A Refreshing New Approach to the Free Will Debate

The debate about free will is interminable. Here are four brief videos I made—and below, the accompanying text—to clear things up.

Typically the debate focuses on whether humans have a choice. Here, based on my collaborations with  Harvard/Berkeley scientist Terrence Deacon I focus instead on will, addressing fundamental questions that the free will debate ignores: 

• How does will emerge as the will to live at the origin of life in an aimless chemical universe?
• How does will work?
• How does it change over the course of evolution out to the will expressed by us humans? 

Part one: Some-nipotence and Some-niscience

Yes, you have free will if we mean by it agency, the ability to act on your own behalf. In a word, you have will.

But how free? Depends what we mean by it. You’re free from absolute control by outside forces. You’re not just caused to act like some passive ragdoll. Rather, you have a degree of autonomy. You work with your circumstances but also act in resistance to them.

It’s obvious. When we die our will is gone. Our corpses succumb to circumstances. While alive we put up resistance. Circumstances don’t try to keep us alive. We do, using our circumstances against themselves. We quest for the wisdom to use circumstances we can’t change to leverage what we can. We quest because we don’t know for certain what will keep us going vs. kill us. Life is guesswork.

So free will as omnipotence and omniscience? Of course not. We’re some-nipotent and some-niscient. We have some power and knowledge and we quest for more, the wisdom to know the difference between what we can and can’t change and between what we do and don’t know.

Being alive we have freedom to exercise our will. And what is will? It’s your self-control which is paradoxically the opposite of freedom. But you know that. After all, why do you want freedom? Not so you can be a corpse free to degenerate into whatever state is imposed by circumstances. No, you want the freedom to exercise your focused will, your priorities, your self-control.

You have will, which means you no longer have to listen to those popular yet self-contradictory arguments for determinism that try to convince you that you’re just a complex ragdoll buffeted about by circumstances, arguments that amount to:

Convince yourself that you’re not a self.
Choose determinism.
Though you want to believe you have wants, you don’t.
Though you try to believe that you try, you don’t.
Though you believe you have beliefs, you don’t.

All self-contradictory nonsense. And why do we hear so much of it? I’ll address that in the next video.

Part Two: Scientific Self-Denial

Otherwise careful scientists and philosophers these days are on a campaign to convince you that you have no will. Why?

Because, to steer clear of theology’s supernatural explanation that had God causing everything, science steered itself into a dead end on selfhood. It was an over-correction, an overstep in the right direction. During the Enlightenment, breaking with supernatural, magical thinking, scientists became materialists, barring all but chemical cause-and-effect mechanical explanations.

By this reckoning, since we’re not God’s meat puppets we must have no will at all. Everything we do is just chemical cause-and-effect. It’s as though they think we could do without all words that imply will. All the everyday words like trying, wanting, caring, striving, effort, good, bad, better, worse, and every concept in the life and social sciences. Scientist’s began to talk as though we’re well on the way to explaining will as just physics and chemistry.

That’s throwing the will baby out with the theological bathwater!

In recent decades this nonsense perspective has become irresistible due to a slew of breakthroughs that make researchers think they’ve explained away will when they haven’t.

Computers became the new metaphor for minds. Our ability to simulate living behavior with computers led to an absurd assumption: If you can model life, you have explained how life really works.

We have completely deterministic computer simulations that give us ever-more convincing impressions that computers act as we do. A Rumba acts as though it wills or wants to clean your floors. Therefore, by the current reckoning, either the Rumba is alive, you’re just a machine or both.

Likewise our breakthroughs on DNA. Scientists can now waffle between treating us humans as machines programmed by DNA (which selfishly wills its own replication), or as programmed by evolution or like nothing but chemistry.

Researchers can have it all three ways but if you corner them, they’ll insist that DNA is just a lifeless chemical, and that therefore you’re just a complicated chemical machine. Designed and functional for whom? For your DNA? It’s just a chemical. For evolution? It’s not a designer. For yourself? No, they say, since scientists are still straining to avoid explaining selves.

All of this pretzel logic just so researchers don’t have to acknowledge and explain will, which you obviously have.

Part three: Interpretive Will

Will emerged long before us. Even the first living beings ever must have had a primitive will to live. The free will debate ignores the origin of will, instead arguing in circles about whether human consciousness affords us free will or whether instead we’re just cause-and-effect machines like all other organisms.

How can we ever hope to resolve the free will debate if we don’t even have a scientific explanation for what will is and how it starts? That’s like trying to explain lightning before understanding electricity. But who among the debaters thinks that the origin of life has anything to do with the free will debate? Most assume that evolution explains life, the random generation of replicator machines. Their only question is whether the machines are freed by the onset of consciousness.

Will isn’t limited to the kind of emotional and conscious motivations we humans have. It starts as the will to live, common to all organisms, including you with your unfelt, unconscious bodily functions humming away all day and night keeping you alive.

Will to live is the ability to make self-directed effort – effort by an organism for its benefit tailored to its environment. It’s right there in the biologist’s key terms: function, fitness, behavior.  

Behavior is not just any phenomena; it’s functional fitted effort ­– effort of value to the organism fitted to its circumstances.

Self-directed effort is an organism interpreting its environment for its own benefit.  The difference between chemistry’s cause-and-effect phenomena and life’s means-to-ends interpretative effort is also ignored in the free will debate.

Look, a stop sign doesn’t cause you to stop unless you crash into it. Rather you interpret it, making effort to stop for your benefit, fitted to traffic conditions. If stop signs caused stopping everything and everyone, even a pebble and the neighborhood cat would stop at them. Likewise, words don’t cause you to think. Rather, you interpret them and if they’re in a language you don’t know you can’t.
 
Pheromones don’t cause a bug to fight or mate, and changes in day length don’t cause plants to flower. Physical causes and willed interpretations are different, but again, this difference is ignored in the free will debate. That’s why determinism is credible at all. If interpretation is just cause and effect, then you just think you’re alive, even though you, thinking, and aliveness aren’t real.

Hear the pretzel logic?

What we’ve needed all along is a realistic scientific explanation for what will is and how it emerges from otherwise aimless chemistry. Scientist Terrence Deacon has such an explanation which I outline in these videos. If you’re mostly interested in human free will, visit the last video in this series here.

Part four: Words Gone Wide

In will to live, we begin to see the outlines of the kind of free will we really have. Free isn’t quite the right word for it. It would be more accurate to describe it as interpretive will. Organisms do the interpretation. Signs don’t cause us to interpret. And interpretation is not deterministic. It’s open to varied interpretation.

Simplifying, there are three kinds of interpretative will in us humans. First, there’s will to live present in all organism’s unfelt, and unconscious basic bodily functions. In animals, will becomes two-layered. There’s will to live, to which neurons and brains add feelings and what could be called will to learn, a capacity to interpret not just through evolved adaptive traits, but through trial-and-error learning.

With humans, a third level has evolved, will to think, conceptualize or more specifically symbolize through language. Language makes our interpretive behavior radically different from that of other organisms.

With language, it’s like the lights went on or the hallucinogens kicked in. We’re dazed by the range of things we can interpret in our self-directed effort. Our interpretable environments expand to include the real and imagined, in the distant past and distant future.

Your cat’s interpretations are not going to be influenced by concepts espoused millennia ago, but your interpretations might.

Just think of all of the languaged-based concepts that can influence how you interpret your circumstances and the way that subtle differences between them can lead you to radically different interpretations.

Our interpretive range, expanded through language, makes it hard to tell what we’ve interpreted, and hence gives the impression of total freedom. But that’s not an accurate description. You fetch influences from far away. It’s more accurate to describe our will as far-fetched, making us more visionary and more delusional than any other organisms.

We humans are living, feeling and thinking, we have will to live, will to learn and will to conceptualize through language. This unruly combination yields wildly non-determinate interpretive will. It’s not that we become freer. Rather, we interpret more broadly.

So a further refinement on what you’ve really got: You are not some wholly independent singular object, a soul or spirit or “consciousness” heavy-equipment driver that decides what your machine body does. You’re a three-way internal negotiation between living, feeling and conceptualizing, each an influence from many directions on how you interpret your circumstances for your own benefit.

In sum, all of us organisms have will to live, functionally fitted behavior, or self-directed effort. It’s there at the origin of life and it expands through evolution: feeling in animals and then out to us in language which expands the range influences that we can interpret.

Often in philosophy, we get stuck on a false dichotomy borne of intuitive categories. Free will vs. determinism is a good example. We cycle endlessly over which of these intuitive categories fits, without stopping to ask the questions behind the debate, in this case: What is will, how does it start and how does it really work? When we address those questions we discover what we’ve really got, and thus get over our false dichotomy. We have neither determinism nor free will but something else: Interpretive will.

Visit these videos for a scientific explanation for the emergence of interpretive will at the origin of life. Or this video on how having language makes us like a chronically-hallucinating mammal.

And congratulations on your some-nipotent, some-niscient interpretive will! May your quest for the wisdom to interpret what fit benefit you long into your language-imaginable future!