Free Will: be glad you don't have it

Free Will is a fantasy we should be glad we don't have it. Um, I'm going to talk about the implications of radical Free Will and why we're much better off without it.

So, what is Free Will? Um, in this video, I'm talking specifically about a version of Free Will called radical free will. This is actually the traditional idea of Free Will, so the idea that given the same situation and the exact same mental state, an agent could have done otherwise, could have made a different decision.

I'm going to distinguish this from a different conception of Free Will, which is an idea of free will that is compatible with a deterministic universe. I'm going to call this one natural will instead to save confusion. Um, according to Natural will, we make real choices. Our choices are our own in a meaningful way, but our choices, like everything else, are caused.

So, it might seem like a contradiction to say that choice exists but only one outcome—but there's only one outcome that we have the power to choose. But it's not really a contradiction, and to see that you only have to consider a computer program. Um, for instance, the chess computer. The chess computer decides which move to take; it chooses a move, but it's never free to do otherwise. For any given situation, it will make the same move.

Usually, when someone asks us why we did something, we can give a reason. Fred might say, "I made a sandwich because I was hungry." Fred's desire to eat a peanut butter sandwich caused him to make the sandwich. His desire for a sandwich was caused by his hunger and his love for peanut butter. His hunger was caused by the sensation of an empty stomach, and the love of peanut butter was caused by memories of the sensation of the taste of peanut butter.

We can keep following these causal chains; they keep on going. His desire to make a sandwich outweighed any other desire he might have had at that moment that was within his power to satisfy. If making a sandwich had not been the greatest desire he had at that moment, he wouldn't have decided to do it. In fact, he couldn't have decided to do it.

So, according to radical free will, or more commonly free will, we make decisions that are entirely independent to and unconstrained by prior causes. Decisions, according to this view, are not part of the causal chains that govern the rest of the world. Your desires, which come from your experiences—in short, everything that makes up your personality and makes it sensible to talk about you—these things have no effect on your decisions according to free will. Even if Fred wanted to make a peanut butter sandwich more than anything in the world, and he saw no reason not to make one, the chance that he would decide to make the sandwich was no more likely than any other decision his free will might have chosen at that point.

So, you might be casting around trying to think of some real-life examples which seem to demonstrate people exercising their free will to overcome their desires. You might have turned down the offer of a cigarette after you quit smoking. The important thing to notice, though, is that even though you really wanted a cigarette, you wanted something else even more. Your desire to maintain a healthy lifestyle beat your desire to have a cigarette.

Or perhaps you're thinking about the peanut butter sandwich situation, trying to imagine really wanting a peanut butter sandwich but not doing anything about it, or doing something completely unrelated to sandwiches. Perhaps you can imagine a situation like that. Um, maybe you decided that laying on the sofa was so comfortable that you didn't want to leave. Or you wanted to demonstrate that you don't follow your desires, but since that's a desire in itself, it would be self-defeating.

Of course, the point is, the only time you'll decide against making the sandwich is when an even stronger desire has beaten that one. Free will would mean that we couldn't account for our decisions because decisions completely divorced from causality, uncaused decisions, would leave us with no idea why we chose any particular course of action. In fact, it would be meaningless to talk about why someone did something.

If Free Will was true and we asked Fred why he had made a sandwich, apart from that being an illegitimate question, he wouldn't be able to answer it. Uh, the best he might be able to do would be, "My Free Will made me do it." Of course, he might have been hungry at the same time, but in that case, it would have been just a coincidence that his Free Will had made him make the sandwich. It could have just as likely made him stand on his head while his stomach grumbled.

So, Fred would actually be a puppet to a will unrecognizable as his own if Free Will was true. Free Will seeks to establish absolute agency but achieves the exact opposite. As a balance to the mistaken intuition that we could have done otherwise, there are already examples in our lives which seem to indicate that we already believe Free Will isn't true.

For instance, we try to persuade others of our point of view. But if the person we're talking to was possessed of a free will, there'd be no point. His decisions in the future will be completely insulated from memory of any discussion you might have had with him, no matter how persuasively you'd argued. His free will will be generating decisions out of nothing entirely independently of his memory and experience.

So, natural will—the kind of limited Free Will allowed by self-determinism—allows us to exert an influence on our world and to act according to our own reasons and based on our own desires. It's the only framework in which we can meaningfully think about ownership of our actions.

Of course, our desires, and that's our will, according to this view, are caused and we can never do otherwise. But if we have control and can make meaningful decisions, why would we want to do otherwise? Radical free will, on the other hand, means the ability to make decisions that go against our desires for no reason. Why do some people want that so badly? To use Daniel Dennett's phrase, this is clearly a kind of free will not worth wanting.