Freedom

An Impossible Reality

Raymond Tallis

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788213806
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Free Will & Determinism in Philosophy

The question of free will has preoccupied philosophers for millennia. In recent years the debate has been reinvigorated by the findings of neuroscience and, for some, the notion that we have free will has finally been laid to rest. Not so, says Raymond Tallis. In his quest to reconcile our practical belief in our own agency with our theoretical doubts, Tallis advances powerful arguments for the reality of freedom.

Tallis challenges the idea that we are imprisoned by laws of nature that wire us into a causally closed world. He shows that our capacity to discover and exploit these laws is central to understanding the nature of voluntary action and to reconciling free will with our status as material beings.

Bringing his familiar verve and insight to this deep and most intriguing philosophical question, one that impacts most directly on our lives and touches on nearly every other philosophical problem – of consciousness, of time, of the nature of the natural world, and of our unique place in the cosmos – Tallis takes us to the heart of what we are. By understanding our freedom he reveals our extraordinary nature more clearly.

CHAPTER 1

The impossibility of free will

“If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of those things (including our present acts) are not up to us”

Peter van Inwagen¹

1.1ARGUMENTS AGAINST FREE WILL: LAWS AND CAUSES

Before we look at the case against free will, it is a good idea to settle on a definition of what is being attacked and, indeed, what is being defended in this book. The definition by Robert Kane in his excellent The Significance of Free Will captures what matters: “the power of agents to be the ultimate creators (or originators) and sustainers of their own ends and purposes”.²

Perhaps “ultimate creators (or originators)” is to make a claim that is difficult to sustain. So let us drop “ultimate” and unpack what is important in a less ambitious idea of free will. It implies:

1.That we can truly say of at least some of our behaviour that “I am responsible for this”.

2.That our actions have deflected the course of events: we make a difference and that difference is not merely an inflection by our bodies of the predetermined course of events passing through us.

3.That our actions express something within us that we can truly own and justifiably own up to.

4.That as agents we have explicit ends and purposes that truly belong to us.

5.And that what we have done is one of several possibilities genuinely open to us such that we could have done or chosen otherwise.³

Since I do not claim that we exercise our freedom by breaking or entirely bypassing the so-called laws of nature, my position is compatibilist: I will argue that determinism in the natural world is compatible with human freedom.

My position is a modest one, in that I do not believe that everything that human agents do is driven by something called the will. Nor does the claim that we are the originators of our actions imply that, unassisted, we magic ourselves and our actions into being. As we shall discuss in Chapter 6 and elsewhere, asserting that we have freedom of the will does not require us to believe that (1) everything an agent does is free; (2) agents are the sole source of what they are capable of doing; (3) every part of a free action is explicitly done and freely executed; or (4) that an agent is free to do anything.

Even freedom limited in this way seems to some philosophers incompatible with our actions being (among other things) bodily movements: they are material events arising out of a material body interacting with a material world. The material element may be a minute part of an action – as in the case of a wink that may be hugely consequential. Nevertheless, it is indispensable: an individual totally paralysed with curare could not express agency.

However strongly we feel that we are the origin of our actions, that we are a place where the buck starts, an objective view seems to tell us otherwise. Or so the argument goes. As Thomas Nagel expresses it: “Something peculiar happens when we view action from an objective or external standpoint. Some of its most important features seem to vanish under the objective gaze. Actions seem no longer amenable to individual agents as sources, but become instead components of the flux of events in the world of which the agent is a part”.⁴

That flux of events is, so we are told, shaped by causes and laws.

Causes

Let us focus first on causes. According to the widely accepted principle of causal closure, every physical event – which must include what we classify as our own actions insofar as they have, and are intended to have, physical effects – has a sufficient immediate physical cause. Since the cause is sufficient, it does not require any distinct assistance from a human agent. And since the cause is immediate, there is no space for the agent to intervene.

This principle of causal closure therefore seems to undermine the claim that our actions originate with us. Everything that has a physical effect must itself always have prior causes which in turn have prior causes and so on – until we reach events which took place before we appeared on the scene. The future we imagine we are shaping is therefore itself shaped by the past that shaped us. No being, not even a human being, has a privileged, even a separate, role in determining its own future. Consequently, we only seem to perform our actions; in reality, we are merely the site of them. We are not the source of any of the events that take place in our lives but, being causally wired into the material world, we are conduits through which events pass, like an Aeolian harp played by the wind.

This dismal claim seems unassailable when we stand back from individual moments in our lives and look at our entire life history and recall that we had no role in assembling ourselves in utero. The development of the foetus involves as little agency as the growth of a tree or even the precipitation of a crystal out of a solution. We begin, it seems, as a given we have not chosen. Why should we not continue in this way? After all, our passage to a sufficient maturity where we seem to have agency is in crucial respects preprogrammed. In addition, development is dependent on many other internal and external circumstances we do not and cannot choose. My acquisition of the capacity to make moral choices for which I am responsible seems to be the ultimate expression of moral luck. I cannot, it seems, freely choose to be the kind of being that is capable of free choice.

Thus summarized, the case against freedom starts to look merely platitudinous. We have to be something we have not chosen to be in order to exercise freedom – on behalf of that something: free will is always someone’s free will and that someone cannot choose her coming into being. How can this unchosen creature we are given to be grow into something that is sufficiently self-chosen to exercise free choice? Can we freely build on what is given to acquire an increasing margin of freedom? If the answer is “No”, is there any respect in which we can take credit (or be justly blamed) for what we are and what we do? The answer again seems to be “No”.

So much for causes: whatever we do has a causal ancestry that precedes our actions, and indeed our very existence. We cannot, it seems, shake off the past in order to be the ultimate source of our actions. There is no way that we can intervene between causes and their effects, to make this event happen and stop that other event from happening.

Laws

As we shall discuss in Chapter 3, the status, and hence the power, of causes is contested. But would-be agents seem to be subject to double jeopardy. If causes don’t imprison us, the laws of nature that govern the way the universe unfolds will. Actions and agents are products of the laws of nature that must, by definition, be unbreakable. If causal ancestry makes the agent the prisoner of her past, law-governed nature predestines her future. The agent’s destination is preordained and apparent choice is rather like that offered by Henry Ford to his customers: “You can have any colour you like so long as it is black”.

What is more, it seems that we rely on those laws to be, or to dictate, exceptionless⁵ regularities if we are to be able to act and our actions are going to bring about their desired effects. Any loosening of the law-governed connectedness of the material world, and of our interactions with it, would be incompatible with our achieving our ends or indeed with our continuing survival. Walking to the shops, throwing a ball, talking to someone and being heard, all require the material world to be impeccably law-abiding. The years of training that go into the making of world-beating snooker players would be pointless if they could not rely on the conservation of linear momentum.

If the laws of nature were suspended for our convenience, we would be chaotic pockets in the order of the universe. Worse still, given that there is no limit to the consequences of any event (though they will eventually be lost in the noise of other events), the law-breaking behaviour of an indefinite number of agents would result in an incoherent universe. And our dependency on the reliability of the laws of nature is even more intimate. While the biological mechanisms instantiated in our bodies are not sufficient to account for agency, they are necessary for it, as becomes all too obvious when they fail.

It appears, therefore, that agency requires precisely what seems to frustrate it: a deterministic universe, regulated by laws and glued together by causation. In short, so it would appear, it depends on having our cake and eating it: relying on the stable order of things while rejecting the implacability of that stable order.⁶

Thus, the traditional case for determinism, according to which only one course of events is possible and we have no independent role in bringing it about. This is clearly incompatible with free will.

1.2NEURODETERMINISM

Philosophers, scientists, and, increasingly, the general public subscribe to the belief that human persons and their conscious experiences are identical with their brains or what is going on in parts of that organ.

This view, as I have argued extensively elsewhere, is ill-founded.⁷ Even so, the temptation to investigate the metaphysical question of our freedom using brain science has proved overwhelming. The laboratory, after all, seems to some to be a more respectable (and better funded) place for inquiry into the nature of things than the philosopher’s study. Consequently, the traditional arguments against free will have been supplemented by arguments originating from neuroscience-besotted philosophy. Given that brains are material objects, subject to the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, and that we are our brains, we must be likewise subject to those laws. The prison of the universe is personalized in the prison of the brain.

In truth, neuroscience has little to contribute to the argument against free will and I was half-minded to assign this section to an appendix. There are, however, several reasons for giving neurodeterminism a place in the main text. First, it is widely believed that it has reinforced the traditional determinist views we have just discussed.⁸ Secondly, the deficiencies of the experiments designed to demonstrate that we have no free will perform the inadvertent service of reminding us of the nature of real actions, an essential preliminary to understanding freedom. In addition, I have a personal reason. As one who spent most of his career in clinical neuroscience, I dislike seeing one of humanity’s greatest intellectual monuments sullied by being associated with bad philosophy. Nevertheless, readers who are already persuaded of the vacuity of the claims that neuroscience has shown us that our brains are calling the shots may skip this section.

The experiments

A typical neuroscience experiment, supposedly demonstrating that we are not free, requires subjects to perform some very simple action, such as moving a hand or pressing a button at a time of their choosing. The action is voluntary because it is not in response to an external stimulus, subjects act without pre-planning, and the required movement is not at a predetermined moment. Brain activity is monitored either using electroencephalography (EEG) or functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) and the experimenters record the activity that has been associated with the brain being prepared to make a move. The subjects are also required to note the time when they feel the urge or intention to make the movement required of them.

In the famous experiments of Benjamin Libet,⁹ subjects were requested to move the fingers of one hand when they wished to do so. In order to assign a time to the urge to move, they were also required to note the position of a moving spot on a screen when they were aware of the urge to move. Experimenters also recorded certain EEG activity in the brain – the so-called Readiness Potential – which was considered to mark the brain’s preparedness to make a move.

In the much later experiments of John-Dylan Haynes¹⁰ and his team, brain activity was recorded with a more sophisticated technology: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this case, the subjects not only had discretion over the when of the movement (as they did in Libet’s experiments) but also the what: they could freely choose between pressing one button with the right hand or a different button with the left hand. They timed their decision as to the button to press by noting which of a succession of letters on a screen was visible when they made their decision.

What has caused considerable interest among neuroscientists and some philoso...