S15, E2B: The B-Side/ "Navigating Uncertainty"
Series 15: How to Remain Blameless while Calling BS on 'No Free-Will'
The experience of making decisions is our most compelling personal reason for believing we are self-determining. The claim that free-will is an illusion begs the question, because effectively, it rules out any counter-argument or evidence that relies on our lived experience. However, even if this feeling of self-determinism is an illusion, that’s not the same as saying it’s nothing.
In S15, E1: The Railroaded Children: ‘No Free-Will’, it was mooted that to understand free-will, we have to determine what consciousness is first. Yet, no understanding is required to recognise that if the experience of free-will exists in humans, whatever it is must have evolved to endow us with survival advantage. Therefore, whether our understanding of it is illusory or not, free-will has an influence on how we interact or cope with the physical world.
The conclusive answer as to whether free-will exists has to be ‘yes’. Here, ‘hallucinations’ provide us with an apt analogy, because they are perceptions of things that are not physically present. Would it make sense to suggest that hallucinations are not experiences and antipsychotics are pointless?
Without free-will all bets are off because discussing it becomes meaningless.
In science, observation typically precedes interpretation, so even free-will is merely an illusion, it must have a cause that scientists can seek. Speculations about causation tend to centre around the idea that free-will might be explained by randomised elements within the biology of thinking. It’s ludicrously easy to destroy free-will arguments predicated on ‘random’ elements, but it is worth considering why it is, that initially they can seem plausible,
To be reactive, we have to mirror the unpredictability to engage with it, for instance when playing table tennis1. ‘Chaotic’ people can destabilise others in their environment because it is difficult to respond to them rationally and be effective. If we are responding to events in our environment that emerge from chaotic systems, mightn’t it induce a feeling that our actions are sometimes irrational, or even erratic? See S5,E2: Randomness, Strawmen and Piñatas.
Random or Just Unknown?
There can be no prior knowledge of the outcome of a truly random process because that contains maximum uncertainty; but ‘uncertainty’ can just be a case of not having access to the information. An individual’s decision making process is not random it’s opaque. Sure, if we know a person it is often possible to anticipate their actions in a given situation, but that’s precisely because we have empirical information about them that we can use to simulate what they might do. That does not make them deterministic, it simply means they have some internal consistency, as you might expect of a stable personality,
Any gamble is an attempt to manage the uncertainty by playing the odds as may be determined from the available information. In a fair coin toss, the call of heads or tails is based on what the information tells us, i.e. our chances are 50%. To have confidence in better than even chances would seem misguided, but if perceptions of luck cause us to be more optimistic about outcomes, ultimately that assessment comes from us.
Additionally (and I am not sure this requires further explanation) our uncertainty informs our sense of jeopardy and our sense of jeopardy informs our ability to be certain.
Whenever we make anything other than the most instinctive decision (system 1 thinking as per Daniel Kahneman), what makes one decision easy and another difficult is the degree of certainty. Uncertainty results from a lack of information i.e. it’s an information-availability problem. That problem can be broken down further to the availability of detection and the availability of comprehension.
Those with specific expertise, training and access to information within a given domain (environment), will be better able to make decisions in that environment because their familiarity will lend certainty.
So a consultant surgeon will on average, be better equipped to make real time medical decisions during an invasive procedure, than a nurse or surgical technologist in attendance. Your legal representation’s knowledge of law will likely make them more able to defend your interests in a court action than you.
Education and skills-training give people the ability to function especially well in specific environments (operating theatre, court of law etc.) and therefore, when novating certain decisions to those with special competencies, the unspoken assumption is that within their particular specialisation, they are better able to navigate the uncertainties than us.
Swinging At Pinatas
Sapolsky recently said this in a segment on neurotransmitters:
… occasionally you see neurons that will just spontaneously dump their neurotransmitters out of their little packets - whoa randomness […], well there’s the usual machinery for dumping neurotransmitter when you want to and it’s incredibly complicated […], so like, something [or] somebody is not looking at the control panel when they should be inside that neuron and [they] accidentally activate the ‘dump the neurotransmitter’ mechanism - “oh it’s just a hiccup in the system”. No. It turns out spontaneous neurotransmitter release has a completely different mechanistic pathway […] you evolved a capacity for spontaneous release, and then you look more closely and it turns out there’s certain times when these random events (sic) occur in your brain more often than others, different physiological states […] there are points where your brain determines it’s time to be indeterministic for a bit, that sure is not free will…
There’s no Free Will. What Now? - Robert Sapolsky, Within Reason, Alex O’Connor
So he says that neurotransmitters appear to be spontaneously released before pointing out that this ‘randomness’ is restricted to periods within certain physiological states. Evidently those states are causal factors and the fact that the behaviour can be attributed to them means they are not random at all. What he is trying to say is that this neurological behaviour is not a sign of free-will. I don’t mind conceding that we can add that to the useless and practically infinite category of things that are not free-will, along with respiration and toenail growth, but so what?
… that’s as much free will as like you take an improv theatre class […] and the teacher tells you ‘okay so now we are going to start the scene, go for it’ that teacher has determined you are going to be indeterministic now…. there is not randomness there.
ibid.
It feels like bullying to point it out, but what does it mean when someone who does not believe in free-will says, ‘[the] teacher has determined’? Using the example of the ‘hungry judge’ Sapolsky discusses how biological stressors compromise our judgement and ability to see things from other people’s perspectives. Look at the sixty-second YouTube clip in the following link - The Hungry Judge - and tell me this is not loaded with assumptions of intent and free-will. He’s having it both ways don’t you think?
Who knows where free-will resides? One thing’s for sure is that we’ll never run out of places where it is absent including the strawman about spontaneous neurotransmitter-release. Most of the 8 billion people in the world are not Taylor Swift but how many people should we eliminate from our enquiries before concluding she doesn’t exist?
Sapolsky points out that any notion that quantum uncertainty can bubble up though all the orders of magnitude and somehow accumulate to have behavioural effects is absurd. But who would think it credible to argue it’s the source of our free-will?
The Wave Function as Metaphor
The collapse of the wave function is a useful metaphor for the counterfactual collapse that accompanies a decision once it has been established. If we suppose that the decision is made subconsciously, only to be observed by the conscious mind, then like the wave function it’s the ‘observer’ that triggers the counterfactual collapse - or at least the awareness of it. I make no extravagant pseudoscientific claims, and it cannot be over-emphasised that this is only a metaphor, albeit one that is better than you might imagine.
I accept that our minds are formed by our environment but find it entirely consistent to extend that argument to hypothesise that our mind is the environment that creates our thoughts. We appear to act on some thoughts and disregard others, but if that choice is not self-determined, what would be the use of the disregarded thoughts or notions of the counterfactual? In fact what would be the utility of creating a simulation of possible outcomes at all?
The mind is integral to our sense of self and to have any ability to direct our thoughts is to be in possession of free-will. My argument hinges on the supposition that consciousness must provide organisms a survival benefit to have passed through natural selection.
Apart from our experience of consciousness (which some of the more obtuse philosophers may attempt to deny) what do we know about the biological embodiment of sentience? Sure we can say it is an emergent property of our neural networks but what is the physical mechanism of awareness? I talk about that in the episode that follows.
Next - S15,E3: A Unit of Consciousness.
Mirroring here is about engaging with something in what might be thought of as an equal and opposite way - analogous to Newton’s third law of motion.