Some Thoughts on Free Will

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

Periodically the issue of free will resurfaces in philosophical discussions, the perennial concern being that determinism may be governing our lives, even if we don’t perceive it to be so.?This misrepresents both determinism and life, as well as free will, so we need to put an end to the silliness.?Here’s my take.

Determinism makes the most sense when we confine ourselves to any one stair in the infinite staircase of complexity, with the most promising results coming from the lowermost stairs.?Even here, however, nothing is 100% determined.?Instead, statistical probability asymptotically approaches certainty to a proximity where it is not worth the quibbling.?But in the transition between any two stairs, novel properties emerge which are not determined by the underlying component elements, and while probability still reigns, it is much further from the asymptote.?Moreover, with each higher stair, these uncertainties increase, both because they are multiplying upon each other, and because each higher stair has more freedom of variation than the one below it.

Now, what sets humanity apart from all other living beings, is our mastery of language and the narratives, analytics, and theories it enables.?Here is where free will reigns.?Nothing determines the narratives we choose to embrace, nor the analytics we choose to apply to them, nor the theories that we use to make sense of reality.?Of course, these are all influenced deeply by our roots, our heritage, our ethnicity, our economic status, and so forth, but they are not determined by them.?Why can we say this??Because no two people come even close to matching each other, not now, not ever.?

So, why in the world does the issue even come up??Historically, it arose out of wrestling with the contradiction of an omniscient God, an accountable human, and a predestined eternal fate.?The Judeo-Christian narrative brings this on itself, and there is no avoiding it, and there is no way to make sense of it.?Indeed, it is one of the reasons that secular worldviews have been increasingly replacing religious narratives.?But that does not answer the follow-up question, why are the secular narratives themselves raising the issue?

Here I think it comes back to the “hard problem of consciousness.”?We want to think of our minds as operating on one stair, but in fact, they operate on all of them.?Your thinking is indeed impacted by the chemistry inside your brain cells, which in turn is a function of the physics of your atoms and molecules, all aligned by the miraculously complex workings of your biology, including the hormonal systems that motivate your desires and fears, the memory pathways that reinforce your values, the subconscious systems that energize your morals and mores, up to the level of language (which is where most people think they live) and then beyond into the narratives that shape your worldview, the analytics you embrace to validate those narratives, to shape whatever theory you may have of reality when that subject comes to mind.

So, yes, at any one stair, one can imagine forces that probabilistically determine outcomes at that stair’s level, but it is ludicrous to imagine that any deterministic force could navigate the entire stairway.

That’s what I think.?What do you think?

Follow Geoff on LinkedIn | Geoffrey Moore Main Mailing List | Infinite Staircase Mailing List

________________________________________________________________

Geoffrey Moore | Infinite Staircase Site | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Infinite Staircase Twitter | Facebook | YouTube