Free Will

(Sabina Hossenfelder should change her mind about it)

Sabine Hossenfelder thinks we do not have free will.

I think we do.

She should change her mind.

I will explain. But, whew, there's a lot here. Before I get into it, I should say that, like many, I respect Sabina Hossenfelder (henceforth SH). I especially enjoy the withering disdain she reserves for cutesy ironies such as my subtitle aspires to be. There will be some snipes, but please don't doubt my sincerity about this. The thoughts here are based on a chapter of her book Existential Physics, and a couple of her videos (here and here). If she has said something divergent more recently, I'll be glad to reconsider. But the point is really to respond to the position she has represented well in these outings.

A good way to start a discussion like this is to settle on a statement where there's clear disagreement. Let's try,

SH thinks it's false, I think it's true.

Excellent - super. But now, are we sure she and I mean the same thing by 'free will' - are we really disagreeing?

The natural next step would be for me to say a bit about what I understand by the term 'free will', in the hope I can come up with something she would consider fair, to get to a clearer understanding of our disagreement. But straight away, we have a problem - SH is very disparaging about efforts to clarify terms. She accuses people who try to do this - I think this is what's going on - of straying from what supposedly 'normal' people mean by the terms in question, and creating what she calls a "quagmire of evasion". Sounds bad.

So let's follow her lead instead - she proposes to state the problem of free will without using the term 'free will'. She says

This is not really satisfactory. SH promised to state the problem of free will but delivered only 'the situation' - a situation is not inherently a problem. What exactly is the problem? You may find it a bit tedious to harp on something like this, pretty clearly SH would, but if you want to say something useful about a long-standing problem you should try at least to be a bit precise about it.

Let's try again. I think we have to risk entering that quagmire of evasion, because terms need to be clarified.

I'm fortunate to have near my house two grocery stores, one budget, the other a bit more upscale. Any given week I have the option to shop at either. I would say,

I understand SH would deny this - she would say that strictly speaking, this is false.

I think there are lots of true (literally true) statements like this:

And I would say that the statement that you have free will is just shorthand for the conjunction of all these statements:

I understand she would say not just that some of these are, literally speaking, false but that all are.

So we have, on the one hand, this common-sense position, and on the other, SH's radically revisionary philosophical position (she implies it's physics, but who does she think she's fooling? The term 'free will' does not figure in any physics theory. She's doing philosophy, plain and simple).

Let's reconstruct SH's position as an argument against the thought that we have free will as just conceived.

1. Physics implies that the masses, positions and velocities of every elementary particle in the universe at any given time completely determine the masses, positions and velocities of every particle at the next instant. This means that any complete specification of the universe at a moment determines the complete specification at every future moment. (I don't question this) *

2. Macroscopic objects (human beings among them) being just assemblages of fundamental particles, the same point applies to us (our bodies).

3. This implies: if you are at point x₁ at time t₁, there is some one point x₂ at time t₂ > t₁ where you (your body) will be. It is not possible that you will be at any point other than x₂ at t₂ (so says physics).

4. But your being able to choose implies that there is more than one place where you may be at t₂. There is one point or more other than x₂ where it's possible you'll be (and so where your body will be) at t₂ (so says common sense).

5. Physics and free will are incompatible (cannot both be true) -- (3) & (4) are mutually contradictory.

6. Physics is true, therefore free-will is false. *

So, is this a fair restatement - am I really, sneakily arguing against some weakened version of the position, not really facing it head-on? Am I just another quagmire-creature? I think I am not, and I will allow that this long-known argument SH has re-gifted us looks pretty solid. So what's my complaint? Let's get to the point.

My first, main complaint against SH is not that her argument is too weak, but that it's too strong.

It's pretty clear from what she says that she agrees with this. Her vision is that we are just complex systems buffetted about by the vicissitudes of the universe's physical constituents. There's no more a wrong or right about anything we do than there is about the direction of bounce of a rock rolling down a hill.

So this is a bullet SH bites. We've done-in morals along with free will. Let's not get sentimental, we're all hard-nosed scientific types, here - we can contrive some ersatz of the concepts of right and wrong to get along with, we'll be fine.

But wait, there's more!

Her view implies not just that there's nothing you ought morally to do, but that there's nothing you ought or ought not to believe. So, to pick an example purely at random, her argument against free will implies it's not the case that you ought not to believe there is free will. Rationality itself being mainly a matter of believing what you ought to, and not believing what you ought not to, it follows from her position that there is no such thing as being rational. And this is really the nub of the whole anti-free-will position, right? The target isn't just free-will, but our very idea of ourselves as reasoning agents. That's really what we're arguing about. And again, I think it's pretty clear this is the view SH adheres to - she seems not to see a tension here.

But that's crazy, right? There is no free will (wagging finger), but it's not the case that you ought to believe there's no free will (?). In fact, whoever appears to win any round of this debate, there's nothing to celebrate or deplore - there's nothing, ever, to celebrate or deplore (if we confine ourselves to what physics recognizes). "But", SH will respond, "no problem, we can come up with a work-around for those concepts we have to ditch. Just need to fiddle a few details, it won't be hard".

But I'm still not done!

Delving just a bit further down this hole, we find that many people very plausibly think that the simple possibility of meaning something by a word (the word 'dog', say) is inextricably connected to there being ways you ought to use the word (if you're going to), and ways you ought not to - that meaning in language is itself tied to our being bound by 'oughts' - by our being agents capable of intending and choosing (you ought not to say of a cat, 'that's a dog' - this is a mistake).

If this is right * --and I for one think it's useless to try to resist it-- then SH's argument implies that the very words she uses to articulate it are meaningless. The argument is in a way self-refuting - if it's conclusion is true then it's meaningless in which case it's not the case it's true...

Again, this is my real complaint against SH. She seems not to grasp the implications of the very familiar argument she is rehashing for us - of its pervasive destructive force, nor, for that matter, of the difficulty in delivering on the promise of those erzatz replacement concepts she cheerfully indicates we can get by with if we accept it. She seems to think that people who believe in human agency do so because they are sentimental or soft-headed, or have failed to understand the rudimentary presuppositions of classical physics --a puerile attachment like to Santa Claus or, in the opinion of some, to God, which those poor benighted philosophers would get over if only they could grasp the complexities of physics. She has misunderstood the problem, and consequently where someone with her beliefs should be focusing their efforts.

Harsh! But is it unfair? Or, is there some easy way to resist the destructive force of the argument?

I hope I've made a case that free will - or human agency, more broadly- deserves a less flippant hearing than it gets in SH's treatment.

Admittedly, none of this tells us why we have free will -it gives us only a dilemma. We still have that contradiction we arrived at.

My position so far is in effect that the familiar argument against free will which SH is proselytizing presents us with a real dilemma, and she fails to get this.

But I haven't said anything to show the argument is bad. I admit, it's a strong argument - there's a reason it's survived centuries, it would be surprising if I could easily pull out some obvious, uncontentious flaw.

Let's step back. SH presents to us a very familiar understanding we have of ourselves, as physical objects fully governed by the laws of nature. But there is a different understanding, equally familiar to travellers of these roads, which is starkly inconsistent with it. This is the view notably championed by Rene Descartes, according to which we are at root thinking agents. On this view, our experience of the world is in the first instance not of things in the environment, but rather patchworks of sense-data - coloured shapes, sounds, smells and so forth. Our challenge is to justify the ordinary beliefs we have about the world, recognizing that this sensory input and our intellects are all we have to go on. In the conventional telling, according to this view, the existence of a world furnished with the objects we take it to have (tables, dogs, aubergines and so forth), seems at least superficially to be just one of any number of possible explanations for what we experience. Alternatives sometimes discussed include that there is an evil demon deceiving us (Descartes), or that we are living in a computer simulation (some racist Oxonian).

Our willingness to entertain this conception shows clearly that we have a way of thinking of ourselves -of understanding what we are- according to which we are not mere physical objects. Let's be clear: this view is consistent with the idea that there are no physical objects at all, let alone that we are nothing more than them. (I'm not recommending it - just noticing the position exists).

Now, admittedly, SH is disparaging at least of the simulation variant of this understanding -she has a singularly weird argument against it * - but her willingness to join the fight in the way she does, shows she thinks the view is intelligible, which is all I need. If her free will argument were decisive, it would be enough for her just to fold her arms and point to it.

What's of interest in this alternate way of understanding ourselves is that the constraint in question on us is not the laws of physics and the state of the world, but rather what reason compels or permits us to believe, given what we know.

Anyway, to close this out, recall that the argument against free will turned on the inconsistency between what physics says is possible (just one future) and what free will requires to be possible (multiple possible futures). The suggestion of this alternate understanding is that there are two quite different concepts of what's possible at work in those two premises of the argument. One is physical possibility (consistency with physics and the total state of the universe), the other is rational possibility (consistency with known facts). Hopefully this has some intuitive heft: if I say 'You can go to the budget store (if you choose)', I don't mean to be committing myself to anything about the near-future trajectories of the innumerable particles in the proximate universe. I'm just telling you the store's still open.

The thought is that the argument fails because it turns on an equivocation over the meaning of "possible".

I admit this is not a knock you down, drag you out argument. The real point is that there's much more to think about concerning agency and free will than is dreamt of in Sabine Hossenfelder's philosophy.