There is a friend of mine online who reads this column occasionally, puddleglum by nick, who has an interest in the issue of free wll. Elsewhere, I’ve commented that Free Will, or the ability to choose an alternative on the basis of logic and reasoning, or preference, as opposed to proximal causality, is fundamentally justified by Levels of Abstraction. I suppose a careful treatment of the subject would take a book, and I don’t have the mental organization (yet) to put together a whole book on it. But a few additional comments here may serve as a few notes.

Just by way of clarification (and not argument), we have to note that free will involves making choices. It isn’t, as some argue, the ability to “do anything you want.” Free will operates within the universe as we know it, where all things are subject to context and limitations. The occasion to make a free will choice (willed choice) begins when a person is made aware of two or more alternative actions, and some action is necessary. Whether need or desire makes the choosing necessary is beside the point; the point is, a cognitive intention to make an action arises, and this intention requires choosing the specific action from among the possibilities. The collection of choices, as they are known to the chooser, comprises the “list” of alternative possibilities, from which he has to select one.

A “proximal cause” of a choice means some condition which makes the choice without cognitive involvement. From Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” we have an entertaining sample of proximal causes of mental behavior, where, on hearing the noises of the ghost of Jacob Marley entering his bedroom, he dismisses it all as hallucinations which are caused by indigestion, a “bit of uncooked beef, or an underdone potato.” More conventional arguments against free will and for proximal causes of choices are: the nature vs. nurture debate. We are caused to do what we do because of genetic predisposition; we have sex because it is human nature, programmed in our genes, and we need only for the opportunity to arise, and then, robot-like, automatically, the human system will launch its characteristic sexual behaviors. Or, from the nurture side, upbringing and prior experience condition us to particular behaviors, so that, once again, we don’t need to choose how to act, we merely react. These types of causal explanations of behavior were launched in the nineteenth century by biologists, trying to explain the apparently intelligent behaviors of birds building nests by supposing there was an instinct that told the bird when and how to build the nest; and conditioning was an idea put forward by Pavlov and B F Skinner, proponents of behaviorism.

Proximal causes are not accepted as the explanations of all human action, today, because science has progressed to the point where cognitive activity is recognized as an actual phenomenon of the brain; i.e., we think. The problem now is to determine to what extent this thinking is the sort a computer does, which includes no reflection or self-awarenes, or the type we think we do, which involves no prior commitment to the outcome of the choosing. In other words, is the choice guided by something other than material causes? Alternative reasons to make a choice are logic, where the choice is made according to reasoning based on the meanings of the facts and circumstances of the choice, or wants and desires, where we have to balance competing desires that may lead to conflicts between the alternatives. Neither of these last two epxlanations of choice are causal, because reasoning is non-biological; it is not concerned with the state of your stomach or secretions of the gall bladder.

There is an alternative approach to understanding how people make choices, which is, randomly. The only conceivable alternative to causal necessitation, some argue, is that a choice is made from a set of alternatives by just random tossing of a metaphorical coin. We guess.

The theory of random choice is not particularly well recieved either, because it doesn’t seem that all choices are random. Choices are sometimes hard decisions to make which involve much weighing of alternatives, their possible consequences, pros and cons, in a lengthy calculation which only seems eventually to settle on some summation. Which isn’t to say that sometimes the problem seems insoluble and the hapless chooser makes a stab in the dark, or maybe even literally tosses a coin. But a subjective and introspective review of the process of choice suggests we spend time and energy on it. And so it isn’t random.

These problems and conjectures — that choice is either motivated by some immediate and external cause, or that it involves a random decision, whether literally or figuratively arrived at by flipping a coin — stems from our beliefs that the physical world is causally determined. We have borrowed some of the conventions of ancient physics and carried them into our philosophy of mind. The randomness theory is a doff of the hat in the direction of quantum theory, a slightly more modern idea that has percolated into the heads of materialistic philosophers. However, it may be that physics theories have precious little connection to what people think about. I think of it this way: the design of a pocket calculator is completely encompassed by the facts of electronics and electronics design. You know there are little chips in there, with transistors and capacitors and other circuit elements incorporated into them, and the electronics explains exactly what the calculator does when you press a button on its keyboard, but problems of arithmetic have nothing to do with electronics. The entire device is just a simulation of an abstract field of arithmetic, where the electronics is incidental to the simulation — one way among many to do the arithmetic. Thinking is like that.

Which brings us to a review of the ways we might explain choice and decisions, or, in other words, what free will is and how it works. I have set out one idea at some length elsewhere in this blog, to wit that free will involves a set of abstract objects and actions taking place on a semantic level, and as such, the rules of this activity are no more defined or limited by the physical structures that support it than arithmetic is defined by the calculator’s innards or the laws of electronics. In other words, free will in cognitive decision making is a feature of an abstract “game,” and as such can be implemented in an entirely deterministic universe. All that would mean (if the universe is really deterministic) is that the same free will choices get made every time the universe is “played,” but the explanations of those choices are not in the physics, they’re in the configurations of the abstract cognitive activity.

Of course, the universe only gets played once, so the supposition that we would make the same choice on each iteration is unsupportable. The universe still happens only once.

Which brings us to another aspect of cognition. No doubt the brain is a very complex thing. Even thoughts sometimes seem to be rather complex, if not individually, then at least the composite outlays of human cognition historically, from architecture and math to politics and government, seems to be more than enough to fill millions of books. Mainly because it has filled millions of books. So given this complexity, how does causality play through a computationally intractable network of causal linkages? I mean, from our computer science study of computatibility theory, we know there are problems which cannot be analyzed, where only ad hoc and heuristic methods of approach are possible.

I am suggesting that a definition of a brain — or for that matter, a living thing — may rest on its having a complexity sufficiently great as to confuse the traceability of causality through its network. This leads to an ambiguity of result; the outputs of the system cannot be directly attributed to current inputs. And although this theory remains to be worked out in any detail, it certainly addresses the instinctive sense we have that living entities, and cognitive agents, originate actions and results. And it is worth noting that living objects and minds both are systems that have internal memory states, such that something about its condition is unrelated to the current inputs of the system. To what extent is the internal state of a complex system deterministically linked to ambiguous history?

In summary, then, there are two principle objections to a theory of deterministic human behavior. The first is that this behavior obtains on an abstract level which is not directly linked to the lower physical substrates that support it. On that abstract level, there are such things as “intentions” which are the explanations of human thought, speech and actions. On the lower physical levels, there are no such things as intentions, and the problem with trying to explain intentions by a theory of neurons is like the problem of explaining addition by studying calculator design: the former is not derived from the latter, and such relations as exist between arithmetic and the calculator are the fortuitious coincidences of good design. And secondly, any claim of causal determination for such complex organisms and entities faces a considerable challenge of demonstrating the causal connections. We suspect such claims can be supported only by the use of highly vague and ambiguous objects. So, for example, a psychologist might say an older boy still sucks his thumb because of weaning — but how do you prove this, not in general, but for this particular child? The causal linkages from the event to the behavior can’t even be examined.

Really, the problem of explaining free will is an activity we undertake for the pleasure of its intellectual exercise, and only that, because the real problem would be to support the counterclaim: that mental actions are simply causal.