Three Arguments for Free Will

For many years, I didn’t believe in free will. Maybe I still don’t. It’s the rationalist, or the contrarian, or both, in me.1 We’re made of atoms; those atoms are governed by the laws of physics; the laws of physics are deterministic: ergo, free will does not exist.2

But I recently listened to Robert Sapolsky make the case against free will while promoting his book Determined, and, in a result I’m sure would horrify him, I came to believe free will may exist after all. Here are three arguments in favor, based on how “free” they make you.

Philosophers, like all experts, like to invent new jargon for concepts that already exist. In this case, “qualia” are just “sensations” (and “quale” is just the awkward singular version of the word). The most common example of qualia is the color red. You can describe red as the chemicals in red paint or the wavelengths of red light or the brain activity that occurs when we see that paint or light, but when we talk about qualia we’re talking about the conscious experience of seeing red, the reason it’s a different conscious experience than seeing blue or yellow, “the redness of red.”

Perhaps, then, free will is a sensation. Just like any definition of “red” which only mentions chemicals, wavelengths, or brain activity misses something about “the redness of red,” any definition of “free will” which only mentions atoms and the laws of physics misses something about the fact that I feel free. It may be true that thirteen billion years of determined events from the Big Bang to this instant led me to [raises hand] raise my hand just now, but from the inside, it feels like I raised my hand because I wanted to. It’s tautological: if free will is a feeling, to feel free is to be free.

As an analogy, imagine a blind man in a very large prison. This man has everything he needs to survive, and thus never ventures far enough to touch the bars. He’s born, he lives, he dies. So: was he actually imprisoned? In a literal sense, yes: he was surrounded by bars. But in a more nuanced sense, no: he lived his life unconstrained by those bars.

In this analogy the constraining prison bars are the constraining laws of physics, and the fact that we never bump up against those bars is the fact that we never feel unfree: if we choose to do what we’re forced to do at the exact moment we’re forced to do it, and free will is the sensation of that choice, we have free will.

Imagine a self-driving car going from Point A to Point B. The path of the car is completely determined by its parts. No engine to create force? The car doesn’t go. No wheels to roll merrily along? The car doesn’t go. No carburetor to to carburate? The car doesn’t go. In this way, the car is completely dependent on its constituent parts.

But wait a minute! Imagine those parts separated from the car! An engine without wheels? Wheels without a computer? A carburetor without an engine? They just lie there, inert. “Driveableness” is an emergent property that exists only when the parts come together as a whole.

And what determines when and where those constituent parts move? The car! So even though the car’s movement is determined by its parts, the parts’ movements are determined by the car. There is a parts-to-whole chain of causality, but emergence also creates a whole-to-parts chain of causality.

Humans work the same way: the atoms of our bodies determine what we can do, but we in turn determine what the atoms of our bodies can do. The same atom in your hand could exist in a banana, but only the atom in your hand can be made to rise.

In his interview, when pressed on the subject, Sapolsky said something like, “You already believe 99% of the universe is deterministic, from stars going supernova to pool balls clacking around a table. I’m just taking the next logical step. I’m just saying there’s no magic.”

It was that word, “magic,” that caught my attention.

I, much like Madonna, am a materialist. I’m not religious or spiritual, I don’t believe in ghosts, and I sure as hell don’t think the soul exists in the pineal gland. I say all this to establish my materialist bone fides before I argue that, well, yeah…obviously magic exists.

When I was a kid I asked my dad why humans feel pain.

He first explained pain in evolutionary terms. People with congenital analgesia can’t feel pain. This may sound nice, but it’s actually horrific. Sufferers3 almost always die young: they develop health problems because they don’t constantly, unconsciously shift around when sitting or lying down; they bite off the tip of their tongue; they lean on a hot stove and don’t notice until they smell burning flesh. So imagine, my dad said, if half of humanity had this condition. Who’s more likely to pass on their genes?

He then explained pain in biological terms. When you touch a hot stove, the nerves in your fingers shoot a jolt of electricity up to your thalamus, which sends a jolt of electricity to your motor cortex, which sends a jolt of electricity to your muscles, which causes you to pull back your hand.

Add those two reasons together, and you understand why pain exists: it causes us to remove our hand from the stove and live long enough to pass on our genes.

It was only years later that I noticed the problem with this explanation: it doesn’t require the existence of pain at all!

Take that second explanation. Do you see any pain there? It’s all just nerve endings, electricity, and neurochemicals. There is absolutely no reason a p-zombie wouldn’t have the same reaction as a conscious human and live long enough to pass on its genes. So what explains the pain?

Some Guy believes that everything in the universe might be the tiniest bit conscious. Once upon a time, I would have scoffed at this theory. But if evolution and biology don’t explain conscious experience, what does? Maybe materialism has room for consciousness: it’s baked in to the laws of physics like the strong nuclear force and electromagnetism.

A p-zombie would act the exact same way I act, but I feel pain and the p-zombie doesn’t. That sure seems like there’s a little bit of magic in my pain. And so, maybe my own conscious experience, the only thing I really have proof of, is evidence that I have free will in the strongest possible sense.