Why is the statement about "Freewill is an illusion" considered profound? [closed]

Question

So my understanding of the "freewill is an illusion" argument is if I know everything about a system since the laws of physics are deterministic the final solution is unique. Anyone who makes this argument implicitly assumes a materialistic view. The more interesting question to ask in my opinion is where does this illusion stem from? The answer is it would stem from the observer's ignorance of physical information of himself. Proof of the negative: Imagine I knew what I was going to do then there wouldn't be any notion of freewill. By this I mean an observer is in a isolated system he knows what he is going to do and he knows how the system will react accordingly. Then there would there is no action of otherwise (or freewill).

Now consider the situation about rolling a dice. If I roll it and there is no ignorance about the physical information then there is a unique final solution. The preceding statement is trivial in my opinion. But suddenly when I say that if there is no ignorance of the system hence, freewill is an illusion! Suddenly this is considered a profound statement. To be both statements are more or less equivalent.

And saying there is no freewill (as expounded by Sam Harris) sounds a lot like if there is no ignorance then there is no probability. I sincerely don't understand the traction this topic has got. I suspect I must be overlooking something?

Answer 1

The idea that free will is an illusion does not originate with Sam Harris, but is around since, at least, Spinoza (Ethics book 2 proposition 35:

men are mistaken in thinking themselves free ; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are conditioned. Their idea of freedom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause for their actions.

As I said in comment, "profound" is a very ill defined and subjective criteria. The best you can do is ask people who find it profound why they do.

One more objective judgement that can be made is that it operates a Copernician revolution on the topic of free will. Our whole experience of life gives us the intuition that we are in control, but this idea challenges the notion by offering an explanation to this feeling. We attribute our wants to ourselves because we don't know what to attribute them to.

Psychoanalysis, experiments of social psychology in the lab and neurology have shown that this feeling of control is largely mistaken. People given a hot beverage before a board game show more collaborative behavior than those in the control group, yet never mention the beverage when asked why they felt like collaborating. Electrodes in the brain can provoke gestures and emotions, always rationalized by the patient as a volition of their own.

Credit is due to Spinoza for having this intuition centuries before it was confirmed by science.

Answer 2

When Sam Harris talks of free will being an illusion, he is not referring to the idea that our minds are subject to the laws of physics (either mechanistic laws or laws involving randomness). He is referring to a basic, and easily verifiable, Buddhist principle. It is easy to prove to yourself that you have no free will by trying to meditate (you do not have to be good at it). Sit calmly and try to think only about the flow of your breath. Your attention will soon stray and various other thoughts will pop into your mind, unbidden. It will be apparent to you that you do not have any control over these stray thoughts. It is in this sense that Harris says you have no free will: you do not have any control over your own thoughts; they enter your mind unbidden. Many people find it profound when they realize (through direct introspective experience) that they are not the authors of their own thoughts.

Answer 3

The profound implication is: are you a free-acting person or a marionette of cause and effect. If nothing can be truly random as in a universally deterministic world there is only one fatalistic outcome. Nothing you can do will change it because you will always act according to your 'programming' of experience and personal reasoning. It's really just a thought experiment though.

Answer 4

Saying that free will is an illusion is profound only because it contradicts religion.

The argument presented in the OP, that if all initial conditions are know then free will is impossible, is not a profound conclusion. It is not even a new idea, and it pre-dates Sam Harris and Spinoza. Maimonides deals with a different form of the argument; that is, if God knows the future, then He know what a person will do throughout his life, and there is no room for free will, because, from God's perspective, his future is pre-determined. This argument is only strengthened by the finding of very specific physicals causes for many actions. Therefor, pure philosophy would reject the concept of free will.

It is only the concept of religion, (and perhaps only Abrahamic religions, but I do not know about other religious families,) the claim that God created Man so that he should do something positive in the world, which requires us to posit the existence of free will. And it is not something that is fully understood. (The impossibility, in a way, is the same as the question of how God could create an imperfect world.) This is a profound idea (in that it is very basic and exceptionally far-reaching), and widely accepted. So rejecting it is equally profound.

BTW, religion does not insist that all thoughts or acts must be in one's control for there to be free will, just that there must exist some actions or thoughts that are truly under man's control.

Answer 5

If you're interested in this, Searle has a book Freedom and Neurobiology about these topics, and gave a quick presentation to Google about this book in a Talks@Google from 2007. Like you’re making the case, he points out that it can be very difficult to isolate the philosophical problem of free will when the scientific problems of how we obtain a notion of our own free will are also still outstanding and seem much larger.

The basic problem in his phrasing has to do with an aspect of science, which is causal sufficiency of explanations, “given the forces and mass transfers present near this bridge, it had to collapse.” Mario Bunge’s Philosophy of Science is also some good reading here, it talks at least in volume 2 about how science has a structure of explaining things and therefore science questions are of the form “Why p?” and traditionally you have a structure of “Because of some particular circumstances q, and some laws that guarantee that q implies p.” Logical entailment is thus a deep part of normal science.

And the problem with free will is ultimately a feeling we have that our own choices were not determined by prior circumstance. “I voted for Obama but I could have voted for Romney,” say. And the philosophical question therefore looks at the language or understanding barrier between these two ideas, “I could have done something else” versus “Science proceeds via causally sufficient explanations” to get to some shared understanding where we can see what both of those mean.

Searle accepts “It’s all an illusion” as a valid explanation, albeit not one that he likes very much. So let’s dive deep into what this means: it is the statement that ”your notion that you could have done something else is a fiction that your brain generates to make it feel good about itself, but it does not correspond to any real physical phenomenon.” Sort of like when we say a rainbow is an illusion we mean that “I know it looks like there is a big physical arch out there but if you move around you will discover that there is no fixed prismacolor object corresponding to the arch you see.” Searle thinks that yes, this solves the philosophical problem directly, and so he only has a few meta-level problems with this explanation:

1. It seems like the point of most “it’s an illusion” explanations is to “shake” the illusion. Unfortunately, we cannot shake this “we could have done something else” illusion of freedom because we by definition do not have the freedom to do so. You cannot freely voluntarily shake an illusion that you have the ability to freely voluntarily shake it. In the Talks@Google talk he remarks that someone had asked him, if someone proved that free will is conclusively an illusion and everything must be deterministic, would Searle accept it? and Searle had to reply that the question is assuming you had no free will, and we made you aware of it, would you use your free will to accept that conclusion? and the question rapidly eats its own premise.
2. It seems like our body is doing a lot of biological work to sustain this illusion whereas simpler structures should be in-principle possible that do the same material outcomes without sustaining this illusion, especially if it is indeed an illusion and “we would do better to live without it,” which seems to be the philosopher’s position.

On the other hand you mention the randomness idea and Searle kind of rejects randomness as a valid explanation in the first place, if my memory serves me correctly. Randomness as an explanation, I would say, has to do with the existence of hidden information, and so the claim is that “I could have chosen otherwise” is really a statement of “I don’t know why I chose what I chose, but there is some reason, I just don’t have access to that reason. It was just one of those random things. Some days I vote for Obama and some days I vote for Romney.” And I think the point is, “no, I can give you my reasons I chose Obama over Romney and I know why I chose what I chose, I just could have chosen something else.” In this respect randomness is talking about a different aspect of determinism than the tension that we have to resolve, and yes it is certainly a valid aspect of determinism but it is not the aspect which we find in tension in our own cases, so you have to eventually “fix” the explanation by adding some other statement, e.g. the illusion idea. So a randomness+illusion explanation would say “You just don't have access to the deterministic causes that made you choose what you chose, so you maybe had reasons which established a 95% chance you voted Obama and a 5% chance you voted Romney within your bounds of what you could know about the system, but you are wrong that you could have chosen something else, in fact your next random variable was going to inevitably be 0.89381... and as long as your conscious reasons generated at least an 89% chance of voting Obama you were going to vote for Obama, with the missing gap of ‘could have’ being a fundamental illusion.” The point is that philosophical randomness does not solve the problem, so you can instead understand this as a scientific randomness which can be left to science and the philosophical aspect is being solved by the illusion explanation.

Searle mentions that he sees another explanation but he doesn’t like it either, which is that more recently, physicists have abandoned causal sufficiency in all of their quantum explanations. He says that the problem here is that usually anything that philosophers have to say about quantum mechanics is hot air at best, but this idea that causal sufficiency is only an approximate principle for our reality that works well for science but is not necessary, should suffice to solve the problem the other way. He just doesn’t like the idea that consciousness should be filed away as a quantum phenomenon when that doesn’t seem terribly likely, so it becomes an open scientific problem how things can inherit quantum non-sufficiency in explanation, without inheriting all of the weirdness of quantum mechanics.

Answer 6

The idea of free will is that you have free will if it is the case that you can do what you want to do. And it is of course easy to verify that you have free will. To prove that you have free will, it is enough to do whatever you want to do. For exemple, do I want to type "I have free will", or do I want to type "I don't have free will"? Well, right now, I want to type "I have free will", so let's see if i can do it: I have free will. Done. I have free will and I have proved I have free will.

So, the idea that we do not have free will is profound because you have to dig very deep to find an interpretation of "free will" such that it is not true that we have free will.

Spinoza, of course, was correct in that it is not our consciousness that decides what we want to do. What we want to do is decided by something else. We only decide to do what we want.

It is funny to see people deny the existence of consciousness and then proceed with denying that we have free will, for assuming consciousness does not exist, then whatever we do is what our body does and it is a fact that what our body does at any one moment is a function of what our body is at that moment, which is just another way to say that we do whatever we determine we should do, which is free will.

The debate aboute free will is essentially an ideological debate where the contenders re-enact endlessly the ideological war between the Catholic Church and European intellectuals in the Enlightenment period. It is somewhat ironic that at the same moment that intellectuals were fighting for their freedom, some of them nonetheless choose to deny that we had free will, only to try and undermine the Church. Lovely.

Answer 7

There is actually nothing that assumes a materialistic point of view in the statement. It is still true even if you are operating in an absolutely perfect, purely spiritual world of complete information available to everyone at all times. I.e. even in the Christian heaven or a similar realm.

The thrust of the argument is as such:

• All actors have certain goals they wish to accomplish and values they hold
• Actions taken by actors are taken to further their goals whilst upholding their values
• Since every actor is perfect and has perfect information at all times, they will necessarily take the best possible course of action every time. Thus, their actions are entirely determined by their circumstances and personality, and entirely predictable given complete knowledge of those
• However, the concept of free will rests on the idea that people can "freely" choose their actions, ie. make decisions that are at least in principle unknowable until they're made and aren't completely determined by the circumstances. But the only way to have unknowable decisions is if they're random (in the sense of being probabilistic), as otherwise the perfect reasoning available to actors would fully determine the outcome. Yet perfect actors with perfect knowledge working towards their goals and values would not take any actions other than the best possible one, as it would mean effecting a worse outcome for no reason

Thus, even in the most ideal world imaginable, free will is an internally-inconsistent, contradictory concept. And things obviously get worse if you're living in an imperfect, material world with things such as biases, illusions, emotions, mental illness, poverty, systemic discrimination, etc.

It is not a profound result because it's particularly hard to work out, but because free will is accepted as a given and necessary in almost all Western religion and culture, forming the basis of a lot of law and morality. But since it's a thing that does not and can not possibly exist, basing your entire idea of justice and morality on it is a big problem. This leads to problems such as inconsistent and arbitrary value systems, punitive rather than restorative legal systems that exacerbate the very things they purport to want to deter from, bigotry and intolerance, etc. Thus getting rid of that idea is very necessary for making the world a better place. That's why it's important for people like Sam Harris.

Note: it's important to distinguish the concept of free will from the concept of responsibility. Personal responsibility (and potentially punishment) is still useful, if it happens to produce the best achievable outcomes. Ie. if putting people in jail for a particular crime works to deter them from it, and the punishment is not excessive or cruel, it might be desirable to hold people responsible for that crime, even if they're ultimately all victims of their circumstances. However, if you can instead rehabilitate them and thus ensure they will not want or need to commit that crime, that is a far better option and it's imperative that you do that. But in legal and/or moral systems based on the concept of free will, it becomes permissible to just exact revenge and dish out punishment, since criminals "freely choose" to commit their crimes.

Answer 8

The definition of free will is that a subject makes decisions which are not predictable — because if the decision were predictable it would obviously be predetermined. Claiming that a predetermined decision was based on free will would be a hitherto unknown use of free.

Another word for "not predictable" is "random".

Physics of the 20th century have taught us that there is no lack of randomness in the world¹, including the brain. We hence do, without a trace of doubt, have free will.²

That is not profound at all, it's trivial (well, if you accept that "der Alte würfelt"). It unfortunately also doesn't make a strong case for individual responsibility, guilt and punishment: Our actions are composed of a predetermined part (our genes, our upbringing, peer pressure, what we had for breakfast) and this random part. Neither one appears to make us particularly responsible now, do they.

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_{¹ The idea that the world, including us, is a predictable clockwork was hip only from LaPlace (1814) to Heisenberg (1927).}

_{² Note that this says nothing about how we subjectively perceive our own decision making. The random firing of a few neurons which snowballs down our neocortex and tips the scale a certain way can well be perceived as eventually making a conscious decision. Interestingly we may feel the same about a decision which was entirely predictable (because it was predetermined by our past experiences and/or our genes).}