Did you really choose to read this article?

[Martin Blank]

This is one of four questions that were posed by real-life philosopher David Bain, who lectures on philosophy at the University of Glasgow. I am posing the questions here as he phrased them in his BBC article, "Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt," published on World Philosophy Day, 20 Nov 2008.

Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.

After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.

And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.

Now, of course, Fred didn't really exist, so he didn't really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred's predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly."

[3FrenchToast]

I think this question is particularly interesting for the "nature versus nurture" questions it raises, as well as the fact that as we learn more about the brain and how it operates, we tend to define more things as ingrained. Take, for example, the sprawling definitions of mental illnesses of all kinds, or research indicating that one gender is more suited to certain behaviors because of brain patterns/development. This seems to indicate that certain actions/patterns in behavior are chemical and are a result of the way we're wired, being inevitable and lending support to the idea that everything is somehow predestined.

There are also certainly environmental factors that, er, factor into human behavior and help determine how we behave in certain situations. The kind of place we grow up in is likely to affect our view on everything that comes after, for example, and this leads me to wonder if our beliefs and actions (actions often being a result of beliefs) are actually ingrained after all. Then again, if everything is predictable everything led to those factors influencing you, so I suppose you have a circle after all.

So is modern brain science (a subject I'll admit I'm not very familiar with) just confirming this idea that everything actually is scientifically predictable, at least in theory?

[Deacon]

Meh. What is the responsible choice, anyway? Are we truly free to choose it? Are you free to choose to not take a breath any time in the next hour? No, you have to breathe. If you don't, you pass out, and your body starts breathing automatically regardless of your approval. Would it be responsible to choose to do so by way of self-strangulation, perhaps hanging? According to some of the more militant environmentalists, yes, that would be the responsible thing to do, since you'd be saving mother earth from any change that might be attributable to your presence. What if you're an elderly invalid who's just a millstone around the neck of your grandchildren? What if you're the healthy breadwinning husband of a wife and father of several children who all depend on you for their continued survival and success?

Blah blah blah. And who is this dude to dictate what may be "reassuring" to someone else? It's all ridiculous.


EDIT: No, Frenchy. The definition of mental illnesses is determined in no small part by the personal politics and philosophies of those doing the defining. Otherwise, if we're being strict, one might define homosexual tendencies as a mental illness, but that will not happen because that's not cool. But it is cool to say that drowning your sorrows in alcohol until you become addicted to it is a disease, as though it's some external pathogen that's invaded your body and mind and forced you to do something. But it's not cool to say that jonesing for a cigarette is a disease. It may be difficult for an addict to choose to stop, but it's not impossible. Some lifelong smokers quit cold turkey. Some who just picked up the habit last year quit a hundred different times using patches one time or gum another and something else the third time, etc.

A lot of what shapes who we are is the personality we're born with, but then our experiences grind it down in some areas and accentuate it in others and smoothly polish one area while putting a sharply honed blade on another. If you want to pretend to be really deep, you could say that with enough knowledge of a person's ingrained personality and general human psychology, you could accurately predict how experiences will effect someone and thus could predict their actions. That doesn't mean that the person isn't free to choose, just that you think you know what they will choose because you know that for them one option is better than the other. But that's just as ridiculous as daydreaming about Fred.

[Martin Blank]

You both may be missing the point. I think the basic question here is, do we have free will, or are all of our actions predetermined based on the physical laws of the universe?

[Deacon]

Which is just another rehashing of the same old question regarding whether you have free will if God is omniscient. If someone knows what you're going to choose to do, do you really have a choice in the matter, blah blah blah. The answer is yes, you have a choice in the matter. If someone offers you both a million dollars and to kill you, and you have to choose one, what would you do? If I say with all certainty that you'd pick the million dollars, does that mean you don't actually have a choice, that you don't have the free will to choose either one? No. You could still choose death. It just wouldn't make sense to do so. But because there's the choice, and the probability is stacked steeply in favor of one over the other, you can't say for absolute certain that the one choice will be made over the other. I may shock you and choose death.

The thing about intelligent life (including animals) is that while we're generally fairly predictable, we're not the laws of physics. Sometimes someone might just get a wild hair up their ass and surprise you. Our decisions aren't made purely by the properties of quarks and neutrons and protons and electrons extrapolated out in mind-bendingly large numbers to form the universe and occasionally our brains. There's an actual thought process, there, and as a result there's some measure of unpredictability beyond that which is physically inherent in the physical universe.

[Martin Blank]

Free will vs. omniscient God is a purely theological paradox, and one that cannot ever be settled unless and until God decides to answer it in clear terms. Reframing it in terms of physical laws changes it to something that we just might be able to test someday.

You say that there's a thought process there, and that it's not subject to the actions of subatomic particles. Yet our decisions can change on the basis of the environment. Intake of alcohol or certain drugs impairs inhibition responses because certain chemical pathways are blocked. Psychoactive drugs help people lead more normal lives because certain things taking place in their brains -- hallucinations, depressive thoughts, impulsive actions -- are chemically corrected. These actions are predictable to a great degree, and as we use more advanced technology to view what is happening in the brain, we learn more about how they work and can better prescribe solutions.

That these changes come down to chemistry then opens the question of how much randomness there is in the universe. Quantum physics would tell us that there is randomness at very low levels, using such concepts as the double-slit experiments. But there is also the possibility that what we see as randomness simply seems so because we lack an understanding of the mechanism that causes the results we observe.