Sigh. Once again someone has written that human beings only think they have free will, when in “reality,” implacable physical forces create the illusion that we have the power to decide. Under this view, every decision we make and act we perform is forced unseen upon us by physical laws–genes, chemicals, whatever. The latest example is in USA Today, by Jerry Coyne, a professor (of course!) of ecology and evolution. From “Why You Don’t Really Have Free Will:”
But two lines of evidence suggest that such free will is an illusion. The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the “choosing.” And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics.
True “free will,” then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain’s structure and modify how it works. Science hasn’t shown any way we can do this because “we” are simply constructs of our brain. We can’t impose a nebulous “will” on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.
Science has not proved that we are mere constructs of our brain. Indeed, it doesn’t yet know what the mind is, much less how consciousness works. And our thoughts and emotions are influenced by far more than mere chemical interactions and atomic vibration. For example, contrary to the assertion, we can will ourselves to change the way we react to certain things. People do it all the time. It is nonsensical to say that one had no choice but to first, want to change, and then no choice whether to actually succeed. Conscious awareness actually changes everything–adds a dimension, if you will–and to say we don’t have free will is to actually say we are not really conscious.
Then we get into Freudian (generically speaking) territory:
Psychologists and neuroscientists are also showing that the experience of will itself could be an illusion that evolution has given us to connect our thoughts, which stem from unconscious processes, and our actions, which also stem from unconscious process. We think this because our sense of “willing” an act can be changed, created, or even eliminated through brain stimulation, mental illness, or psychological experiments. The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we’re characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we’re puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics.
Please. This isn’t anything more than a hypothesis. Besides, how can there be “mental illness” if we are just so many “meat computers?” In such a world, there is no wrong way to act, nor a right one. Coyne agrees:
And there are two upsides. The first is realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains, and contemplating the notion that things like consciousness, free choice, and even the idea of “me” are but convincing illusions fashioned by natural selection. Further, by losing free will we gain empathy, for we realize that in the end all of us, whether Bernie Madoffs or Nelson Mandelas, are victims of circumstance — of the genes we’re bequeathed and the environments we encounter.
How can we gain empathy if we have no free will? How can we gain anything at all if we are merely flotsam and jetsam on the currents of atoms? This is Dada talk.
The attack on free will is an attack on human exceptionalism, religion, and moral accountability–and a way of promoting and justifying relativism. It is a means of allowing anything and judging nothing because whatever we do, it wasn’t essentially us doing it, anyway. But somehow the I Robot peddler thinks we will be able to choose to use this information to build a better world! He ends:
With that under our belts, we can go about building a kinder world.
What? We can take knowledge and apply it? That contradicts Coyne’s entire thesis.
First, if everything is merely physicis, why is kinder to be valued more than brutality? Indeed, to even assert that kind is preferable to brutal can’t be done absent free will. And how do we go about making a kinder world if we can’t help ourselves either working toward or against that end? Finally, physics is an implacable natural force. Kindness is a human moral concept. The two are unrelated, or to borrow an old saying from the feminists, physics is to kindness what a fish is to a bicycle.
In short, what utter drivel.
January 2nd, 2012 | 5:55 pm
Apparently the laws of physics compel Jerry Coyne to craft clauses such as “The ineluctable scientific conclusion . . .” and “by losing free will we gain empathy”.
Nelson Mandela is a victim of circumstance?
Apparently physics is the new predestination.
What depresses me is thinking about how much money this guy probably earns from the, apparently unwilled, tapping of his fingers on a keyboard.
So if we don’t have free will, I imagine that monkeys don’t have it either which of course means, ineluctably, that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards could in fact have written the entire works of William Shakespeare.
I had to write that.
holyterror Reply:
January 3rd, 2012 at 4:58 pm
@Peter S, Of course, Bernie Madoff was also a victim of circumstance as well! Why can’t all those victims of his just be more kind and understand that?!!!!
Harryhammer Reply:
January 4th, 2012 at 12:04 pm
@Peter S,
Monkey-like in every way:
Machiavellianism, it is the art of manipulation in which others are socially manipulated in a way that the user benefits from it, whether it is to the detriment of the people being used or not.
The user would feel little to no remorse or empathy when their actions harm others.
Dario Maestripieri, an expert on primate behaviour and an Associate Professor in Comparative Human Development and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago.
After humans, rhesus macaques are one of the most successful primate species on our planet.
Rhesus macaques live in complex societies with strong dominance hierarchies and long-lasting social bonds between female relatives.
Individuals constantly compete for high social status and the power that comes with it using ruthless aggression, nepotism, and complex political alliances.
The tactics used by monkeys to increase or maintain their power are not much different from those Machiavelli suggested political leaders use during the Renaissance.
Alpha males, who rule the 50 or so macaques in the troop, use threats and violence to hold on to the safest sleeping places, the best food, and access to the females in the group with whom they want to have sex.
Like human dictators intent on holding power, dominant monkeys use frequent and unpredictable aggression as an effective form of intimidation.
Less powerful members of the rhesus macaque group are marginalized and forced to live on the edges of the group’s area, where they are vulnerable to predator attacks.
They must wait for the others to eat first and then have the leftovers; they have sex only when the dominant monkeys are not looking.
Male macaques form alliances with more powerful individuals, and take part in scapegoating on the lower end of the hierarchy, a Machiavellian strategy that a mid-ranking monkey can use when under attack from a higher-ranking one.
Altruism is rare and, in most cases, only a form of nepotistic behavior.
Mothers help their daughters achieve a status similar to their own and to maintain it throughout their lives.
Females act in Machiavellian ways also when it comes to reproduction.
They make sure they have lots of sex with the alpha male to increase the chances he will protect their newborn infant from other monkeys 6 months later.
Struggles for power within a group sometimes culminate in a revolution, in which all members of the most dominant family are suddenly attacked by entire families of subordinates.
These revolutions result in drastic changes in the structure of power within rhesus societies, not unlike those occurring following human revolutions.
There is one situation, however, in which all of the well-established social structure evaporates: when a group of rhesus macaques confronts another one and monkey warfare begins.
Rhesus macaques dislike strangers and will viciously attack their own image in a mirror, thinking it’s a stranger threatening them.
When warfare begins, “Even a low-ranking rhesus loner becomes an instant patriot.
Every drop of xenophobia in rhesus blood is transformed into fuel for battle,” Maestripieri wrote.
January 2nd, 2012 | 9:20 pm
“In short, what utter drivel.”
You need to be more empathetic. Dr. Coyne is merely a victim of circumstances that cause him to believe and to write as he does.
January 2nd, 2012 | 9:33 pm
Woo hoo! A chance to advance my latest crackpot theory.
I had the thought the other day that free will finds a parallel in the economic concept of disposable income. In economics, gross income is fairly meaningless to economic decisions unless you account for all the necessary expenses first. So a person with limited income and no commitments may have more disposable income, and therefore more choices, than a person with more income and a big mortgage, multiple child support payments, etc. etc.
Similarly, free will comes in once your stomach’s been filled and you have a safe place to sleep at night. The benefit of civilization is that it makes it easier to fulfill basic needs, giving us more options, thus more opportunity to exercise free will. Which is how I got to spend today eating unhealthy food and watching football. Praise be free will!
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
January 2nd, 2012 at 9:48 pm
Sorry. No cigar. You are limiting choices to major issues. But even there, some very poor people deal with their poverty by trying harder. Some by turning criminal. Some by resigning themselves. Etc. My grandmother came to America at age 16 from Italy, which was her parents’ will, choices they freely made for the family. Some by sneaking into richer countries, etc. If we are competent, we all have continual choices that are ours to make. They might not be desirable, but they always exist.
January 2nd, 2012 | 11:40 pm
“I was born like this, I had no choice,
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
and twenty-seven angels from the great beyond
came and tied me to this table here in the Tower of Song.”
Leonard Cohen
January 3rd, 2012 | 12:56 am
The very fact that Coyne is trying to persuade others of his view assumes that we are free to reason and come to conclusions about what is true based on the evidence. But if his view is true then all of our beliefs are predetermined. If we have no free will, then Coyne was predetermined (by genetics, environment, etc.) to argue that we have no free will.
January 3rd, 2012 | 1:01 pm
If human thought is the result of essentially inanimate chemical and physical reactions in the brain, then there can be no free will. What we see as evidence of free will must therefore be an illusion. But, there is another explanation, although Coyne is right to say that free will “would require us to somehow step outside of our brain’s structure and modify how it works. Science hasn’t shown any way we can do this.” He says it’s because we’re constructs of our brains, so a priori science has excluded the possibility of an immaterial, intellectual soul that uses the brain the way an artist uses a brush. Moreover, physical sciences, concerned as they are with physical phenomena, have no way of detecting the immaterial soul.
Except through effects of the soul. Free will manifests itself in freely chosen actions, which scientists have called an illusion. But — there is no evidence that it is an illusion. How on earth can the laws of physics impel me to write this? That is even more of a leap than postulating the existence of the immaterial soul: That molecules without knowledge can cause behaviors of in complex organisms, such as a human being writing an article at a computer.
It’s not relativism. It’s anarchy. It’s individualized autocracy.
January 3rd, 2012 | 1:10 pm
“What utter drivel.” Hear, hear!
Gotta love the anthropomorphism by which Coyne tries to make a little sense out of his nonsense. The laws of physics “script parts,” and natural selection “crafts illusions.” Maybe we should capitalize them and call them by personal pronouns: “The Laws of Physics, those great and wise Governors of the universe, have scripted my part, and I am bound to play it.” “Natural Selection has made her decision and saddled me with the illusion she has crafted.” (I think Natural Selection sounds like a female.)
January 3rd, 2012 | 5:02 pm
There is something about Coyne’s argument that reminds me of the atheist critique of Intelligent Design. By which I mean, he has a sort of absurd fatalism about determining the nature of the mind and will, and his “theory” is a sort of scientific jargony attempt to fill-in-th-gaps with nothing that is actually Real.
Of course, I think that most of the God-in-the-gaps critique itself misses the point, so maybe Coyne has something that I just can’t see.
January 3rd, 2012 | 5:02 pm
What odd times we live in when we have to come up with detailed rational arguments to defend the only real self-evident conclusion in existence, cogito ergo sum. It’s relativism thinly veiling a core of hopeless nihilism eating at the corners of their minds.
January 3rd, 2012 | 5:16 pm
Jerry Coyne has spent a considerable amount of time chastizing Francis Collins, for being a religious believer, even asserting that Dr. Collins should resign as head of the NIH, since he can’t supposedly be a good scientist and a good Chrisitian. Coyne has also called John Haught a “coward” because the latter refused to give his permission to allow a video of a debate between himself and Coyne (John Haught’s reason for not wanting the tape released, was a very good one. but he later agreed to allow it to be released to the public. I hope Coyne has apologized for calling him a “coward”, but I don’t know if he has.). He’s also gone after, in print, Michael Behe, for the latter’s support of Intelligent Design.
I could give more examples. What’s my point? It seems strange that someone who doesn’t believe in Free Will can consistently go after anybody for anything. Aren’t they just behaving as they should, as he’s behaving as he should?
January 3rd, 2012 | 7:17 pm
The “attack” on free-will is not anti-human exceptionalism.
Quite the opposite, it is quintessential human exceptionalism.
Here is why:
Humans are excptionally defined by our obligate pipedalism, high functioning cerebral cortex, usage of tools, and scientific inquiry.
Scientific inquiry has lead many to question whether “free-will” (as defined by Coyne, here) exists. This is human exceptionalism because no other extant animal that we know of can probe such hypotheses.
Smith applies his definition of human exceptionalism inconsistently and incorrectly.
Further, Smith asks “How can we gain empathy if we have no free will?” He then dismisses such conclusions as “dada talk”, without providing a shred of counter-evidence disproving the contention.
Here is how we can gain empathy sans free-will (from the article):
“It is unlikely that empathy is the product of random mutation and just happened in humans without any evolutionary
history. During the evolution of the mammal
and primate brain, the organization of the neural activity has been shaped by the need for rapid evaluation of the
motivations of others (Brothers, 1989). Indeed, affective communication is widely distributed in the animal kingdom
(e.g., Buck & Ginsburg, 1997; Preston & de Waal,
2002). It has a survival value and contributes to inclusive fitness because it assists individuals in gathering and hunting for food, detecting predators, courtship, and ensuring reproductive success (Plutchik, 1987).”
Jackson and Decety
The Functional Architecture of Human Empathy
Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews 2004 3: 71
Further, empathy appears common in Nature. For example,
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1427.short
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
January 3rd, 2012 at 7:43 pm
The article you quote is pure supposition. The idea we have no free will, at least as expressed in the article I quoted, is nonsensical.
holyterror Reply:
January 4th, 2012 at 6:33 am
@David, Thank you for presenting this basic argument often made for the evolutionary basis for empathy.
It gives me a chance to point out that if we see and speak of empathy *merely* in the language and context of being a byproduct of evolution then it leaves us basically without any obligation to value it above other qualities, except one that helps us to survive.
Which is a pretty significant quality, and certainly as social beings we can and do place high values on those things which help us to continue as a species.
BUT. If we remove free will (or something uniquely human that is more than a sum of evolutionary parts), and cause empathy to be valued specifically because it helps us to survive (and not, say, because it is an appropriate and noble expression of our unique humanness which is inviolable), then we have made the case for valuing whatever it is that helps us to survive; theoretically if empathy ceases to be important to us as a species then it is no longer a good or desirable trait.
I am not going to make this any longer right now, but I would argue that this inexorably leads to utter materialism with respect to not only people but all living things, and thus undermines any value system whatsoever.
The reduction of free will to “merely” anything at all, but especially in this way, leads to utilitarianism. Utilitarianism, the value system of materialists, ultimately makes a case for its own moral destruction and is thus not a value system at all.
January 4th, 2012 | 8:05 am
Where does he get his evidence that the human brain is nothing but the processes of physics and molecules? No one yet has been able to predict the behaviour or mechanics of the brain through the workings of simply the laws of physics or chemistry. This seems more and more patently absurd as research into brain physiology continues.
The brain’s functions work in patterns of united networks. The brain functions as a whole. Individual molecules and neurons cannot function this way on their own (unless you are going to posit some sought of intelligent activity to individual cells that tell them to act in unison with other cells). Thus the laws that describe the behaviour of brains must be sui generis and hence it is entirely plausible that there is a unique thing we call free will that is inherent to the human constitution.
Coyne says that
We can’t impose a nebulous “will” on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.
Is he not familiar with recent neurobiological work? The brain CAN change itself in ways that a computer can not. The brain is a dynamic organism that is always changing its own structure. It is entirely unique in this regard. See Norman Doidge “The Brain that Changes Itself”
http://www.normandoidge.com/normandoidge/MAIN.html
January 5th, 2012 | 6:06 am
One can believe (or disbelieve) that there’s no free will without knowing any brain science. For example, one can believe that the weather in the next four weeks is determined by the complex dance of particles, wind currents, heat and other physical systems, and are therefore the product of physics. It doesn’t matter how much one knows about meteorology or physics of the atmosphere, he can still believe that the weather is caused by physical laws.
Jerry Coyne’s (materialist) argument:
1. Anything that exists is made of matter.
2. All material beings are bound by the laws of physics.
3. I exist.
4. Therefore I’m a material being, including my brains.
4. Therefore my brains are bound by the laws of physics.
5. Therefore I have no free will.
I think the logical structure is valid. To deny the existence of self is simply too absurd, and to deny the physics/matter relation is also a bit wild. So, what are the possible objections?
-immediate experience disproves this claim
-claim that human beings are not composed entirely of matter
-denying free will leads to contradictions
-denying free will produces a defeater for believing that claim
Also the “ought implies can” -problem: “If there’s no free will, there’s no good or evil” is the same as “If there’s good and evil, there’s free will”. Then the person must weigh which one is more plausible: the existence of good and evil, or that there’s no free will.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
January 5th, 2012 at 10:53 am
Nice comment. It seems to me that denying free will almost denies life. What we think of is life is just chemical and atomic reactions, like a cloud. So, there is only animated matter and inanimate matter, but in the end, we aren’t that much different from a stalagtite.
January 5th, 2012 | 7:42 am
If Coyne’s premise is true, then one can reason that our free will is governed by the enigmatic quantum physics. Since my thoughts are the results of neuron activity. The synaptic clef, the distance that electro-chemical signals travel, is about one angstrom; well within the realm of quantum physics. Quantum physics is probabilistic in nature and appears many times to be bizarre and counterintuitive (much like Coyne’s ideas). If physics were governing our free world, the world would be devoid of rational thought.
January 5th, 2012 | 9:53 am
Coyne writes: “The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they’re finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.”
It is interesting to me that there is an entire branch of philosophy addressed to these issues that is called the philosophy of the mind. The issues that Coyne addresses have, for the most part, been contemplated and debated for several hundred years by philosophers. More modern philosophers who specialize in these issues have a sophisticated understanding of the latest developments in neuroscience and the biology of the human brain.
Coyne seems to think that he has some novel ideas that would contribute to the debate in this field of philosophy. In fact, his column reads at best like a freshman’s essay.
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