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Chapter 8.
Asking When a Child Gains it
Illuminates the Incoherence of the
Concept "Free Will"
Often people will confuse the term
“free will” with the term “will.”
When people say that they have a
free will, they are actually saying
that they have a will. We make
decisions all of the time. These
decisions are based on reasons, or
causes. The notion that we can make
decisions that are not based on a
reason is incoherent. How can we
make a decision not based on some
reason? We can’t, and this is true
whether or not the reason is
unconscious. If we were to make a
decision, and it was actually
possible that there was no reason
for it, obviously the decision could
not have been freely made. If there
is a reason for it, this brings the
principle of causality into play. If
there’s a reason for the decision,
there is a reason for the reason,
and a reason for that reason. If you
follow this chain of causation back,
it extends to before the person
making the decision was born, to
before the planet was created, and
presumably to before the Big Bang.
Causality is the fundamental
explanation for why our wills are
not free. Again, when people say
that they have a free will, what
they are saying is that “I can
choose whatever I want. What I do is
completely up to me. It is not up to
anything else.” What we actually
have is a causal will. Our decisions
are not really up to us. They are up
to many factors that are not in our
control at all.
One of the ways that we define free
will goes as follows. If we have a
free will, then that means we’re
essentially responsible for our acts
– we’re fundamentally responsible.
It’s not that we simply hold
ourselves responsible, but that we
actually are responsible. If we have
a causal will, that means that we
may hold ourselves responsible to
preserve our civilization and to
have a certain degree of order, but
that attribution, is just a
convention. Perhaps because we don’t
know any better, or for some other
reason, but the fundamental reality
is that we’re not responsible. The
universe, or God, may be responsible
for our actions, but that prospect
lies beyond the scope of this
inquiry. If being responsible for
our acts is our definition of free
will, then we have a problem. We all
agree that a one-day-old infant does
not have a free will, in the sense
of being responsible for his or her
actions. You can’t hold a
one-day-old responsible for a moral
decision – for soiling itself, or
peeing on you. We all agree that a
one-day-old infant is not morally
accountable, and therefore does not
have a free will. Naturally, the
reason infants don’t have a free
will is that they don’t have the
capacity – the experience and brain
development – to make a moral
decision. So, if a one-day-old
doesn’t have a free will, at what
point, at what moment, at what age –
what would have to happen – for that
human being that doesn’t have a free
will to suddenly acquire one? That
question is fraught with
contradiction and confusion. We
might say that a child will develop
free will when the child has gained
a certain amount of knowledge and
experience in the world. Then, all
of the sudden, the child would go
from being a human being that is not
essentially responsible to a human
being that is essentially
responsible. But, if that’s the
case, would that mean that a child
who has acquired much more knowledge
than another child would have more
free will than the more ignorant
child?
That would mean that some people
have more free will than others, and
a person who is almost completely
ignorant would have almost no free
will. An infant doesn’t have much
intellectual maturity, or its
rational thought processes haven’t
developed much yet. Well, when might
that happen? At what age? That
would, of course, mean that one
child would develop a free will
before another child. Asking those
questions invites much confusion.
What about a person who is brain
damaged? It would be presumed that
they don’t have a free will. What
about the mentally and emotionally
challenged? The intriguing part of
this question relates to the exact
moment that a child would go from
not having a free will to having
one. Again, this relates to
causality because it’s not just
about a child’s intellectual
development, amount of experience,
maturity, etc. Those aren’t the only
factors that prevent a child from
having a free will. The other
inescapable prohibition is that the
one-day-old child, like a
five-year-old, or a ten-year-old, or
an adult, lives in a physical
universe that is completely governed
by causality. In science, we
understand that change is the
fundamental process in the universe.
Change means that a particle, or
molecule, is at one place at one
moment, and in another place the
very next moment. The universe is
not static. It changes, and the
fundamental process explaining this
change is causality. Things cause
other things to change, and
everything has a cause. Without
causality, there would be no change.
If we agree that a one-day-old
infant doesn’t have a free will, and
we want to assert that at a certain
age – two, five, ten, whatever – the
infant suddenly acquires one, we
would have to explain how that
infant suddenly develops the ability
to circumvent this fundamental law
of nature that is cause and effect.
It’s simply impossible for an
infant, or a child, or an adult, or
anything at all – alive or not – to
overcome the causal nature of the
universe. Those of us who may not
accept causality as the fundamental
process that everything in the
universe is governed by may wish to
consider the alternative. If actions
were not caused, they would be
random. Randomness has various
definitions. You can put your hand
in a bowl of ping-pong balls, and
pick one out randomly, but that is
just a manner of speech. You are
acting without the deliberate
intention to pick out a specific
ball, but the whole process is
nevertheless causal. If events were
not causal, how could they come to
be? If a child’s, or our own,
decision, is not caused – if
anything in the universe is not
caused – how could it have happened?
Nothing happens that isn’t caused.
That’s the salient understanding
here. When you understand that
everything has to have been caused,
including the causes of causes, then
you understand how it would be
impossible for a child to go from
not having a free will at one day
old to suddenly having one at the
age of five or ten. It would be as
if acquiring more intelligence, or
maturity, or knowledge, would
somehow allow the child to
circumvent this basic law of nature
– the law of causality.
This truth that human will is causal
and unconscious rather than free
represents a leap in the evolution
of the human mind. Perplexingly, we
have been predetermined by the past
that controls everything to believe
that we have a free will – to get
wrong the most fundamental
characteristic of human will. We
didn’t of our own accord decide to
get it wrong just like we didn’t
decide to get that the Earth is an
orb rather than flat wrong or that
the Earth revolves around the Sun
rather than visa-versa wrong. For
millennia, we’ve been predetermined
to hold this free will illusion.
Imagine what it would mean for our
world – not just some philosophers,
psychologists, and physicists – to
understand the causal nature of
human will. I would guess most
physicists understand that free will
is impossible because they
understand that the physical laws of
nature control everything. Sometimes
people will assert that physics
relates to the physical world, but
that thoughts, and feelings, and
decisions are actually spiritual,
and operate outside of physical law.
They do not. In physical reality, or
nature, there is the idea of time.
As Einstein demonstrated, it’s more
accurately described as
“space-time,” because time and space
are actually one entity. Space
requires time, and time requires
space. You can’t have one without
the other. Let’s define spirituality
as that which we can’t detect or
measure physically. Now consider
that every decision we make, however
spiritual it might be, would have to
take place within a specific moment
in time. Think about that. If the
decision is being made within a
certain particular moment, it is
clearly within time. Thus, the
spiritual nature of a decision does
not allow it to circumvent time. So,
another way to understand why our
decisions are not freely willed is
to consider that a spiritual
decision cannot reside outside of
the laws of nature, or outside of
space-time.
The most fundamental way of
understanding why free will is
impossible, and why cause and effect
govern everything, is to consider
the universe in its entirety. When I
say the entire universe, I mean
regardless of whether the universe
is finite or infinite. The universe
at one moment in time completely
determines the universe at the next
moment in time. The state of the
universe at that next moment in time
will then completely determine the
state of the universe at the
subsequent moment. Naturally, this
chain of cause and effect that
involves the entire universe also
goes back into the past. This moment
in time is the complete result of
the previous moment, and the
previous moment in time was the
complete result of the immediately
preceding moment. That chain of
causality stretches back in time at
least to the Big Bang. If a decision
that we describe as spiritual is
taking place within a precise moment
in time in the universe, it can’t
escape causality. The decision
occurs within a universe defined as
everything there is, spiritual or
whatever. If it is occupying a
specific place in the universal
timeline, the decision is determined
by the causality inherent in that
timeline. The decision cannot escape
causality.
This is huge. John Searle’s
statement at the beginning of each
episode to the effect that
demonstrating free will to be an
illusion would be “a bigger
revolution in our thinking than
Einstein, or Copernicus, or Newton,
or Galileo, or Darwin” is true. We
undergo evolution in the sense of
our physical bodies evolving. People
are getting taller. We’re losing our
hair. Our brains are getting bigger.
Some changes happen over the course
of over a million years, but there
are some changes that occur within
decades. There is also an evolution
of our mind. We are becoming more
intelligent as a species. To move
from our mistakenly perceiving the
fundamental nature of our human will
as free of causality– free of
reasons, free of any and all factors
not in our control – to the accurate
understanding that our wills are
causal, and that reality is
essentially like a movie, is truly
revolutionary.
We generally understand that the
universe is causal. Some people may
claim that particle behavior at the
quantum level is random, in the
strongest sense, but they are
thereby claiming that such particle
behavior is uncaused. That is an
absurd conclusion. It is not founded
on reason. It is not founded on
evidence. How could something that
has happened not have been caused?
At the quantum level, it is
impossible to measure simultaneously
the position and momentum of a
particle. It is therefore impossible
to use Classical, or Newtonian,
physics to accurately predict the
behavior of quantum phenomena. So,
at the quantum level, physicists
rely on probabilities. Instead of
measuring the movement of one
particle, they measure the movement
of groups of particles. They thereby
predict a single particle’s behavior
through probabilities derived from
the movement of those groups, as
opposed to through the exact, direct
measurement of that particle. We may
not know the factors that contribute
to a particle’s being in one place
at one moment, and then all of the
sudden being in another place at the
next moment. But such ignorance of
the agents impinging upon the
particle in no way leads to the
rational, scientific conclusion that
the particle’s behavior has not been
caused. Again, the prospect of a
particle’s behavior being uncaused
is incoherent. How could something
not be caused?
Transitioning from the illusion of
free will is a huge step in the
evolution of humankind. It can
generate profound changes in our
civilization. Right now, everything
from our criminal justice system to
how we raise our children, to how we
reward what we do related to
economic activity, is all based on
the mistaken premise that human
beings have a free will. When you
consider that this illusion of free
will leads to people blaming each
other and themselves, you can
understand why there is so much
conflict and so many wars in this
world. If we’re mistakenly blaming
others and ourselves for behavior
that we have absolutely no control
over, and then acting on that blame,
it’s going to create a much more
aggressive and hostile world than if
we were to overcome this free will
illusion, and understand that
everything we do is completely
compelled.
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