Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.
How many choices have you made since waking up this morning? Perhaps you considered whether to go to your 8 a.m. class, decided between cereal and a bagel for breakfast or mulled over what shirt would go best with those jeans. You might have thought long and hard about some of these choices, but you probably took at least one thing for granted — that you had a “choice” in the first place. Today, I’ll be reflecting not on any particular choices you might make, but on the concept of choice itself, and how the way we think about choice has real implications for how we should live our lives.
I’ll get right to the point: I think “free will” is an illusion, and that no one really chooses anything, ever. That said, there are few things that feel more obvious and intuitive than the idea of free will, and this intuition presents a pretty large hurdle that I must clear if I’m to convince you otherwise. For this reason, I ask you to consider the following argument as concerning everyone in the world except yourself — as if you’re the only person in the world with free will.
The argument itself is almost distressingly simple. First, I take it that physical systems behave deterministically. This is to say that, given the state of some physical system at a given time and the rules that govern it, I can, in principle, predict the state of the system at any future time with 100 percent accuracy.
For example, if you tell me about gravity and drop an apple from a table, I can successfully predict that it will fall to the ground. Even seemingly random systems such as coin flips are still deterministic — if you tell me exactly what angle and height the coin starts at, how much force you apply to it, where you apply the force, etc., I can theoretically predict heads or tails every time.
Second, I take it that human brains are physical systems, and thus your brain makes choices based on the exact configuration of its synapses, which are molded by your upbringing, genes and other variables. This doesn’t seem too controversial; I can take your brain out and poke it, so it must be physical, and if I do take your brain out you won’t be making any more choices, so the two must be pretty intertwined. From here, the conclusion follows: Human brains, being physical systems, must behave deterministically, so there must not be such things as “choices.” Free will is therefore an illusion.
(As an aside: Technically, physical systems operate probabilistically rather than deterministically due to quantum mechanics, but that doesn’t make a difference for free will unless you think humans have the ability to collapse the wave functions of particles in their brain in a certain way.)
Convinced? I didn’t think so. Most people tend to react pretty negatively to this argument, not just because it feels like we have free will, but because it feels like you lose too much when you give up the idea of free will. For instance, how are we supposed to blame people for doing bad things — or indeed, to think about right and wrong at all — if no one has any choice in the matter?
It does seem pretty clear that reasoning about moral matters affects the way people act. If you’ve ever considered doing something, but didn’t because you realized it would be wrong, your actions were affected by moral reasoning. It doesn’t matter whether you could’ve decided otherwise; the deterministic process inside your brain was affected by thoughts about morality, so those thoughts are important. We can thus still have fully justified moral systems without free will.
In fact, dispensing with free will validates a lot of the intuition that many progressive types have regarding things like poverty and criminal justice. One of the reasons we put people in prison is to punish them for their “choices.” If we accept that criminal behavior is the deterministic consequence of disposition, socioeconomic conditions and other factors, then throwing someone in prison for things clearly outside their control seems utterly pointless. Rather, rehabilitation should be the de facto solution for criminal behavior, with imprisonment reserved for the irreformable.
Similarly, this idea helps put a finger on what exactly is so ridiculous about arguments that the poor should “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and, in effect, simply choose not to be poor. There is a wealth of research establishing the self-perpetuating nature of poverty. It isn’t merely that the poor lack the will to endure whatever suffering might be required to escape poverty — it’s that their circumstances are such that, often quite literally, they don’t have a choice.
Perhaps the deepest concern is something like, “What’s the point of life if no one can choose anything?” The unsatisfying answer is that this question is akin to asking, “What’s the point of sand?” Human existence doesn’t need a point — it simply is, like everything else in the universe.
Of course, I can’t say for sure what the point of life is, with or without free will. My humble suggestion is that perhaps the point is simply to enjoy the ride, keeping in mind that everyone else is also just along for the ride, and treating them accordingly.
Joey Marcellino is a junior jazz saxophone, physics and philosophy major. He can be reached at fmarcel1@terpmail.umd.edu.
