Does Free Will Necessitate a Divine Creator?

Great Debates
1

(aka “Poke Holes in My Logic,” “Sometimes Shaky Knowledge of Physics is a Very, Very Bad Thing,” and “Is Free Will Consistent with Atheism?”)

So some 62 tetracontillion[sup]1[/sup] particles were set into motion after the Big Bang, they all scatter, interact via various forces, push each other away, pull each other together, collide, more matter forms in lieu of energy as symmetry breaks and the universe assumes a lower energy state - rinse, wash, repeat, yadda yadda yadda. All of this is carefully calculated and guided (for lack of a better word) by the rules we call physics, even if we don’t understand HOW things worked at various times, we at least know they did, and even if they didn’t… who cares? Things work now and we have at least a moderate grasp of many of the less nuanced aspects (well, that’s what the physicists tell me at least… I know you have those God Machines stored SOMEWHERE :p)

Now there are many theories of what governs what - from strings to higgs bosons to other things that almost (and often do) sound like flights of fancy to the untrained ear. But one thing I have rarely, if ever seen disputed is the case that it’s simply a matter of figuring out HOW the damn things work, with a great underlying concept of “give me the right values for these variables, and we can show you in hard numbers and graphs exactly what does happen when x meets y, given our theory is true.” This implies everything is calculable, at least to an observer looking in (I’m not talking about any gods, I’m simply talking about a theoretical person who could step out of the universe with the needed formulae and know the exact state of every particle and unit of energy necessary).

This, sadly, throws a small crux in free will. If we figure out the correct math, pause time and step out, though it may take a while but given the right values (i.e. everything) one could 100% accurately calculate exactly what hits what, how it bounces, combines, inhibits, orbits, or whatever, including what hits what in your brain causing blah blah blah to release a chemical which blah blah blah to stimulate you to move your arm to pour milk, as well as exactly how THAT long series of events affected everything and everyone around you, all of these collisions precisely tuned by the governing principles of the universe at the very moment of the Big Bang (or before, who knows). Given an even longer time (seriously if there is a God who doesn’t interfere and he’s just a book keeper and this is how he stays Omniscient he must be bored as hell), one could calculate the exact string of events leading straight from the Big Bang to the action of you drinking milk above. You could actually do this with any given point in time in the universe.

The only way I can see this being potentially mitigated is if there is a God and he put a magical anti-physics shell around our synapses allowing us to reason and make choices, instead of being slaves to a single event of great power countless years earlier. As a disclaimer this is more of an argument AGAINST Free Will than FOR God, I don’t want to give the wrong impression here. I don’t exactly want to believe this, but I haven’t been able to really dent this idea under review of it.

[sup]1. I think that’s the name for a grouping of forty when going million (1), billion(2), etc I at least know as my reasoning was that a 40 sided polygon is a tetracontagon. It matters not, it’s a made up figure anyway.[/sup]

Someone (thankfully) finding the gaping hole in my logic in
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2

Not me. As an atheist I’ve always believed every decision I’ve ever made was technically decided billions of years ago.

3

Problem it, that’s impossible due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. That information is by principle impossible to acquire. And if you go by the Copenhagen Interpretation, it’s not even there to be acquired, as I understand it; the location and velocity and so on of the particles are themselves uncertain, not just our knowledge of them.

That wouldn’t work either. The fundamental problem with “free will” is that it’s not a concept that makes any sense when looked at closely. As many people have pointed out in the past, randomness isn’t free will either. And if something determined isn’t free will, and something random isn’t free will, that leaves . . . what ?

4

Two basic problems:

  1. The “billiard ball” picture of reality (particles bouncing against particles and moving in paths according to predictable laws) isn’t accurate. What’s going on down there is alot more fuzzy than that. Basically, it’s all probabilities. You’ve almost certainly read about this before, but you may want to do some poking in wikipedia about quantum physics (see for ex. the Uncertainty Principle and the Collapse of the Waveform) to remind yourself.

However, replacing billiard balls with probability waves hardly makes medium size objects any more capable of Libertarian Free Will. A free will is supposed to be both not bound by causal laws and also not random. If our will turns out somehow to hinge on quantum effects (i.e. you could say something like “He made that choice because that particle appeared in that place upon waveform collapse”) then the will is apparently essentially random–and that’s not free. (And even though it would be in some sense “essentially random,” being a quantum phenomenon, it would still be bound by measurements and laws concerning probability and so, being bound to causal laws in this sense, would apparently be unfree.)

So there’s still a problem in the area of the one you are trying to get at.

  1. A “magic anti-physics shell” doesn’t seem to help. What does it do? Create new laws for things inside the shell? Then the will procedes according to laws, and so is apparently unfree. Does the shell, rather, insure that no laws apply (in some relevant sense) inside the shell? If it follows no laws, then apparently it is essentially random, and that’s not free.

So not only is there a problem in the area you’re trying to get at, your proposed solution (which you didn’t really think was a solution anyway) turns out not to work. It doesn’t work because there’s a fundamental problem with understanding how a free will can be possible. If it’s not amenable to explication through laws, then it’s random, and so not free. If it is amenable to explication through laws, then it’s governed and predictable, and so not free.

I used to take this to be the clincher against the Libertarian conception of free will. But now I’m not so sure. If it is the case that the human will is essentially unpredictable and not governed by laws, then yes, this makes it random in the troubling sense I’ve tried to indicate–but if we’re willing to identify ourselves with a complex of random events, then there you have it. In other words, if someone is willing to point at a complex of random events and say about them “That’s me, that’s where I spontaneously exerted my will” and is willing to own up to the inexplicability and irrationality of his own existence, then he can successfully affirm a Libertarian conception of free will.

On such a picture, absolute self-control on the one hand and on the other hand helplessness in the face of a meaningless cosmos turn out to be the same thing which is odd, but it’s so “zen” and I’m cool with that. :stuck_out_tongue:

Note that on this picture, the concept of God is not necessary to explain freedom.

-FrL-

5

Did I kill it? Is it dead?

-FrL-

6

More like respones to the OP being one pretty sided, so there’s no dialogue.

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Frankly, I don’t have time at the moment for another determinism debate, but I would like to make one observation apropos of the OP. If free will exists, and I believe in one form of it though not LFW, it requires no God to make it so. Indeed, I’m an atheist. Rather, it could just as easily (I think more easily) be explained by evolution. Thus, brains able to engage in the behavior we call free will were better adapted for success (given our rather meager strength and speed) than those which ran merely on instinct. IOW, volition is an aspect of intelligence. No soul required.

8

Link: Compatibilism

Short answer to title question: No.

Answer a question with a question answer: Who cares? What does free will get us (or, what do we want that requires free will)?

Somewhat longer answer: The standard response to the question is that the presence of free will determines whether or not our actions have meaning. Then we can answer the free will question by determining whether our actions have meaning. Let’s broaden the question a bit: is it possible for anything to have an explanation other than at the sub-atomic level? For example: why do the wings of a hummingbird have a different shape than those of a falcon? Because they have radically different strategies for feeding themselves, of course. The different wing shapes are “designed” to aid in these strategies.

This answer is reasonably independent of the initial arrangement of atoms in the universe, so clearly there are events in the universe which have particle-independent explanations. From here it seems reasonable to suggest that our actions also have associated meanings.

Book-length answer: Freedom Evolves by Dan Dennett.

9

I think that’s a false dichotomy. The whole point behind free will is that it is neither deterministic NOR randomly generated. That is, it presupposes that the consciousness can act (ahem) willfully; that is, of its own volition. It is not predetermined, but neither is it determined by some random roll of the metaphysical dice.

10

This is a logically incoherent paradigm. It has to be either random or caused.

11

I’d say it’s uncertain wether the thread is alive or dead.

12

I think the disjoint here is that the average ‘free will denier’ doesn’t see the drawing of a boundary around the particles mainly responsible for the decision-making as being a useful distinction in this discussion - if you have a wind-up toy, the fact that its impetus and decision-making processes* are internal and not external to it makes no real difference in the discussion of how they work.

Typically the person arguing for non-compatablist free will (in my admittedly limited experience) believes that some sort of poorly defined/understood spiritual entity is ‘doing the thinking’; and based on the poor definition/understanding claim that something different is going on in there that is ‘willful’ in a way that no wind-up toy can match. Myself I don’t find this convincing, because even if we decide to accept souls as existing for the sake of argument, poorly understood or not they have to work somehow. And that somehow either follows rules, in which case it’s not free, or otherwise it’s random and not free.

  • Its spring and its gears, that is.
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But what does that mean ? The idea simply doesn’t make any sense. It’s not so much a claim as it is a demand that there HAS to be third option besides determinism and randomness.

As Diogenes the Cynic says, it has to be one or the other.

14

I’d argue that you could have predeterminable free will, if you could have free will, which I don’t think you can.

False dichotomies are only a problem when they’re truly false. Deterministic versus random are the only two options. Either it is caused by something; or it is not caused by something.

I would also point out that the concept of a consciousness acting upon volition freely means it would not be affected by outside factors. IOW, our consciousnesses would never change, and they could not accept new inputs. The very concept of an unaffectable core of consciousness would mean that things would be determined from our very birth - they aren’t going to change.

15

JThunder’s right about the false dichotomy. An event y might be random, but it comes from a distribution, which in the simplest case has a mean and a standard deviation. It’s entirely possible that x might not cause y directly, but it might instead alter the distribution variables. I don’t see that we can neatly state that y was or was not caused by x, but neither is y completely undetermined.

16

That’s not news, and it doesn’t matter - the point is that there’s a certain amount of decision that’s entirely determined by rules, and all the rest of the decision-making process is entirely random - and there’s nothing else there. Part rigidly determined + part absolutely random = not free + not free = a not free will. Even if it’s not wholly one or the other.

It’s clearly obvious that humans aren’t entirely random. In fact, we look really deterministic - there’s piles of evidence that when we make decisions, what choice we eventually make is clearly influenced very strongly by the things we know, our moods, our personality - basically all the things we can call ‘internal state’. I don’t know whether we have random elements tweaking our decision-making process or not, but even if we do, adding randomity does not add libertarian free will. If anything it gives us less control over the choices we make.
And I am almost 100% certain that what you are describing is not what JThunder was talking about. He spoke of something being done “willfully, as in of its own volition”. According to the free online dictionary, ‘volition’ means:

  1. The act or an instance of making a conscious choice or decision.
  2. A conscious choice or decision.
  3. The power or faculty of choosing; the will.

Now the only thing distinguishing this from the way a tetris game selects the next piece to drop is the ‘conscious’ element - and consciousness is sort of irrelevent to the question of how decisions are made from a mechanical standpoint. Certainly the tetris game has “the power or faculty of choosing” - ergo, by definition 3, it has a will. But it’s not free - it’s not even random, since there is no randomity in computed calculations - it just fakes it really convincingly. Much more convincingly than we fake having libertarian free will, really.

17

But the problem with free will arguments aren’t that they deny cases where x may cause y, but that xn may cause y. In other words, not that one event doesn’t cause a choice directly, but that there are zero events which cause an event directly, either independently or together.

Were the argument that some events will rob us of our free will, whilst others may not impact us so much, then your point would be right. But the general arguments of free will, and as I believe JThunder is arguing here for, are about a free will that is omnipresent.

18

I guess it all boils down to what exactly it is that underpins physical reality at the most basic level - whether it’s all mechanical little blobs all the way down to the smallest one, or whether the most basic level consists of will itself - as some kind of non-simple, but non-divisible unit that has volition as one of its inherent, inseparable, inscrutable properties.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that it is such a way, but it seems like a lot of the argument against the notion of divine sparks etc, is the (not unreasonable) notion that the universe is purely mechanical and ultimately divisible into parts all the way down - by which I mean to say that it’s obvious that free will doesn’t exist in a universe that is understood not to have any niche in which it could exist.