Why we do not have free will

Introduction

Much debate about 'free will' is clouded by people using different definitions of it. I believe that the definition that best fits the reason why we are interested in the subject, is of free will as ‘moral responsibility’. Someone is 'morally responsible' when it is morally fair to hold someone to account for what they have done.

Whether you see people to be morally responsible depends upon two things: the model of the human mind and decision-making that you believe (explicitly or implicitly); and the conception of responsibility you apply to that model. In order to decide which model of the human mind is most likely to be true, we should select the one that provides the most coherent explanation of the facts about decision-making. So this post follows the following structure:

• Facts to be explained: I list some stylised facts that I have personally observed in my decision-making, and which I suggest any theory of the mind should be able to adequately explain.
• Models of the mind: I describe what I see as the three main models that we explicitly or implicitly believe: Thinker Model; Collective Self Model; and Higher Self Model.
• Evaluation of the models: how well the models can explain the stylised facts. I believe that the Collective Self model does much better than the others.
• Levels of responsibility: how much responsibility we have under the Collective Self model.
• Possible objections: I answer some of the key objections.

Facts to be explained

• Fact 1: Belief that you are in control of your decisions: we all have a strong sense of an 'I' taking decisions.
• Fact 2: Systematic Inner Conflict: Humans are capable of systematically making a conscious decision that is regretted afterwards. For instance, someone repeatedly eating chocolate when on a diet, and regretting it afterwards.
• Fact 3: Choosing differently in the same circumstances: This refers to when faced with the same choice in the same circumstances, you choose differently, such as whether to get up in the morning.
• Fact 4: The unconscious instant of choice: This refers to the phenomenon that although you can be consciously debating a decision, the actual moment of choice sometimes comes as a surprise. For instance, you may be debating whether to get out of bed, and then suddenly find yourself getting out.

Models of the mind

1. The ‘Thinker’ Model


The ‘real you’ here is the ‘Thinker’. It is indivisible - a ‘black box’ that cannot be analysed in terms of the deterministic interaction of internal parts. It does three things:

• Makes decisions, either to do a physical action or to think a thought.
• Generates Thoughts and beliefs (about the world and yourself) and Feelings, represented by the arrows.
• Processes sense data from the External World, and from its Thoughts and Feelings that it observes through its ‘Inner Eye of Consciousness’, which may be seen to be a fifth sense.

I’ve called it the ‘Thinker’, because of the argument that ‘thoughts need a thinker’ to produce them. It is the most commonsensical model, that most of us live on the basis of.

2. The ‘Collective Self’ Model


The ‘Collective Self’ is simply a mass of mentally stored data. How can such an entity make a decision? Being confronted with a particular choice stimulates all relevant data in the form of a collection of Thoughts and Feelings (TFs), which may be conscious or unconscious. These are then converted into a decision through a ‘Decision Mechanism’. This can be envisaged like a voting mechanism, in which motions for decision are continually being subconsciously proposed and voted on by the relevant TFs, with a decision made whenever a threshold of votes or mental support is reached. Whether the stimulated beliefs and feelings are in support or against the proposed action is represented in the diagram by the direction of arrows. It may be the case that the nature of the TFs may allow categorisations to be made, such as between the ‘rational’, ‘emotional’ and ‘self-reflective’ (or more narrowly, ‘moral’). Whether or not the self-reflective part supports or rejects the proposed decision (which we may call of a ‘lower order’), depends upon where the majority of TFs lies in response to the relevant self-reflective question (which we may call of a ‘higher order’, see below for an example). The TFs within each category may be in consensus, but there may be conflict between the three categories as a whole. The number of votes allocated to each TF may differ between Feelings based upon their intensity, and between Thoughts based upon their grounding in experience.

Like the ‘Thinker’, the Collective Self:

• Makes decisions, with its thoughts feeding back to change the TFs.
• Processes sense data, including what the Inner Eye observes of its thought stream and TFs.

How this sense data is stored, and therefore how it changes the TFs depends upon how the Collective Self chooses to interpret the sense data at the time.This is the least commonsensical model, since it implies that there is no single ‘you’ - we are just bundles of stored mental data that creates thoughts and feelings when stimulated.

3. The ‘Higher Self’ Model


This is essentially a combination of the other two models, in which the Collective Self and its decisions are monitored and influenced by the Higher Self, that like the Thinker is indivisable - a black box. Monitoring occurs through the Inner Eye, while influence is in the form of an ultimate veto of decisions and an ability to change them by adjudicating between and influencing conflicting TFs.This is the model that people might come to after reflection upon the simplicity of the Thinker model, seeing the authentic them as the ‘Higher Self’.


Evaluation of Models

We can now evaluate the truth of each model according to how well it can explain the ‘stylised facts’ given earlier:

1. The belief that you are in control of your decisions

• Thinker: no problem, for the Thinker is seen as being in control.
• Higher Self: no problem if ‘you’ is equated with the Higher Self which is seen as in control in a supervisory role.
• Collective Self: no problem because if ‘you’ is equated with the TFs that are present at each instant in time, the nature of those TFs, and therefore ‘you’, do determine decisions.

2. Systematic Inner Conflict

• Thinker: cannot explain this, for either it is constantly changing its mind, which implies that it must have separate component parts, or it is divided into different factions, both of which point to the Collective Self model.
• Higher Self: cannot explain this. If the Higher Self is completely in control, then the arguments against the Thinker model apply. If it is the Collective Self that is making the decisions and the Higher Self that is doing the regretting, this implies that it is not all-powerful, which requires an explanation of how the power over decisions relative to the Collective Self is determined ie. that both are subject to the Decision Mechanism as in the Collective Self Model.
• Collective Self: can explain this in terms of there being a majority of TFs in favour of eating (perhaps from the emotions if it is ‘comfort eating’) coexistant with a minority against it that ‘in the back of your mind’ warns that it isn’t right (your self-reflective part is against it since when the question voted on is ‘Is it right to eat the chocolate bar?’ the majority of higher order TFs stimulated say ‘no’). Once you have eaten the chocolate the self-reflective part gains accendancy and you are regretful.

3. Choosing differently in the same circumstances

• Thinker: cannot explain this, for it implies that it is changing its mind, which implies that it must have separate component parts.
• Higher Self: runs into the same problem as the Thinker if the Higher Self is completely is seen as in control.
• Collective Self: no problem, since the balance of power within the TFs has changed.

4. The unconscious instant of choice

• Thinker: cannot explain this, since the Thinker should be in control all the way.
• Higher Self: undermines the argument that the Higher Self is fully monitoring what is going on.
• Collective Self: can explain this convincingly as due to subconscious operation of the Decision Mechanism: the conscious thought processes change the TF voting patterns until the required threshold of mental support to get up is reached, being then subsconsciously translated into immediate action.

The Collective Self Model is therefore the only one that can adequately explain all of the ‘stylised facts’. Furthermore, it can hold up against criticisms:

1. If we are a collective of TFs, how come we feel that we are a single Thinker?
Answer: Because we have a single Inner Eye of Consciousness, we are under the illusion that there must be one entity behind it, when in fact the data from it is being ‘beamed’ to the whole mind. The illusion of being a single Thinker is then self-reinforcing, because the belief that a subset of the mind is the ‘authentic you’ means that it can command extra votes that may turn a minority into a majority, giving the impression that that part is even more authentic. The illusion of oneness however, is broken when you come to face strong inner conflict as described in Stylised Fact 1.

2. If we are constantly changing over time as our TFs change, how come we think we are the same person with the same identity?
Answer: Because there is only one persistent data processing and storage facility throughout our lives eg. one memory recording everything, and one persistent Inner Eye of Consciousness observing our inner world.

3. Don’t thoughts logically need a single Thinker to produce them?
Answer: the link here between ‘thoughts’ and a Thinker is a semantic one based upon the commonsense belief in the Thinker model. The Collective Self model demonstrates how ‘thoughts’ may be generated by a collective, just as committees can generate discussions.


Levels of Responsibility

Each level of responsibility will be applied to the CS Model and its validity discussed in terms of the core concept of moral responsibility defined above ie. when it is morally fair to hold someone to account for what they have done.

1. Physical Responsibility
You are responsible for a decision if your body does it.
The CS model is consistent with this conception. But it may not be morally fair to hold someone to account on this basis, for instance if the action was accidental ie. not chosen by their mind.

2. Mental Responsibility
You are responsible for a decision if your mind chooses it.
The CS model is consistent with this conception. But it may not be morally fair, for instance if the person is not fully conscious of what they are doing eg. if they are drunk, mentally ill, or asleep.

3. Conscious Responsibility
You are responsible for a decision if your Inner Eye of Consciousness observes the thought processes that go into it, allowing you the opportunity to change it if you want to.
The CS model is in principle consistent with this conception, since the Inner Eye of Consciousness observes the set of thought processes going on that are based upon the BFs stimulated by the constant ‘lower level’ question ‘What do I do now?’. This data from the Inner Eye gives rise to the constant self-reflective ‘higher level’ question of ‘Is this the right way to be thinking?’ which stimulates a set of self-reflective TFs (that may be equated with the Higher Self in the Higher Self Model, except that they are a collective). If it is decided that the lower level question is being answered wrongly, this judgement may be seen to caste a number of lower order votes belonging to the self-reflective part against the current majority. If this turns a minority into a majority it could be called ‘willpower’.

However, in practise, conscious responsibility may not always occur: the mind has limited conscious data processing capacity, with much thought data available to the Inner Eye ‘filtered out’ because it is not judged to be important for conscious attention. Thoughts and decisions may therefore be made that are not conscious. In that important decisions would not be filtered out however, conscious responsibility may be said to generally occur when it matters most.

This conception is fundamentally inadequate however, for it may be the case that the person is not in control of the balance of power within the higher level, self-reflective TFs. They may be able to choose what to want, but may not be able to choose what to want to want. Their lower order decisions are determined by the balance of power within the lower order TFs, which are in turn partly determined by the higher-order TFs, the balance of power of which may not be chosen. It would therefore be just as morally unfair to hold them to account for their ‘conscious’ decisions as their unconscious ones.

4. Ultimate Responsibility
You are responsible for a decision if ‘you’ at one point in time are able to control ‘who you are’ at that same point in time.
This is inconsistent with the Collective Self Model, because in order to make a decision to change yourself, the decision has to be made by a set of TFs at a higher level from those TFs that the decision refers to. The number of levels is mentally limited however, with one reaching a level of TFs that you cannot consciously control. Where do they come from then? As a result of incoming data from the external world and the internal world through the Inner Eye, all interpreted in terms of those TFs that were existing at the time. These processes may be taken back to the womb when the first data that could produce TFs was stored mentally, whether biologically or by ‘God’. In either case, you could not control it.

We therefore do not have ‘moral responsibility’ for the only conception of it that makes sense is inconsistent with the best model of decision-making.



Key objections

1. The whole argument is based upon the premise of a deterministic world in the first place. For instance, the discussion of the ‘stylised facts’ assumes that the inner conflicts or changes must have been caused by something.
Answer: If something is not determined, then it is random. And if it is random, then it cannot be chosen and so you cannot be responsible for it anyway! And if something is chosen, it is in the very nature of choice that it must be internally determined, for what differentiates one option from another in terms of the desirability of choosing them, are mental phenomena (TFs) associated with each of them. It is therefore impossible to choose something non-randomly over another not on the basis of TFs.

2. If all our beliefs are determined, how can we trust them?
Answer: Because the causal processes that create them are relatively reliable ie. sense data interpreted according to our prior TFs, and our own thought processes. There is an element for error here of course, which it is important to be aware of.

3. Saying that we do not have moral responsibility has terrible implications. The Conscious Responsibility conception should therefore be used, not the Ultimate Responsibility one.
Answer: This paper is only concerned with truth, not consequences. It may be argued, briefly, that the consequences are not terrible however:

• Law and order: would just be purely based upon deterrence, thereby ruling out capital punishment.
• Religions: undermines many, since people cannot be ‘sinful’. And even if the purpose of life is seen as just ‘to learn’, what is the value of such learning if it is all determined? It is however, consistent with Buddhism, which sees the deep realisation of the Collective Self model applied to oneself and its implication that there is no substantial independent self, as the key to enlightenment.
• Living with oneself: it is in my experience impossible to perceive yourself as being determined in the moment you are in, since, as argued earlier, the TFs that comprise me at each moment, are making the decision. It is just that ‘I now’ have not completely chosen those TFs. When I look back at past decisions however, I can explain why I made them in terms of the TFs at the time. I have gained considerably from applying the Collective Self model to myself, since it enables me to accept myself as I am at any point in time, and understand what is going on within me.
• Interpersonal relations: it enables you to understand people much better. Although you accept difficult people completely as they are in the moment (since you know they ultimately couldn’t help being who they are), you know that there is potential to help them change. For instance, it might be necessary to pretend to be angry with them in order to discourage them from doing something.