No Pressure

If have just begun reading "Determined: a science of life without free will" by Robert Sapolsky. Even a page into Sapolsky's book, I can feel the yes-but reflex twitching. I am going to give it some thought.

I think Sapolsky may be guilty of equivocation fallacy since the term free will can mean different things. He claims that free will is an illusion. I think he's pretending we mean one thing when most people mean something else.

First, can we agree that the universe is particulate, that it consists of local clumps of material sufficiently distinct that they can be thought of as discrete objects, and that I am such an object? Label me Dennis. (That's all I will say about that other idea that the self is an illusion.) 

Next, can we agree that time may be divided into intervals of various durations encompassing particular events: the precambrian period, recorded history, my lifetime, last year, today, this moment. What will Dennis choose in this moment? Will he write a note about the objection to free will being an equivocation fallacy or will he watch reruns of The Big Bang Theory?

The argument of hard determinism is that everything is cause-effect dependent and the dependencies stretch back to the beginning and throughout space. This argument is seductive because things that have already happened are settled, and a plausible cause-effect narrative can be invented to explain them even though almost all the causes and the causes behind the causes behind the causes are unknown and many are unknowable. 

The future is not so certain. Particular futures are more or less improbable. We do science so that we can imagine possible futures, choose a future we want, and do something to make it more probable. Knowing some of the important causes behind events (determinism) can help with that. On the other hand, hard determinism says whatever we do, it was decided already in the first microsecond of The Big Bang. So, why bother with science? Why bother making a choice? Why bother?

Whatever happened on some exploding star long ago to create the elements in my body, I here in this moment choose, using my brain in its current state, to write this note. Just as Dennis is the label I use for this bit of flesh and bone and brain, free will is the label I give to the motive behind this choosing process. I make a choice, not bothering with most of its antecedents because all of that is too complicated.

We can argue about whether  free is a good word for this idea, but it boils down to how much of the universe we include in the explanation and how far back we want to go in time. Instead, let's clarify using a different term. Here and now, I made a thoughtful choice to write this note. Once the choice has been made, we can supply a few reasons that show it was determined. But before the thoughtful choice was made, the vast field of determining causes was too complex for us to predict the choice. Being thoughtful is how we deal with impossible complexity. So when we say we have free will, we mean we may thoughtfully gamble and sometimes win in spite of our ignorance of the incomprehensible complexity of our situation. Of course, thoughtfulness is relative. We are also free to be not so thoughtful, as when we say it is all predetermined, so why bother.

Now we have this blog note. You can thoughtfully imagine that an accident 13.8 billion years ago involving a bunch of quarks was the primal source of this note, and then what...  On the other hand, I've got this. My choice is to write this note.

You can thoughtfully choose to email me with the message "Stop" because you are tired of deleting my nonsense. Or you can comment below objecting to my naive reasoning because Sapolsky is about to destroy this argument in the next chapter. Or you can email me asking a question. Or you can watch reruns of The Big Bang Theory. Or whatever. Your choice. That's as free as it gets.

No pressure.

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How the Brain Makes Decisions: Psychology Today