Sober Sunday Reflections on the Useful Illusion of Human Freedom – Part I

“Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of...How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it...Consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when it actually does not.”

Julian Jaynes (1976) 

Here's the Problem

Sartre said we are “condemned to be free.”

“It’s true. I said that.”

Maybe he was right, but after thinking about the naturalistic/psychological theories explored by Daniel Dennett and Daniel Wegner, it is better to say we are condemned to feel freer than we are.

“THAT’S better.”

One of the largest obstacles Dennett and Wegner’s theories of consciousness face is the uneasiness they can produce in people that are accustomed to thinking in conventional ways about their own choices and behavior. This uneasiness is a symptom of thinking in extremes and painting a threatening caricature of a theory, rather than trying to understand how new theories about consciousness can still hold on reality and not completely destroy a kind of freedom worth having. Granted, anxieties are understandable. Tensions exist between our traditional sense of self and the scientific worldviews humans have developed by observing nature. Consciousness is a frontier that Wegner and Dennett have started charting for the purpose of scientifically resolving the problem of human freedom in a deterministic universe. If we choose to follow them, and are met along the way with discoveries that surprise, scare, or even disappoint us, then our demands about the reality we want to be living in are unrealistic. (Good lord, you want your cake and you want to eat it, too?).

“But, reality is scary. And cake isn’t.”

Like landing on an unmapped island, we can expect to feel dissonance between the actual reality we face and the ripe content of our desires and imaginations. For this reason, it is vital that we trust our reliable instruments to help us find the connection between the dark islands and the rest of the known world. Whether the reality of consciousness turns out to be pleasant or well-received becomes a matter of taste, and what we discover becomes a fact to acknowledge regardless of how it treats emotional palates.

Before attacking the issue, it is important to understand the field of debate and its basic arguments. The problem of human freedom is summarized by drawing attention to the conflict between the deterministic laws observed in our universe and the distinct feeling of agency we have toward most of our actions. The logical conclusions derived from observing deterministic laws of nature can be used to formulate an argument like this:

 

The Problem of Human Freedom

             P1. All physical events are caused by previously occurring physical events. 

             P2. Every human action is a physical event.

             P3. Given P1 & P2, every human action is caused by previously occurring physical events.

             P4. If actions are caused by previously occurring physical events, they are not free.

             THEREFORE, human actions are not free.

 

P1 is well-established already. The laws of physics have a long history of reliably identifying physical causes that determine physical events. Skepticism may haunt every inference of causation, but it is reasonable to assume that all events have causes, apparent or subtle. Therefore, the assumption is safe, backed by common sense, Occam's razor, and centuries of scientific observation. So if P1 is true, the premise implies that it is rational to believe the physical world is deterministic.

The core problem of human freedom is introduced by P2-P4. P2 operates on the assumption that all human actions are physical events. The work of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and evolutionary biology paints an increasingly physical picture of human action and behavior. Therefore, in an effort to remain consistent and steer clear of dualistic metaphysics, I take it for granted from here on that all events in the universe, including human actions, are only physical events. If this is the case, then P3 is true and human action is caused by prior physical causes.

The argument in P4 is known as incompatibilism, and claims that if an act was determined by previously occurring events, then the act could not have been otherwise. If an act could not have been otherwise, then it cannot be free, so acts that are determined by previously occurring events cannot be free. Incompatibilism implies that the freedom felt in human action does not align with the principles of determinism in the world. This line of thinking leads to theories that, in trying to establish a source of agent-caused free will, often find themselves wandering into the alluring dualism of the “Cartesian Theater.” This is because determinism appears to be a direct assault on the normal concept of human freedom, the idea that humans themselves are the cause of their own actions.

(Dennett coined “The Cartesian Theater” as a disparaging term for the dualist materialism that still remains in many modern materialistic theories of consciousness. Cartesian dualism implies that consciousness operates through the interaction of an immaterial soul with the material body…originally via the pineal gland of the brain.)

So now we have a serious dilemma. Our best reasoning tells us the world we inhabit and the processes responsible for everything in it (humans included) is deterministic, and yet we still feel like we are the ones causing our actions. How can this be?

What the incompatibilist dilemma assumes is that freedom cannot exist in a deterministic world. However, incompatibilism operates on a definition of freedom that is needlessly inflated. In fact, P4 should be amended to state that the kind of freedom many people expect themselves to have cannot exist in a deterministic world, but this does not rule out a kind of freedom worth having. This different version of freedom is more realistic and compatible with the forces of determinism and evolution. And it deserves an explanation.

 

How it Happened

 

The evolutionary theory of consciousness I want to talk about posits that consciousness is an ability evolved from the human knack for communication and cultural expression and is responsible for our sense of freedom. We experience this sense of freedom when our prior thoughts align themselves seamlessly with the actions we perceive ourselves making. What this implies, unsavory to some tastes, is that consciousness and freedom are not irreducibly separate faculties of the mind. Instead, they are integrated cognitive systems that serve an evolutionary purpose, and like any physical adaptation, they can be deceived. So the freedom we experience is an “illusion”; that is, something that appears a certain way without making its actual structure apparent. Both Dennett and Wegner provide arguments and evidence that propel a particular angle of this theory. In Dennett’s case for consciousness and freedom outlined in his book Freedom Evolves, the diverse facets of evolution hold most of the answers to the fundamental problems of free will. Wegner, on the other hand, looks to empirical studies on human psychology to shed more light on what consciousness actually is and why we experience it the way we do.

According to Dennett, freedom is an evolved concept that owes its nature to our shared beliefs about it (Dennett 9). Freedom is real in the same sense that other cultural ideas like “true love” or “good and evil” are real. They are involved and significant to the way we live our lives, present and dynamic in our folk psychology, but they do not exist as emergent, separate, and irreducible entities. In other words, they do not belong to some extra-physical realm (a la Descartes), and like many things still outside the current scope of human understanding, certain features of freedom and consciousness are often exaggerated.

“Look…I know I fucked up, OK?”

Dennett explains the evolution of freedom by tracing its origins back to the first stirrings of life on the planet. This approach avoids the kind of speciesism that obscures the actual history of consciousness as a phenomenon that evolved out of the species-neutral processes of early life. The kind of freedom discussed here is not exclusively human, nor was it ever “complete” at any one time we started noticing it. This fact helps shed more light on why people may not like this “ersatz” freedom that was not supernaturally bestowed upon them by gods or demons, but rather evolved through them and the basic structures that are shared by the simplest of organisms. Consciousness is not some celestially ordained human superpower. It is a growing, evolving capacity evinced at different levels by all living things in a system of natural selection. And it was here, in some form, from the beginning.

The Game of Life developed by John Horton Conway is a useful analogue for thinking about freedom evolving in a deterministic universe. This simulation offers a helpful perspective for understanding how the design steps leading to the freedom we observe today could have occurred without the repeated influence of a creator’s hand (Dennett 53). The game consists of an infinite grid that can be populated with any configuration of square cells. These cells can either be “on” or “off,” simulating the cell’s state of life or death. The cells interact with their eight vertical, horizontal, and diagonal neighbors by following four basic rules:

1. If a cell has fewer than two living neighbors it dies, simulating the effects of isolation.
2. If a cell has more than three living neighbors it also dies, simulating the effects of overpopulation in a resource limited environment.
3. In accordance with rules 1 and 2, any living cell that has two or three living neighbors survives into the next round or “generation.”
4. Lastly, any dead cell that has precisely three living neighbors becomes live again for the next round, simulating birth.

In its simplest forms, the Game of Life simulation is not particularly interesting. The basic constructions of squares appear to function in very limited ways when they are not forced to interact with one other in the same plane. However, when the complexity of the game increases, fascinating patterns begin to emerge. When multiple cell groups are introduced and are allowed to confront each other, the interactions become an apt model for how the evolution of life systems operates in early stages of development. Remarkable instances of self-replication can result, like the ones discovered by Conway’s theoretical version of the game that became a self-reproducing Turing Machine. Since the game’s invention in the 1970’s, computer programs were designed to effectively extend the simulation. But, the complexity required to generate a Turing Machine and other more computationally expensive arrangements still exceeds what is practical (according to Dennett, the screen displaying a Turing-enabled Life World would need to be approximately one kilometer across) (Dennett, 48). Interestingly, if the complexity needed for such an arrangement could be reached, the size ratio between the functioning whole of the game and the individual square “cells” would become similar to the size ratio of an actual organism to its constituent atoms (Dennett, 49). At these levels of design complexity, the Game of Life becomes all the more reminiscent of the natural world. Since the fuel of evolution is the very crowdedness of a particular environment (more confrontations yield more cases of change and mutation), the probability of spontaneous cases of design rises alongside the increased complexity of environmental conditions. The Game of Life is an informative theoretical analogy for thinking about evolution. It can be used to show how freedom, as a repeatedly re-designed function of cellular life, evolved from the basic avoidance structures of early organisms into the more robust cognitive systems we see operating today.

What this picture of human freedom shows us is nothing short of an unfathomably complex system of avoidance that has been billions of years in the making. So what accounts for the knee-jerk aversion to a freedom that was “blindly” designed by forces of evolution that follow complex but predictable rules? The answer is a lingering fear that leads people to perceive determinism as the ultimate threat to human agency. Both Dennett and Wegner have a ready response to this fear, claiming that even though consciousness and the freedom it affords us are experienced as illusions, this realization changes nothing about our cognitive abilities or our moral responsibility.

 

A Happy Determinism

Determinism can be seen as a problem for human freedom when it is understood to imply the inevitability of actions and events. The first step out of this quicksand is realizing that nothing about determinism necessitates the inevitability of actions and events. If the word “inevitable” really does mean “unavoidable,” as Dennett stresses, then the fact that evolution produces avoidance equipment in abundance exposes the blatant contradiction in claiming that determinism means inevitability (Dennett 58). There is nothing unavoidable in my being able to circumvent a menacing dog in the street. I have the ability (if I happened to be suicidal) to intentionally avoid my avoiding of the threat. However, this ability to avoid the dog (or override my impulse to do so) is still determined in every sense by the evolutionary processes responsible for my cognitive equipment. Because of this, the evolution of avoidance is key to distinguishing determinism from inevitability.

“Relax, buddy-bud, it's just a thought experiment.”

Dennett engages an important objection to this in Freedom Evolves that is worth mentioning. If avoidance is determined, how can it be authentic avoidance in the sense of being able to actually change the outcome of an impending event? This objection confuses what constitutes an impending event. This can happen when retrospectively examining a situation that has already occurred. When conceptualizing a sequence of events in memory, it is tempting to say that the outcome was going to happen but that it somehow changed causal paths. The reality is that whatever happened was determined to do so by the conditions in place when it transpired. What actually occurs becomes the actual outcome in both deterministic and indeterministic worlds. Furthermore, the only authentic avoidance is determined avoidance, since the only real avoidance systems that exist are determined by evolutionary processes. An indeterministic case of avoidance would look something like an act of god or an instance of magic, and it is fair to say that invoking these explanations indicates an obvious lack of important information about the event. Therefore, because the deterministic processes of evolution are the only reason we can avoid anything at all, determined avoidance is the only really authentic kind of avoidance.

Another worthwhile objection expresses contention about the role of chance in deterministic avoidance. Determinism, at the outset, seems to exclude chance.

“C'mon. If everything is determined, what is left to chance?”

Once again, this objection confuses the notion of deterministic chance that Dennett provides a way of thinking about. According to Dennett, chance does not need to be “causeless” in the sense that a chance event pops into being literally from nowhere. Furthermore, chance should not be considered excluded from determinism, because separating chance from determinism leads to the same kind of dualist thinking that we are trying to avoid in the first place. Chance can still exist in a deterministic world and follow all the rules of necessity, possibility, and causation that we commonly observe. A chance event can be thought of as something that occurs with causal connections that are either too complex or too minute to be scrutable. Take rolling dice for example. We normally consider a proper dice roll to be an indeterministic chance event. In fact, our wagers depend on its legitimate randomness. However, the outcome of the dice roll depends entirely on miniscule deterministic forces at work on it from the time the dice leave the dealer’s hand to the time they settle on the felt table of a casino. Variables like wind resistance, trajectory, tiny variations in the surface of the dice, and so forth into the vast complexity of the physical universe all stack up to determine the outcome. In other words, chance events are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. The whole point of chance, however, is that no one knows enough of this highly detailed information to make an accurate prediction. Therefore, events that occur with complex and practically untraceable variables take on the appearance of chaos. For all practical purposes chance is epistemically tamper-proof, and effectively as opaque as any indeterministic randomness. Physicists refer to this as deterministic chaos. This appearance, however, can be called an illusion when it leads us to infer indeterminacy where there is none. This kind of thinking may require a different understanding of the normal notion of chance, but it is necessary for accurately grasping the forces that determine the extent of our freedom, which is a function of our external and internal physical environments.

There are reasons beyond the tidiness of scientific uniformity to favor determinism over indeterminism. Imagine finding yourself in a violent lightning storm. A five-acre field stands between you and the shelter of your country home. Would you rather traverse this field knowing that a bolt of lightning could strike anywhere, anytime with no possible causal explanation? Or would you prefer a deterministic world where staying low, avoiding tall metallic objects and bodies of water would actually decrease your chances of being struck?

Maybe.

The deterministic world is the only world where effective avoidance is even possible. How can you avoid a completely chaotic and indeterministic event? Granted, lightning is for all practical purposes unpredictable in both deterministic and indeterministic worlds, but at least scientific knowledge is possible regarding the tendencies of the phenomenon in deterministic worlds, providing us with opportunities for genuine avoidance. Even full predictive knowledge of the phenomenon is theoretically possible in deterministic worlds, if only for a LaPlacian Demon (Dennett 28).

(LaPlace’s Demon refers to a thought experiment that originated in 1814 from Pierre-Simon LaPlace. Theoretically, if a being possesses complete information about the atomic and subatomic levels of reality in a deterministic universe, the being could explain and predict any past or future event with absolute precision.)

So there’s no cause for wonder why a world in which my head could explode for no reason at all would be less appealing than a world where rational explanations are prevalent and available. An indeterministic universe would leave us much more stranded for knowledge because it would keep us from knowing about the world. In the deterministic world we live in, our epistemic horizons are comparatively broader.

Yes it's true, indeterminism = Scanners.

Even more progress toward a “happy” determinism is made when it is understood that determinism does not imply fixed natures. It is natural to fear that determinism results in inability to change one’s character or lot in life, but nothing about determinism merits this anxiety. As Dennett points out, no contradiction exists in saying something can be determined to be mutable, unpredictable, or apparently chaotic (Dennett 90). Just because the laws governing the micro-events that determine our possibilities are largely outside our control does not mean we are without the capacity to influence the kind of people we become. It is all a matter of design. Human beings have evolved the ability to learn, improve, and change. Hence, we are determined to have an ability (evidently increasing) to change our natures and thus have some amount of influence over the outcomes in our futures. The actual extent of this freedom might not be quite what we are used to believing, but we’re better off avoiding delusions of grandeur. If freedom is a spectrum, humans are located somewhere on it, moving (it is hoped) in a direction of increase. The fact remains that determinism results in a future (not a nature) that can be, in principle, known and thus is fixed in some important sense. However, humans are not LaPlacian Demons. We live within soft epistemic boundaries that make it improbable enough to thoroughly predict our own futures, so we experience our prospects as subjectively open, which makes us feel free. If this produces the hollow feeling of something left to be wanted, then consider it a reality check.

“Take that, unreasonable expectations about life.”

Human beings have a natural tendency to overestimate their capacities. Our capacity for freedom is no exception. This impulse has traceable evolutionary benefits. Confidence and illusions of control bring social rewards (e.g. political power, successful mating, stronger social networks and support systems). But what accounts for this exaggeration, and is it necessarily wrong? What about the value of a conceptually flexible free will? A free will that is sensitive to our beliefs about it? In this case it really does matter what we think about free will, because (like concepts of “true love,” or “evil”) free will is entirely politically defined. This is one of Dennett’s ongoing concerns. Rather than only peering into the complex features of the physical universe to discover the secrets of some mysterious freedom, (as some versions of Libertarianism attempt to do), why not seek an explanation that is more socio-cultural than metaphysical? Does being free depend on our sense that we are in fact acting freely? Is it simply a shared belief (like the value of money) that could disappear off the face of the earth as soon as everyone ceased to give it credence? Could our sense of freedom collapse like a troubled economy? How free we are (or equivalently how free we think we are) depends on how the progressing ideas of human intention, agency, and responsibility evolve over time within human culture. And this ideological evolution is only a continuation of a vast biological system of adaptations that have been hard at work since the dawn of life on this planet.

In this new light, freedom becomes a concept-dependent cluster of cultural information that causes us to have specific beliefs about what we are and what we are capable of (Dennett 176). So it becomes obvious why people are disposed to overestimate their freedom: natural selection favors it. If this is the case, as Dennett puts it, freedom is no different than our other shared beliefs about things like love or money. It is a meme fighting for survival in the grand arena of contemporary ideas, and a concept applied to specific areas of our lives to serve a cultural function, be it justice, morality, self-esteem, or any of the practical benefits of believing we are free. So if freedom really is one massive shared illusion, the issue becomes profoundly psychological. Given the expanding scientific knowledge humans are gaining about themselves and the demystification of consciousness and self, the goal of securing for ourselves a kind of freedom worth wanting becomes a matter of making calm rational strides toward understanding what free will is, rather than allowing our imaginations to run wild in some quixotic swordfight with determinism.

The urges to battle determinism have resulted in several objections to Dennett’s naturalistic compatibilism. The objection he specifically engages in Freedom Evolves is the quantum indeterminacy theory of libertarianism.

 

Closing the Cartesian Theater

Libertarianism (the apolitical variety) is a popular philosophical movement searching for a defense of indeterminism and to establish moral responsibility in the form of final or ultimate human agency. In order to solve the compatibility problem of free will and determinism, this theory turns to the subatomic world to explain how spontaneous freedom may be possible. What this requires is a vast logical leap from the frontier discoveries of quantum physics to a scantly explained induction about the indeterminacy of macro level decision-making. The instance of the theory Dennett takes issue with was formulated by Robert Kane and proposes that a libertarian freedom is the only way for human beings to be the ultimate source of their decision-making and thus be authentic moral agents. The idea is that if human action were only a mechanical function of a deterministic universe, then moral responsibility would cease to be meaningful. The only way for an act to qualify as moral is for the causal chain of action to end at some nexus of what Kane has termed “Ultimate Responsibility” (Dennett 99).

In other words, people only deserve credit for compassionate or charitable acts if they are the ones doing them, and not merely subjects involved in the serendipitous steps of a massive causal continuum. Libertarians have developed extravagant ways to pin down a stopping point in the dangerously spiraling causal chain of human action. These attempts have resulted in dualisms that try to isolate some notion of the agent self from the surrounding causal chain. The problem with this line of reasoning is that it usually requires an extremely fancy explanation that becomes increasingly improbable with every embellishment, or it necessitates a mystical resignation, a “passing of the buck” to some other problematic entity or force. Kane’s version of the theory tries to more clearly formulate an argument for indeterminacy, but in the end it still delegates the explanatory tasks to the obscure concepts of quantum chaos. This results in a story of free will that is fraught with plot holes. He attempts to ground the indeterminism of human action in the internal conflict of desire and intention that occurs when someone deliberates over a decision. This “conflict of will” results in multiple intersecting feedback loops of moral feelings, ambitions, motives, and other mental input that generates a chaotic system from which a decision to act is selected and outputted. The fact that this chaos is still deterministic chaos is something Kane recognizes, so he proposes that the actual indeterminacy is introduced via chaotic ripples emanating from the subatomic structure of reality (Dennett 105).

According to Kane, the indeterminacy of our actions (not just the deterministic randomness associated with the conflict of will) comes from the quantum noise generated within the very physical structure of our active neurons. This bona-fide indeterminacy introduces a genuine chaos into our actions and allows the system to escape the causal confines of determinism. A problem with this that Dennett identifies is that it shouldn’t matter whether a system is deterministically random or genuinely indeterministic. They both accomplish the same result and there is no significant functional difference between them. In a practical sense, an indeterministic dice roll adds nothing over a deterministically random one (because remember, we are not LaPlacian Demons). So, quantum indeterminacy is a gourmet but pointless extra ingredient in human decision-making.

Another more important problem is that Kane never adequately shows how exactly a quantum fluctuation of physical matter contributes to the indeterminacy of our actions and gives us freedom and ultimate agency. Even if this indeterminacy breaks the normal causal chain involved in a human action by stopping the regress at some flash quantum event, how can this event be considered one’s own? There’s no clear reason to assume that this moment of quantum fluctuation belongs in any meaningful sense to an Ultimately Responsible agent, just because the event occurs within the practical reasoning structure of the brain (especially considering that the brain’s practical reasoning structure was developed by deterministic processes). What Kane is missing is a solid way for this quantum event to not just occur within us, but actually belong to us in a real identity-forming sense. Kane supposes that this quantum randomness enables people to experience legitimate “self-forming actions” (SFA’s) that contribute to a person’s character and decision-making behavior. However, as Dennett argues there’s no real way to discern a legitimate SFA from an illegitimate one, which means this indeterminism theory offers no better way to verify or quantify a person’s agency (Dennett 117). Given all of this, the question remains: why should we have any reason to consider indeterministic actions more our own than deterministic ones?

“Whatever, dude. You just don’t get it.”

Like extra margarine or artificial sweetener, Kane’s sickly sweet theory is something easily done without. The indeterminism that Kane relies on to propel his theory is unnecessary and superfluous. Even if this highly unlikely amplified quantum fluctuation does add an element of indeterminacy to our self-forming actions, what difference does it make? The fact that a vital distinction cannot be found, let alone a thorough scientific explanation of the quantum physics at work does not do much to recommend the quantum indeterminacy theory.

This is especially the case given that more coherent explanations are available in the more clearly defined features of deterministic macro-events. Kane’s theory amounts to a muddy dualism. It uses a mysterious phenomenon to explain another mysterious phenomenon, and why rely on conjecture about the subatomic world we still understand so little about to explain consciousness? Using underdeveloped quantum theory to explain philosophical problems like free will and agency is precarious, because it leads to absurd conclusion-jumping. The supposed "quantum fluctuation" of Ultimate Responsibility is highly susceptible to exaggeration, because it is so glamorously newfangled. As Dennett says, something that can explain everything is in danger of being able to explain nothing. The perception or experience of human agency is a macroscopic phenomenon that can be understood in terms of deterministic processes without indulging in the extravagance of quantum indeterminacy. The theories of Dennett and Wegner help define this emerging picture of consciousness and make progress toward a more scientifically coherent view of freedom and the self.

Ladies and gentleman, it is now safe to exit the Cartesian Theater.

(Thanks for sticking around, and stay tuned for Part 2 of this article, which will be posted next Sunday.)