Determinism and Accountability

By Keith Tidman

People assume that free will and moral responsibility are mutually and inextricably interwoven. That is, the default belief tends to be that people make decisions and act on them freely. On the grounds of that conviction, society condemns and punishes, or lauds and rewards, people on the basis of their actions’ supposed morality. It’s how accountability for behaviour intersects with matters like retributive and distributive justice. 

 

But what if decisions and actions are already decided – predetermined? Such that if an event has transpired, it is impossible it could not have happened. Might society still need to parse people’s deeds on the basis of some arbitrary construct — a community’s self-prescribed code of right and wrong — in order for society to function in an orderly fashion?

 

With the objective, then, of preserving social orderliness, all the while holding people responsible, doesn’t society have no option but to submit to at least the pretense of free will? Where even that pretense is itself predetermined. That is, to make-believe — for the sake of convenience, pragmatic expediency, and the evasion of disorder — that people enjoy unfettered decisions, choices, and deeds.

 

Okay, so far I’ve summarised what free will means by way of libertarian agency in choosing and behaving in particular ways, with the presumption, however faulty, that people could have acted otherwise. But what about its counterpoint, determinism: especially what in academic circles is often referred to as ‘hard determinism’, where determinism and freedom unreservedly conflict (called incompatibilism)?

 

According to determinism, for example, acting benevolently rather than selfishly (or the reverse) may be no more the exercise of unconstrained free agency than naturally having brunette hair or 20/20 vision. We may not really be ‘free’ to decide which job candidate to hire, which book to read, which model car to buy, which investment to make, which country to visit — or which political candidate to vote for.

 

Rather, the argument states that all decisions and deeds are predicated on the laws of nature, which inform, describe, and animate the stuff of our universe. The proposition is that people’s choices and actions are shaped (are predetermined) by all that has happened over the course of the cosmos’s entire lifespan. The basis is an unremitting regress of successive causes and outcomes recursively branching and branching in incalculable directions, nonstop. A causal determinism, sourced all the way back to the beginning of the universe.

 

That is, decisions and deeds inescapably result from a timeless accretion of precedents. The tumbling buildup, over far-ranging generations, of influences: like culture, genetic makeup, experiences, parenting, evolution, intelligence, identity, emotions, disposition, surroundings. As well as, every bit crucially, what naturally occurred throughout the entirety of history and prehistory.

 

Such factors, among others, have powerful, compelling influences, canceling out moral agency — our ability to make choices based on our sense of right and wrong. After all, in the deterministic model, the events that occurred as antecedents of current and future events did so necessarily. Indeed, we might imagine that if fissures were ever to show up in determinism’s cause-and-effect procession of happenings, the laws of nature and of human behaviour would pitch toward systemic failure — the undoing of events’ inevitability. We thus justify judging and punishing people who behave antisocially, on grounds induced by predetermination, where there is only one possible course of events.

 

If, however, because of the absence of free agency and volitional intent, people cannot be regarded as morally accountable, ought they be held responsible anyway, subject to legal or other kinds of sanction? To go through the motions — despite determinism dangling menacingly over systems of criminal justice everywhere. And similarly, ought people be lauded and rewarded for things deemed to have been done right? With implications for assigned guilt, sin, and evil, and other verdicts pertinent to actions freely chosen.

 

One answer to the two preceding questions about responsibility has been ‘yes’, on the basis of a belief system referred to as compatibilism. This asserts that free will and determinism can compatibly coexist. But this is a challenging — arguably impossible — needle to thread, short of arbitrarily warping definitions, assumptions, and preconceived conditions.

 

My position goes in a different, even simpler, direction from compatibilism. It is that accountability is necessitated by society having to prescribe ethical norms, no matter how contrived — and attempt to force human behaviour to fit those engineered norms — in order to avoid society alternatively sinking into chaos. In this manner, society learns, perhaps kicking and screaming, to cope with a deterministic world — a world where people cannot act otherwise than they do, and events are inevitable.

 

It’s difficult for us to shake intuitively favouring free will, despite its illusory nature. People feel as if in control; they zealously covet being in control; they recoil unsettlingly at the prospect of not being in control. Fundamentally, they sense that personal agency and volitional intent define humanity. They can’t easily discard the pretense that only freely willed actions meet the criterion of warranting tribute, on the one hand, or fault, on the other. 

 

But even if they’re not in control, and determinism routed free will from the start, society must behave otherwise: it must hold people responsible, both to deter and punish — censure — and to reward — validate — decisions and actions as if free choice had indeed sparked them. 

 

Free Will, the ‘Block Universe’, and Eternalism

In this image, the light trail left by traffic illustrates an idea central to the growing block universe theory of time, that the past, present, and future coexist.  

By Keith Tidman

The block universe is already filled with every event that ever happens. It is where what are traditionally dubbed the past, present, and future exist simultaneously, not as classically flowing linearly from one to the other. As such, these three distinct aspects to time, which by definition exclude the notion of tense, are equally real. None is in any way advantaged over the others.

The orthodox model of a ‘block universe’ describes a four-dimensional universe, resembling a cube, which merges the three dimensions of space and one of time, along the lines that Albert Einstein theorised in his special relativity.

Might this tell us something about the possibility of free will in such a universe? Before we try to answer, let’s explore more particulars about the block universe itself.

 

If observed from outside, the block would appear to hold all of space and time. The spacetime coordinates of someone’s birth and death — and every occurrence bracketed in between — accordingly exist concurrently somewhere within the block. The occurrences are inalterably and forever in the block. This portrayal of foreverness is sometimes referred to as ‘eternalism’, defined as a complete history of all possible events.

 

Conventionally, the block is considered static. But maybe it’s not. What if, for example, what we ordinarily call ‘time’ is better called change? After all, the second law of thermodynamics tells us that the state of entropy of the entire universe — meaning the presence of disorder — will always result in a net increase. It never decreases. Until, that is, the universe ultimately ends. Demonstrating how change, as in the case of entropy, moves inexorably in one direction. The inevitability of such change has a special place for humankind, as reality transforms.

 

Entropy is thus consummate change, on a cosmic scale, which is how the illusion of something we call ‘the arrow of time’ manifests itself in our conscious minds. As such, change, not time, is what is truly fundamental in nature. Change defines our world. Which, in turn, means that what the block universe comprises is necessarily dynamical and fluid, rather than frozen and still. By extension, the block universe challenges the concept of eternalism.

 

This also means that cause and effect exist (as do correlation and effect) as fundamental features of a universe in which ‘becoming’, in the form of change, is rooted. Despite past, present, and future coexisting within the block universe, causes still necessarily precede and can never follow the effects of what appears as relentless change. Such change serves, in place of illusory time, as one axis matched up with three-dimensional space. The traditional picture of the block universe comprising nondynamical events would contradict the role of cause in making things happen.

 

So, let’s return to the issue of free will within the block universe.

 

First off, the block universe has typically been described as deterministic. That is, if every event within the universe happens simultaneously according to the precise space and time coordinates the model calls for, then everything has been inescapably preordained, or predetermined. It all just is. Free will in such a situation becomes every bit as much an illusion as time.

 

But there’s a caveat pushing back against that last point. In the absence of freewill, humans would resemble automatons. We would be contraption-like assemblages of parts that move but lack agency, and would be devoid of meaningful identity and true humanity. We, and events, could be seen as two-dimensional set pieces on a stage, deterministically scripted. With no stage direction or audience — and worse, no meaning. Some might proclaim that our sense of autonomy is yet another illusion, along with time. But I believe, given our species’ active role within this dynamical cosmos, that reality is otherwise.

 

Further, determinism would take us off the hook of accountability and consequences. Fate, bubbling up from the capriciousness of nature’s supposed mechanistic forces, would situate us in a world stripped of responsibility. A world in which our lives are pointlessly set to automatic. Where the distinction between good and evil becomes fuzzy. In this world, ethical norms are arbitrary and fickle — a mere stage prop, giving the appearance of consequences to actions.

 

And yet, the blueprint above replacing the concept of time with that of change puts free will back into play, allowing a universe in which our conscious minds freely make decisions and behave accordingly. Or, at least, seemingly so. In particular, for there to be events at the space-change coordinates of the block universe, there must be something capable of driving (causing) change. The events aren’t simply fated. That ‘something’ can only be choice associated with truly libertarian free will.

 

There’s one other aspect to free will that should be mentioned. Given that motion within the three-dimensional space of the block universe can occur, not only the what but also the where of events can be changed. Again, agency is required to freely choose. It’s like shuffling cards: the cards remain the same, but their ‘coordinates’ (location) change.

 

In refutation of determinism, the nature of change as described above allows that what decisions we make and actions we take within the block universe are expressions of libertarian free will. Our choices become new threads woven through the block universe’s fabric — threads that prove dissoluble, however, through the ceaselessness of change.

 

Chaos Theory: And Why It Matters

Posted by Keith Tidman

Computer-generated image demonstrating that the behaviour of dynamical systems is highly sensitive to initial conditions

Future events in a complex, dynamical, nonlinear system are determined by their initial conditions. In such cases, the dependence of events on initial conditions is highly sensitive. That exquisite sensitivity is capable of resulting in dramatically large differences in future outcomes and behaviours, depending on the actual initial conditions and their trajectory over time — how follow-on events nonlinearly cascade and unpredictably branch out along potentially myriad paths. The idea is at the heart of so-called ‘Chaos Theory’.

The effect may show up in a wide range of disciplines, including the natural, environmental, social, medical, and computer sciences (including artificial intelligence), mathematics and modeling, engineering — and philosophy — among others. The implication of sensitivity to initial conditions is that eventual, longer-term outcomes or events are largely unpredictable; however, that is not to say they are random — there’s an important difference. Chaos is not randomness; nor is it disorder*. There is no contradiction or inconsistency between chaos and determinism. Rather, there remains a cause-and-effect — that is, deterministic — relationship between those initial conditions and later events, even after the widening passage of time during which large nonlinear instabilities and disturbances expand exponentially. Effect becomes cause, cause becomes effect, which becomes cause . . . ad infinitum. As Chrysippus, a third-century BC Stoic philosopher, presciently remarked:

‘Everything that happens is followed by something else which depends on it by causal necessity. Likewise, everything that happens is preceded by something with which it is causally connected’.

Accordingly, the dynamical, nonlinear system’s future behaviour is completely determined by its initial conditions, even though the paths of the relationship — which quickly get massively complex via factors such as divergence, repetition, and feedback — may not be traceable. A corollary is that not just the future is unpredictable, but the past — history — also defies complete understanding and reconstruction, given the mind-boggling branching of events occurring over decades, centuries, and millennia. Our lives routinely demonstrate these principles: the long-term effects of initial conditions on complex, dynamical social, economic, ecologic, and pedagogic systems, to cite just a few examples, are likewise subject to chaos and unpredictability.

Chaos theory thus describes the behaviour of systems that are impossible to predict or control. These processes and phenomena have been described by the unique qualities of fractal patterns like the one above — graphically demonstrated, for example, by nerve pathways, sea shells, ferns, crystals, trees, stalagmites, rivers, snow flakes, canyons, lightning, peacocks, clouds, shorelines, and myriad other natural things. Fractal patterns, through their branching and recursive shape (repeated over and over), offer us a graphical, geometric image of chaos. They capture the infinite complexity of not just nature but of complex, nonlinear systems in general — including manmade ones, such as expanding cities and traffic patterns. Even tiny errors in measuring the state of a complex system get mega-amplified, making prediction unreliable, even impossible, in the longer term. In the words of the 20th-century physicist Richard Feynman:

‘Trying to understand the way nature works involves . . . beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen’.

The exquisite sensitivity to initial conditions is metaphorically described as the ‘butterfly effect’. The term was made famous by the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in a 1972 paper in which he questioned whether the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil — an ostensibly miniscule change in initial conditions in space-time — might trigger a tornado in Texas — a massive consequential result stemming from the complexly intervening (unpredictable) sequence of events. As Aristotle foreshadowed, ‘The least initial deviation . . . is multiplied later a thousandfold’.

Lorenz’s work that accidentally led to this understanding and demonstration of chaos theory dated back to the preceding decade. In 1961 (in an era of limited computer power) he was performing a study of weather prediction, employing a computer model for his simulations. In wanting to run his simulation again, he rounded the variables from six to three digits, assuming that such an ever-so-tiny change couldn’t matter to the results — a commonsense expectation at the time. However, to the astonishment of Lorenz, the computer model resulted in weather predictions that radically differed from the first run — all the more so the longer the model ran using the slightly truncated initial conditions. This serendipitous event, though initially garnering little attention among Lorenz's academic peers, eventually ended up setting the stage for chaos theory.

Lorenz’s contributions came to qualify the classical laws of Nature represented by Isaac Newton, whose Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy three hundred-plus years earlier famously laid out a well-ordered, mechanical system — epically reducing the universe to ‘clockwork’ precision and predictability. It provided us, and still does, with a sufficiently workable approximation of the world we live in.

No allowance, in the preceding descriptions, for indeterminacy and unpredictability. That said, an important exception to determinism would require venturing beyond the macroscopic systems of the classical world into the microscopic systems of the quantum mechanical world — where indeterminism (probability) prevails. Today, some people construe the classical string of causes and effects and clockwork-like precision as perhaps pointing to an original cause in the form of some ultimate designer of the universe, or more simply a god — predetermining how the universe’s history is to unfold.

It is not the case, as has been thought too ambitiously by some, that all that humankind needs to do is get cleverer at acquiring deeper understanding, and dismiss any notion of limitations, in order to render everything predictable. Conforming to this reasoning, the 18th century Dutch thinker, Baruch Spinoza, asserted,

‘Nothing in Nature is random. . . . A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge’.

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*Another example of chaos is brain activity, where a thought and the originating firing of neurons — among the staggering ninety billion neurons, one hundred trillion synapses, and unimaginable alternative pathways — results in the unpredictable, near-infinite sequence of electromechanical transmissions. Such exquisite goings-on may well have implications for consciousness and free will. Since consciousness is the root of self-identity — our own identity, and that of others — it matters that consciousness is simultaneously the product of, and subject to, the nonlinear complexity and unpredictability associated with chaos. The connections are embedded in realism. The saving grace is that cause-and-effect and determinism are, however, still in play in all possible permutations of how individual consciousness and the universe subtly connect.

The Silence of God

Posted by Eugene Alper

Perhaps God is so silent with us for a reason.  If He were to answer, if He were to respond to even one question or one plea, this would spell the end of our free will.

For once we knew His preferences for us, once we could sense His approval or disapproval, we would no longer exercise our own preferences, we would not choose our actions.  We would be like children again, led by His hand.  Perhaps He did not want this.  Perhaps He did not create us to be perpetual children.  Perhaps He designed the world so we could think about it and choose our actions freely.

But mentioning free will and God's design in the same sentence presents a predicament—these two ideas need to be somehow reconciled.  For if we believe that God designed the world in a certain way, and the world includes us and our free will, its design has to be flexible enough for us to exercise our free will within it.  We should be able to choose to participate in the design or not, and if so, to which degree.  Should we choose to do something with our life—however small our contribution may be—maybe to improve the design itself, or at least to try to tinker with it, we should be able to do so.  Should we choose to stay away from participating and become hermits, for example, we should be able to do so too.  Or should we choose to participate only partially, every third Tuesday of the month, we should be free to do so as well.

This thinking smacks of being childish.  We want God's design to be there and not to be there at the same time.  We want God to be a loving father who is not overly strict.  This is how we created His image in the Old Testament: God is occasionally stern—to the point of destroying almost the entire humankind—but loving and caring the rest of the time.  This is how we created His image in the New Testament, too: God so loved the world that He sent His own Son to redeem it.  Maybe all we really want is a father again; whatever beings we imagine as our gods, we want the familiar features of our parents.  Maybe we are perpetual children after all.  We want to play in our sandbox—freely and without supervision—and build whatever we want out of sand, yet we want our father nearby for comfort and protection.

There is no need to reconcile anything.  This is how it works.  Our free will fits within God's design so well because it is free only to a degree.  Time and space are our bounds.  We have only so much time until we are gone, and we have only so much energy until it runs out.  Gravity will assure that we can jump, but not too high, that we can fly, but not too far.  We cannot cause too much damage.  Sitting in the sand, we can fight with other players, we can even kick them out, we can build our own castles or destroy theirs, but we cannot destroy the sandbox itself.  Maybe this is the secret of the design. 

Free Will: Has Philosophy Been Eclipsed by Neuroscience?

Norton Junction. With acknowledgement to Adrian the Rock

By Keith Tidman

We make decisions before we are consciously aware of making them. These are the findings of the latest neuroscientific research. Has neuroscience therefore eclipsed philosophy? Has it taken the lead? Does philosophy have anything left to say?

In a much-publicised experiment, a neuroscientist placed people into a ‘functional magnetic resonance imaging’ (fMRI) machine. The aim was to observe brain activity as test subjects performed an activity. The neuroscientist instructed the subjects to press a button either with their right hand or their left hand – but to pay close attention to when they took the decision as to which hand to use. The results surprised the worlds of both philosophy and neuroscience. The scanner revealed brain activity—the brain unconsciously deciding to press the button—a remarkable seven seconds before the test subjects consciously opted to press it. That is, the subjects’ brains committed to decisions before the subjects became aware of making them.

Why should this be important? Why does it matter?

We assume that free will is fundamental to our humanity. Assumptions about free will—conscious agency—engage people on pragmatic levels. In fact those assumptions are the keystone for society’s notions of responsibility. Codes of morality and law necessarily rest—rightly or wrongly—on free will’s existence. Institutions, from government bodies to systems of justice to religions, are built on that keystone. In the absence of an alternative model that ensures order in society, such rules-based institutions hold people accountable for their actions. Human conduct is judged, and responses—praise and reward, or condemnation and punishment—are rendered accordingly. Society assumes that a person may be held responsible only if that person is a ‘morally responsible agent’, in conscious, intentional control of behaviour.

The cautious conclusion to the fMRI experiment was that consciousness may play no role in what a person decides. Other neuroscientists concur in this, based on the results of different tests. But are our conclusions too hasty? Are the results ironclad?

In the context of conscious control, what does the fMRI test really tell us about free will? Is free will an illusion, a tricked brain, misled intuition—and even just a convenience for society to function? The question typically appears something like this: “At the moment a person decides, could she willingly and freely have decided otherwise?” And if we do not enjoy unbridled (‘libertarian’) free will, do we at least have contingent free will? If free will is an illusion, is that so for only those choices made hastily and with minimal thought? Or does free will describe all our decisions? Philosophers have grappled with free will for millennia, of course. But the role of neuroscience in this arena is more recent—and arguably indispensable. This dual track of philosophers and neuroscientists makes it necessary to delineate what unique competencies each field brings to free will. But what are they? And do they each have a role?

By and large, both philosophers and neuroscientists today acknowledge the  cause-and-effect nature of brain activity (the physics, chemistry, biology) and decisions—mind-brain dualism long since having been discarded. Yet our considerations do not end here.

Philosophers, for their part, collaborating with psychologists and anthropologists and others, bring a deep understanding of human behavior. This understanding exists in the context of the roles of institutions and culture in society, informing the ways people make decisions, including whether freely or mechanistically. Philosophers also contribute an understanding of the centuries-long history of conceptualising free will and its alternatives, especially how some of the most brilliant minds have described and debated free will and determinism and the concepts’ variants. This process includes placing those historical notions of free will to the litmus test of analytical logic, to assess soundness. All this vitally informs the science—outside the standard domain of scientists—to ensure that the science remains conceptually and historically grounded.

For their part, neuroscientists, collaborating with physicists and biologists, structure hypotheses and bring increasingly sophisticated technologies and rigorous methodologies to understand cognitive brain function. They correlate those functions to the brain as it makes a decision and the person subsequently is aware of the decision. The aim is to explore—tangibly record and measure through technology—what is happening at the unconscious and conscious levels, and to do so involving more complex decision-making. Independent scientists must duplicate test results. For neuroscientists, this unique framing of the free will-versus-determinism puzzle takes into account diverse factors.  These include the neurons and synapses firing in different regions of the brain, perceptions of reality, people’s genetic makeup, the environment influencing genes’ expression (epigenetics), psychological states, and others. How these factors bear on outcomes of science’s take on free will remains to be explored.

Allowing for the distinctly separate competencies of philosophers and neuroscientists, tackling free choice can best be accomplished jointly: defining the problem, examining alternative models, conjuring hypotheses, developing methods, describing initial conditions, teasing out empirical data, interpreting results. Wherein, it seems, lies the best hope of resolving the free-will debate. Philosophy is far from eclipsed.