Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Freedom in a Causally Determined World
For us to even have knowledge and operate within reality, we must at least practically accept causality. Everything we perceive is connected by an infinite amount of causal chains and these particulars continue to cause other chains. Your whole life is a history of cause and effect. Your every thought is the result of an equation spawned and determined by causality. Fortunately our capacity for reason allows us to discover and understand this logical determinism.
Let us grant that at this moment you are reading this blog. What caused you read this blog? Most likely, the reason is that you know me or followed a link here, and the title caught your eye. You were conditioned by your surroundings, upbringing, mental makeup, and this resulted in this precise moment and the very thoughts you are having right now. If you think about it, your whole life and everything that has happened in it, has brought you to this very instance of you happening to read this blog. And if you think about it even further, what really brought you to this moment are causes leading back before your very existence.
The problem with this notion, which philosophers call determinism, is that every action you make seems unfree and non-spontaneous. And if our actions are determined by causality, then we can no longer be held responsible for those actions because they are outside of our control. It seems to be the death of morality and accountability. While this is a scary thought, it does not necessarily mean it is untrue. If we actually were free agents spontaneously causing movement within reality, we would be defying the laws of physics. Our ability to comprehend anything in reality, especially laws of science, is our ability to perceive and understand the causes behind particular events. Even within psychology and medicine, the doctor is attempting to discover a cause of the illness or behavior. Perhaps the behavior or illness is genetic or a result of upbringing. Perhaps it is a combination, or they extracted the illness from some other person.
But wait! You set goals and plan for the future! You cannot help but think as if you were free, so determinism must be false!
Well, what caused those desires? What caused you to set those goals? What caused you to fail or achieve those goals? Why do we feel as if we are free?
Our freedom falls apart after we ask "why", because "why" implies a reason that preceded the action or choice.
The paradox is that we are able to reflect on this and discover a contradiction. We feel as if we were free. Our consciousness demands that we are free agents to change the world as we will. This seems to make our entire existence absurd to the extreme. If all of our actions and feelings are really just mechanical results of previous causes, then why should we do anything at all upon realizing this?
One answer is to simply embrace this absurdity and operate as if you were free from restraints. If truly it no longer matters what you do or what you have done, then you can do as you wish. The consequences for your actions are no longer your responsibility. The fact is we can still experience pleasure and pain, happiness and despair. There is no longer any preconceived notion of moral prejudices to govern you.
Another way to think of it, is that we do in fact have the capacity to understand the universe as a beautiful and logical deterministic equation, and it is unfolding as it should (very Spinoza).
I'd like to hear people's reaction to this. There are other escapes, such as a leap in faith to the notion of god. You can also say that I am only experiencing the world as one of appearance, and therefore I am a subjective being unto myself with an end-in-myself, and therefore I cannot prove that I am unfree (Kant). Etc.
-Below I have left a comment which is a cut and past of my essay for B & R in attempt to offer a solution to this problem.
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3 comments:
spinoza and his gonads.
The Power of Understanding: Moral Responsibility While Lacking Free Will
Many have discovered, desperately researching arguments to the contrary, that determinism is probably true. No theory has truly convinced us of its falsity or comforted us by asserting that we still have free will. Logic demands that either determinism is true or false. And if determinism is true, then the complex causal nexus preceding this moment has determined you to read these words and experience the very thoughts you are having right now. These prior causes have fixed this very epic event in every detail, right down to the tea you might be drinking. The dismal feeling of not having any choice in the matter, which you might also be experiencing, is simply a result of my gripping intro to this essay. However, while determinism seems to be a bleak, mechanical existence, I contend that it is necessarily true and does not abdicate us from moral responsibility. I also think that determinism should be looked upon as more liberating than it at first appears.
Many people reject determinism on the grounds that they simply don’t like the idea. It contradicts free will, which entails the absence of moral responsibility. Theodore Sider points out this problem with extreme precision by stating “determinism says that Hitler’s invasion of Poland was caused by some earlier event… and the existence of such a cause seems to imply that Hitler’s invasion of Poland was not a free action” (Sider 117). If actions are not free, we cannot hold people morally responsible for the choices they make. But it seems we cannot help but feel as if we are free, so determinism must somehow be false. But what causes this feeling of freedom, and for that matter, what exactly is free will?
As a philosophy student, I cannot accept the temptation to reject determinism simply on the grounds that I dislike the idea of being unfree. I am forced to explore this problem by the use of reason, which ironically operates on the canvas of causality. In fact, behind every piece of knowledge assumed within our minds, is an infinitely complex causal chain leading back to the primordial ooze. To discover this, all one has to do is ask “why”. Why do I have this particular knowledge? Why do I hold these beliefs to be true? Why am I writing this essay? The answer to all of these questions will lay in some kind of causal pattern determining the supposed proposition. Every event has a cause, and this allows us to make sense of things like science, mathematics, human behavior, and reality itself. But what does this mean for free will?
Free will in the classical sense is the notion of an uncaused choice. However, when we talk about choices we talk about the reasoning behind them. If human action was uncaused and indeterminate, it seems we would be acting randomly without any control. For example, an indeterminate action might be my hand rising from the keyboard to slap my face without any desire or reason behind it. This is not free choice. It would seem that free choice must have a cause behind it.
So what is control? Control I will suggest is understanding causality or the reason behind action, and it is the only power we hold subjectively. You may recall the Merovingian in the movie Matrix Reloaded who put it quite eloquently: “causality, there is no escape from it, we are forever slaves to it…our only hope, our only peace, is to understand it, to understand the why.” I’m not saying we have free will, but what I am saying is that we have the capacity for understanding. And without determinism, understanding would most likely be impossible.
At this point I have asserted that determinism is necessarily true for us to have understanding. Since determinism is true, uncaused choices do not exist. However, our understanding of the reasons behind events causes us to act within the context of that knowledge. So the beauty of determinism ultimately rides within our ability to comprehend reality as being ordered through cause and effect, and our moral responsibility lies within understanding.
Peter van Inwagen states in his consequent argument that “if determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past…it is not up 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 these things (including our present acts) are not up to us” (Inwagen 1983). I reject the first premise on the grounds that it doesn’t account for our ability to comprehend and represent the past in the present moment. I also reject the conclusion by asking how we could not have responsibility when our actions are partially dictated by our understanding. We do not have control over the laws of nature, but the laws of nature determined that we have the ability to comprehend and judge, which partially dictates choice within the present moment. This makes us partially responsible. It ultimately makes us responsible for all actions that are not done out of ignorance.
As a hard determinist, I find comfort in our power to understand why. I do not suggest that we have free will in the sense that our choices are undetermined. I don’t think that we are free in a spontaneous sense of agency. If we were, we would defy physics and have little ability to discover the truth and falsity of the universe. But our ability to understand, for which we can discover the truth value of things by causality, means that we can ascribe responsibility.
It still might not be encouraging to the reader who might object with a quote from Sider who states that “without freedom, we march along pre-determined paths; unable to control our destinies…such a life is not worth living” (Sider 2005). After all, understanding might just be the same pretty fiction as our classical notion of free will. In which case, I would have to point out the fact that I am writing on this very topic, and would have to assert the ironic contradiction assumed. I have an understanding of what determinism is by definition, and logic demands that all bachelors are unmarried men, and 2 + 2 = 4.
Another objection which may sound promising is that ignorance excuses people from moral responsibility. I find this to be a true exception. After all, we don’t hold infants accountable for their actions when they don’t comprehend them. Not all people can achieve a state of understanding to the point of which we can hold them morally responsible; the mentally insane for example, or any other state that inhibits judgment.
So what I have shown is that determinism is necessary. It beautifully connects everything in an ordered context of cause and effect allowing us to understand reality itself. This power to understand the “why” is the true source of our moral responsibility, even without the classic sense of free will. Another concept we might attempt to derive from this, is the very drive to comprehend reality. But after all is said and done, understanding may still be a slave to causality if it dwells inevitably within our passions.
Works Cited
Inwagen, P. v. (1983). An Essay on Free Will. New York: Oxford: at the Clarendon Press.
Lawrence, M. (2004). Like a Splinter In Your Mind: The Philosophy Behind The Matrix Trilogy. Maiden: Blackwell Publishing.
Sider, T. (2005). Free Will and Determinism . In T. Sider, & E. Conee, Riddles of Existence (pp. 112-133). New York: Oxford University Press.
Isaiah Berlin said that while we cannot know for certain that free will exists, the most sensible thing is to behave as if it does.
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