Roy Baumeister says “The essence of free will is that the person really could do more than one possible response to a given situation.”

If we could reproduce the “given situation” down to the atomic level, inside and outside the person, there’s no reason to suppose she would do other than what she did originally, barring some quantum indeterminism. But of course such indeterminism, should it play a role in behavior, contributes nothing the person can take credit or blame for since it wouldn‘t reflect her character or motives. So indeterminism doesn’t confer free will or responsibility “worth wanting,” as philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it in his book Elbow Room.

If we imagine the person acting in a slightly, somewhat, or greatly different situation than the given situation, then yes, it’s likely the person could and would have done otherwise (even without indeterminism), since most human agents have flexible behavioral repertoires that can (and usually do) respond to such differences.

This 2nd sense of could have done otherwise, what Dennett calls the “wide” sense,* and which is compatible with determinism, is all we need or want to be effective human agents who have an influence in the world. Indeterminism doesn’t add to our freedom or responsibility, so we needn’t hanker after it. We can make our peace with determinism should it turn out to be the case.

*see http://www.naturalism.org/choice_and_creativity.htm#chdo

Baumeister says

“Also, psychological causality as revealed in our labs is arguably never deterministic. Our studies show a change in the odds of one response over another. But changes in the odds entail that more than one response was possible. Our entire statistical enterprise is built on the idea of multiple possibilities. Determinism denies the reality of this. Statistics are just ways of coping with our ignorance, to a determinist - statistics do not reflect how reality actually works.”

The determinist, believing in the general reliability of cause and effect relationships discovered by science, has no problem with statistics as a reflection of how reality works, even in psychology. A statistical distribution of behavioral responses in an experimental situation simply reflects variability, whether controlled or uncontrolled. The variation in certain variables *determines* the varying outcomes, outcomes which are a subset of the multiple possibilities we can imagine would have occurred depending on the initial conditions. There would be no making sense of statistics unless there were reliable cause and effect, deterministic relationships between the (varying) initial conditions and subsequent outcomes. Of course there will be unknowns adding noise, but these aren’t of theoretical interest compared to the behavioral regularities, if any, revealed by the experiments.

There’s no leap of faith required to believe in determinism, it’s simply a plausible working assumption when trying to make sense of natural phenomena, including human beings. The opposite assumption, that there are no discoverable and reliable cause and effect relations that explain human behavior, or that there’s some sort of special human exemption from causality, is of no practical use in psychology and there's no evidence for it. Adding indeterminism to behavior to rescue free will doesn’t work, and there’s little or no evidence that indeterminism (real indeterminism, not just ignorance of initial conditions) explains much about why we behave the way we do.

I think the bulk of this article was a fair synopsis of Determinism--right up to near the end.

Then it took the very predictable (sic) bent that all such authors take who desperately wish to salvage so-called free-will (FW). This includes the irrational and indefensible assertion that "even though FW may be an illusion it's somehow better to continue to believe in it".

What is again missing is a logically-based, vs. emotionally-based, explanation as to exactly why this should be so. Yet, the author of this article actually describes Determinists as requiring the "leap of faith", and not those who cherish FW. Indeed!

In reality, FW is entirely faith-based, including the appeal this author makes by suggesting that since everything experienced "seems" to involve choice, therefore it does. In one breath the author is attempting to claim a scientific foundation to psychology and in the next--if not the same one--he is appealing to subjectivity as the ultimate test by which to measure all authenticity.

Let's ignore for a moment a tacit conclusion by this notion that hallucinations, delusions and illusions are thus as valid as mathematical formulas and consider this: so long as we dismiss empirically-based theories about human behavior in favor of subjective reports then there is no longer any point to the pursuit of psychology as a science, is there?

Far from being fatalistic, Determinism, like true sciences, seeks to simply set aside notions of choice in the pragmatic quest for understanding human behavior in order to hopefully improve the human condition.

Whereas FW is a self-refuting concept: to the degree choice is not caused it is random; to the degree it is random it cannot be "free". But this is not the end of hope because change is inevitable, eternal and cannot be entirely predictable.

But unpredictability should never be confused with being un-caused. To think otherwise may require a certain conceit, which is inherently also a part of the FW illusion mechanism.

I am a psychiatrist and a hard Determinist, yet I'm decidedly not fatalistic. And even I usually "feel" like I have choice. But, in the final analysis, I think it doesn't matter if we "feel like" we have choice or not; what really matters is what we humans do with the discovery that the universe, and everything in it, is determined.

Meanwhile, I submit that it is actually the anachronistic belief in FW, placed at the foundation for all social policies, that is responsible for the perennially miserable performance of our institutions. To defend FW despite this fact is ironically to perpetuate a truer form of fatalism.

Haven't many/most physicists rejected determinism? It's my understanding that the behavior of large, complex physical systems cannot be predicted with certainty. Also, that this is likely due to true randomness (not simply an inability to measure all the forces at play).

Why do so many psychologists cling to the outmoded idea of determinism if the hard sciences have rejected it? Human psychological functioning, embedded in the social and physical environment, surely must qualify as a large, complex system whose behavior cannot be predicted with certainty.