This is a version of a posting made to objectivism@vix.com in December, 1995.
Freewill and determinism are both true. The traditional Objectivist position that determinism is false has made it impossible to explain how consciousness and freewill can emerge from the operation of (supposedly) deterministic neurons (1). Two major errors have led to this conflict:
Objectivism defines freewill as the choice to focus, or more accurately, the choice to increase one's focus. This choice is said to be "not an effect produced by antecedent factors". This does not stand up to scrutiny: All human choices are mental processes. They involve the conscious and subconscious evaluation of decision criteria. On what basis would we choose to focus, if not on an assessment of factors ? To argue that this most fundamental choice we can make is not subject to antecedent factors, but simply volitional, is begging the question. What evidence is there that this choice is different from others ? It is not sufficient to state that it is invalid to ask the question of how we choose.
I believe that the "choice to focus" is too narrow a concept to describe freewill: The choice to increase focus has to be made at a time when our focus is low. If it is made subconsciously then it is not under our control, else it is made under a state of limited awareness. Can our morality and survival be defined by this tenuous condition ? I don't think so. In any case, animals clearly also adjust their focus of attention without us attributing freewill to them. It is arbitrary to claim that we do it "volitionally" and animals don't. The choice to think is clearly something that becomes a habit, encouraged initially by upbringing and influenced later by our thoughts. Lastly, freewill must ultimately also account for our higher level choices, such as what to eat, which morality to adopt, and the purpose of our life. Just imagine that we could not adjust our focus but were automatically in a given state of focus. Surely, we would still be able to make other choices freely by virtue of the nature of our thinking. While control of our focus is an important aspect of freewill, it is insufficient to define it. These problems disappear once we understand the true nature of freewill.
Freewill is the mind's ability to choose with intelligence (2).
What kind of freedom is there in our free choice ? Our choices cannot and obviously should not be totally free from (or fail to take into account) our knowledge, values and perceptions of our environment and ourselves. Our choices are not free from past thoughts and decisions or from external influences. Our choices can also not transcend the laws of nature, ie. do the impossible. The freedom we find in freewill is not the elimination of influencing factors as such, but the expansion of our choice by our unique ability to deal with abstract concepts (language), by our self-awareness, our imagination, our ability to seek out knowledge and project the future and, most importantly, by our awareness of and monitoring of our own thinking. This is the source of our freedom; this is what makes us self-determined. This is the crux of the proper understanding of freewill: Not free from influences, but free to make intelligent choices.
How does freewill differ from "normal" choice, the kind a machine or an animal may make ? The advance of human choice over that of (current) machines and animals lies in our ability to think abstractly and in our awareness of ourselves and our own thinking. This creates the freedom of choice that freewill represents. We understand. Machines and animals have knowledge, but they have little or no understanding. I use the term knowledge in a limited sense: Facts of reality as may be contained in an encyclopedia or a computer program, or an animal's knowledge of nutritious food. We, too, sometimes have knowledge without understanding. Our schools often encourage rote learning of such facts as the dates of Napoleonic wars or the Latin name for a frog's tonsils. Understanding, in contrast, implies the integration of knowledge with other existing knowledge and its relationship to ourselves and to our primary means of knowledge, our senses. Until we relate knowledge to our own existence and our perceptual knowledge of reality, it is not understood. All knowledge, including abstract concepts, has to be integrated with and related to fundamental experience. A thermostat has knowledge of a temperature change, but not understanding. A flower has knowledge of the rising sun, but no understanding. An animal has the knowledge to feed itself, but only understanding food's significance allows us to farm or select a healthy diet.
There are degrees of freewill similar to degrees of intelligence or compassion. There are also degrees of understanding. Animals have varying degrees of understanding, limited by their inability to think abstractly and their limited awareness of themselves and their thought processes (3). True understanding requires a grasp of the concept of "consciousness" (though not necessarily knowledge of the word) and of the "I" which is experiencing and thinking. The freedom of choice that we enjoy is in a different class than that available to animals; that is why we correctly give it the title "freewill". There is no absolute cut-off point between "normal" choice and freewill; children's freewill develops and surpasses that of chimps at an early age. We recognize this fact of developing freewill in the way we treat babies as compared to how we treat children or adults. All conscious humans have the capacity for freewill, but the scope of actual utilization is variable. We determine the degree of freewill ourselves, we are self-determined. We may do this by implicit, subconscious default or by explicit, conscious decision.
To summarize, freewill is not choice free from the "wiring" of our brains (genes and chemical factors), our life's experiences (environmental influences) or prior thoughts and decisions. Freewill is the extra freedom to create and evaluate options by understanding their implications. The scope of freewill depends on the actual utilization of this unique cognitive ability.
All mental processes are the functioning of a living brain. These processes include the choices to focus or not, how long and hard to think about an issue, between Coke and orange juice, to make love or to make war. The brain is made up entirely of molecules and atoms that obey mechanistic causation. If freewill is the functioning of a deterministic machine, how can it have the property of freedom? Let me present two perspectives that help resolve this apparent paradox.
Emergent properties - There are many examples of new properties emerging from the combination of individual elements that do not posses them individually. Specific combinations, arrangements or interactions of components can give rise to totally new attributes. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Diamond's (or charcoal's) properties emanate from carbon atoms that don't possess them. A drum made entirely from flat planks acquires the ability to roll. An essay's words and meaning arise from individual ink dots that surely do not contain them. Life emerges from the glorious combination of molecules.
Incommensurable types of freedom - The lack of freedom in determinism refers to the fact that atoms in whatever combination, can act only in accordance with the laws of physics - they have no choice. The freedom referred to in freewill is the mind's ability to make choices not determined solely by external or genetically fixed factors; the mind is self-programming - it modifies its own processes. Freewill does not need to deny the laws of physics; its freedom operates at a different level and is of a different type - the freedom of thought processes to monitor and modify themselves is compatible with deterministic laws. This difference in types is somewhat analogous to trying to compare the laws of grammar in a novel to the laws of physics governing the behavior of ink molecules - and bemoaning their incompatibility. The conviction that there must be a conflict between what the atoms in our brains "decide" (how they have to act) and what our freewill decides, is very difficult to shake off. The truth is that there is no conflict; it is simply looking at causation from two very different levels of complexity.
Another look at the hierarchy of choice from a more mechanistic perspective may help to explain why freewill is a product of man's unique cognitive abilities. The simplest life forms have simple sensory inputs that trigger fixed reflex actions, their action "chosen" similar to that of a thermostat acting in response to a sensed temperature change. Higher levels of development utilize feedback to achieve conditioned reflexes. Integration of different circuits forms complex decision systems. A more sophisticated version of this development uses pattern-recognition that also serves as the basis of concept formation. Deterministic systems at this level of complexity are routinely designed today and are well understood. The next major step adds emotional responses by means of a generalized pain-pleasure control mechanism which serves as a guide to both physical as well as mental health. Rudimentary self-awareness is limited to awareness of the body as a concrete-bound concept. While higher animals that represent this stage of sophistication make extremely complex choices, these choices do not qualify as freewill; the important ability to handle concepts abstractly is missing.
Conceptual thinking, the ability to deal with mental symbols representing concepts, opens the Pandora's box of human possibilities: Language ability, self-awareness of thought, imagination and the ability to project the future. Conceptual thinking enables true understanding, integrating facts of reality and relating them to both our sense-perception and to our self-image, giving meaning to facts and observations. At higher levels of abstraction we can form crucial concepts such as life, purpose, value, morality, community, and justice. Freewill is the freedom of choice arising from the awareness of our own thinking and the understanding of knowledge. This allows us (our mind) to make sense of our thoughts (its own processes), to project consequences and crucially influence decisions. An important aspect of freewill is that its scope is determined by its own action. We can decide to be more aware of our thoughts, to project better, to be more mentally alert - in short, to think better, to exercise more freewill. We can also decide to diminish our humanness by partially abdicating our freewill to influences not under our control.
All of the foregoing relies on my assertion that understanding and conceptual thinking is possible in a deterministic system. We have already looked at the difference between knowledge and understanding. A machine can certainly obtain knowledge (facts of reality), it can for example determine the color, shape and temperature of objects and their relationship to each other. This knowledge can be acquired, stored and utilized by the machine, but how can the machine validate that the knowledge is true ? What determines objective truth ? Perceptions (sense data) must be directly determined by reality (the senses must be valid) and these perceptions must be integrated in a non-contradictory system of knowledge. A machine can identify contradictions and eliminate them by re-analyzing prior conclusions in the light of new expanded knowledge. An iterative process of zeroing in on truth. We do that. The claim that deterministic systems cannot compute true knowledge is simply false. Some systems may be better than others at arriving at the truth - but, then, so was Ayn Rand better at it than most of us.
Higher levels of knowledge require the use of abstract concepts, ie. conceptual thinking. Whether we look at concepts as being formed by "measurement omission" or by the more general notion of pattern recognition, there is no reason to believe that concept formation cannot be achieved by a deterministic system (4). Conceptual thinking does not require freewill, freewill requires it. The next level of cognitive sophistication is conceptual self-awareness and understanding. These arise from the formation of a concept of the "self" and relating knowledge to it. Knowledge becomes meaningful. We can make sense of our thinking, project the future and foresee consequences of our actions. Now, there is freewill.
A deterministic mind can test and validate its conclusions provided it is has the ability to perform logic, form concepts and has valid senses. In short, it can reason. None of these requirements are incompatible with mechanistic determinism.
Quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle do not contradict determinism, but extend our understanding (and define its limits) at the atomic and sub-atomic level. This is similar to Einstein's Relativity modifying and extending Newtonian Physics near its limit, the speed of light. In any case, any quantum effects impinging on our mental processes would hardly be responsible for freewill, only for randomness !
Many objections to determinism are not against determinism per se, but are based on the supposed contradiction with freewill. They take freewill as a given, assume a contradiction and conclude that determinism must "break down" when it comes to freewill. With the contradiction exposed these objections fall away.
Empirical evidence against freewill: We are determined by our blond hair, our ghettos, private schools, broken homes, satanic rock-music, Bibles, Camel advertisements, sex symbols, The American Dream, Hershey Bars, adolescence, falling in love and the roll of a dice. We are determined by our genes, environment, education, parents, art, literature, the media, instincts, drives, addictions, hormones, feelings and by chance. All true. In fact, we could not function as animals, let alone humans, without these determinants. Freewill does not deny them but acknowledges and controls them. They are not sufficient to uniquely determine us; the nature of freewill, awareness of thought and consequences, can override their influence. Freewill can play the trump card. Freewill is not omnipotent; it has its limits, but these very limits can be expanded by the use of our will.
Many of the above mentioned factors interact in complex ways. For example, brain structure and chemistry, being one aspect of the operation of the brain (the mind), is modified by our thoughts. Our thoughts, in turn, are influenced by neural connections and chemistry. There is a intrinsic and perpetual interaction between these two aspects of brain / mind. Let me offer a crude computer analogy of this interaction: Imagine a computer that, depending on the outcome of certain calculations, chooses to transfer certain data into its memory banks (a "state of mind"). If this data is now involved in the next sequence of calculations and choices ("thinking"), then we have a similar interaction between data and computation as that between physical brain state and thought. Thoughts (calculations) and physical structure (data, in this limited analogy) influence each other. There are also complex interactions between environment and thoughts; our thoughts help to select our environment and our environment affects our thoughts and choices.
"If determinism is true then freewill is just an illusion". This fallacy rests on the invalid use of the concept "illusion". What is an illusion ? It is the invalid belief in something based on a fabrication or distortion of reality. It implies the possibility of the opposite, objective reality. An optical illusion implies a true view of reality. Beyond the spell of an illusion, reality exists. The "illusion of freewill" implies that we are fooled into believing that we have freewill, when in reality our will is not free. This supposes that it would in principle be possible to have will free from all imaginable factors. This, of course, is not possible. Freewill choice is an action and has to have an "actor", it can be free only from specific causes, not from all causes.
Another aspect of this fallacy is the view that freewill is an illusion because in a deterministic universe the future is "inevitable". This subsumes both an incorrect view of freewill (as above) and inappropriate use of the concept "inevitable". This "inevitability" is often stated in the form "could not have decided otherwise". The word "could" hides the implicit question of "under what circumstances ?". In totally identical circumstances we would indeed make the same choices, but that is irrelevant: Identical circumstances do not occur. What use would freewill be if it simply allowed us to arbitrarily or randomly come to different conclusion under identical circumstances - for no reason ? From an objective perspective our decisions and actions do shape the future; in that context the future is certainly not "inevitable".
What are the implications of this understanding of freewill to Objectivists ? Irrespective of potential implications to ethics, politics, etc., our first "duty" has to be to the truth. It will not do to rationalize comfortable views to avoid uncharted territory.
Any improvement in our knowledge must lead to an improved ability to pursue values. Understanding the nature of freewill, and in particular the concept of degrees of freewill, can greatly assist us in gaining more control over our lives. I think it is reasonable to say that the scope of our freewill is a measure of our humanness.
This reconciliation and understanding of freewill and determinism also opens the way to Artificial Intelligence systems with freewill - machines with self-awareness, conceptual thought and understanding. It is beyond the scope of this essay to investigate further implications to law, education and psychology - undoubtedly they are not insignificant. This theory of freewill appears to be consistent with evolution, animal cognition studies, child developmental models and computer models of mind - it should be instructive to pursue these perspectives.
1.) By determinism I refer to mechanistic determinism. I do not discuss genetic and social determinism separately, as they are limited subsets of general mechanistic determinism.
2.) "Mind" refers to the totality of our conscious and subconscious mental processes including use of our knowledge and experience - the operation of the living brain.
3.) It seems that chimpanzees are the only animals that are able to identify themselves in a mirror.
4.) Ayn Rand's theory of "measurement omission" refers to the method by which we select the concretes to which a concept refers (see An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology). It would seem to me that "pattern recognition", as studied in neural networks, may prove to be a more flexible and comprehensive explanation. Pattern recognition will more easily cater for complex weighted selection criteria such as for example the dimensions, relative size, context and function of a table versus those of a chair.