Maybe the free will debate is really about the scope of causal influences on our decisions.
With Daniel Dennett’s death, a lot of podcasters have been replaying his interviews, many of which concern his stance as a free will compatibilist. That and a recent Mind Chat episode focused on Kevin Mitchell’s strong emergence understanding of free will, left me mulling this subject again.
Cards on the table, my stance is pretty similar to Dennett’s. I’m a compatibilist who sees free will as the capacity to act with forethought, to simulate possible and probable consequences of an action and take them into account when making decisions. That ability makes the causal factors in our actions broader than the immediate circumstances, leaving something to judge aside from those circumstances, and making social responsibility a coherent and useful concept.
Of course, that isn’t libertarian free will, the putative ability that provides a freedom from the overall laws of physics. Often this is discussed in terms of determinism, with the idea that maybe if the laws have some kind of randomness in them, a level of indeterminism, it allows for an ability to have acted differently even with the same history of the universe up that point. But I can’t see how this works for social responsibility. If I can blame the deterministic laws of physics for my actions, why can’t I just as well blame the indeterministic laws?
And adding fundamental randomness actually reduces the type of freedom that makes responsibility reasonable. We want my actions based on my nature and experiences. If randomness undermines that, then how does it make sense to judge me for them? All randomness does is frustrate any ability to predict actions. But given the complexity of the processes involved with those decisions, there’s no feasible way to do that anyway.
No, for libertarian free will to be coherent, it requires that the causes of my actions transcend the causal framework of the universe, to be broader than or orthogonal to it. Which is why this type of free will is usually coupled with some form of mind-body dualism, that the mind is something different in kind. It also fits with religious traditions that involve an ultimate judge. For judging us to make sense, at least some of the causes of our actions have to be outside of that judge’s created framework. (Whether that makes sense theologically, I’ll leave to others to figure out.)
It’s also worth noting that this holds if we’re in a Matrix type simulation where our minds exist independent of the actual simulation. If the Matrix Architect judges Agent Smith, it has to be as a part of the simulation going wrong, whereas from his view actual humans like Neo have an independent will. From the Architect’s perspective, Neo’s mind is of a different kind from his body in the simulation. (David Chalmers makes a similar point in Reality+.)
So maybe the real distinction between free will libertarians and compatibilists is the scope of influences we regard as necessary for the label “free will”. Hard determinists tend to agree with libertarians on this, that the scope of that freedom must transcend physics (or at least standard physics). It’s just that hard determinists regard that as non-existent. Compatibilists generally agree with hard determinists on that non-existence, but disagree that smaller scopes of influence aren’t meaningful. It may not be for God or the simulation owner, but should be enough for human judges.
Unless of course I’m missing something?
Featured image credit
https://selfawarepatterns.com/2024/05/18/the-scope-of-free-will/
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