One of the topics that makes my brain squirm is the issue of free will. I consider myself neither an expert nor even a truly qualified interlocutor on this topic. So much has been said from every perspective over the course of centuries on this issue, and in the light of developments in neuroscience, the debates have only become murkier and more tangled than ever. It has impacted our epistemological, cognitive, and, perhaps most importantly, psychological understanding of what it means to be human.

The problem of free will vs. determinism is often framed by several presuppositions: 1. There are “laws of nature” and these laws have an objective reality that are independent of us, even though we are ever engaged in trying to understand them. 2. We are part of the natural world and, hence, subject to those laws of nature. 3. Human beings are conscious beings.

It is the nature of that consciousness that is the central point of contention among those on either side of the debate. In terms of gross simplification, we can say that those who advocate libertarian free will believe that we are not determined by forces beyond our control and that we are agents of causal efficacy. Those who advocate strict determinism believe that human actions are as determined by the laws of nature as are any other entities in the universe and, given that we are determined by previous causes, we, ourselves, do not have causal efficacy. As I said, this is a gross simplification, and there are scores of positions between these two extremes. The one that I find most appealing is “compatibilism”, which sees mutual compatibility between free will and determinism. More on this below.

I need to preface this conversation with a Hayekian word of caution because many of these issues are ultimately entwined with the question of whether we will ever truly understand the functioning of human consciousness, of the human mind, let alone whether that functioning is “free” or “determined”. There are compelling reasons to remain agnostic, in the ultimate sense, on these questions. Borrowing from Hayek’s discussion in The Sensory Order, on the nature of the mind’s organic, dialectical “interconnectivity”, Gary T. Dempsey writes:

The implication of this interconnectivity is that a sensory experience cannot be analyzed without regard for the other contents of the mind that contains them; that is, to describe a sensory experience all the way through, one must describe its relations to other bits of information which in turn are related to further bits, and so on in an infinite regress. Logically, any attempt to describe a sensory experience would have to take into consideration the complete “sensory” order that arises from each person’s previous sensory experiences. Moreover, to demand that one sensory experience be removed means to change all the others in some subtle way, and to demand that one sensory experience be added means causing all the resulting connections to occur.

As a result of this interconnectivity, the “sensory order” cannot be broken down into component sensory events. No sensory experience is autonomous. Rather, all sensations are embedded in a complex of relations to other sensations or, as Umberto Eco might put it, a sensory event becomes different when it is connected to another. “The connection changes the perspective” so that “every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, it tells a secret.” It “resonates” with what Jacques Derrida might call “traces” of something “other.” Consequently, where one part ends and another begins is undecidable. There is only sensory information in intersubjective relations with other sensory information; their essence lies in their relation to the others and their interpenetration of the same. Recognizing this, Hayek concludes that the “sensory order” is irreducible. Its elements cannot be broken down into linear, A causes B terminology and reassembled into an explanation of the whole.

This interconnectivity of mind is what led Hayek to reject the idea that a mind could ever fully understand the functions of itself. Indeed, for Hayek, “the whole idea of a mind explaining itself is a logical contradiction”, insofar we would have to explain the process by which the mind explains its own functioning and then the process by which we explain the process by which the mind explains its own functioning, ad inifinitum.

These observations, however, do not prevent us from defining a specific context or contexts within which the whole question of “free will” and “determinism” makes any sense at all.

A recent discussion of the issue by Marxist philosopher Ben Burgis, in his article, “Slavoj Zizek and the Case for Compatibilism” is a case in point. Personally, I have long found the case for compatibilism to be the most dialectically persuasive in transcending the free will/determinism dichotomy. Indeed, compatibilism finds its roots in the ancient Stoics, Aristotle (the father of dialectical inquiry) and Thomas Aquinas, who carried on the Aristotelian project into the age of the Scholastics.

As Burgis writes:

Many philosophers, including me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires. We act of our own free will to the extent that we have the opportunity to exercise these capacities, without unreasonable external or internal pressure. We are responsible for our actions roughly to the extent that we possess these capacities and we have opportunities to exercise them. … There is no question that human beings can imagine and plan for the future, weigh competing desires, etc.—and that losing these capacities would greatly diminish us. External and internal pressures of various kinds can be present or absent while a person imagines, plans, and acts—and such pressures determine our sense of whether he is morally responsible for his behavior. However, these [phenomena] have nothing to do with free will. … If being the “deep cause” of your actions means that you’re their First Cause—like a miniature God, you cause things without anything causing you to cause them—then … [t]hat’s a level of control over your actions that it’s impossible to have in a deterministic universe. It might also not be possible in an indeterministic universe since it’s far from clear that it’s even a coherent idea.

My friend Ryan Neugebauer recently discussed the Burgis article on Facebook, prompting a thread that has now been going on for more than a month. (And, yes, this constitutes another installment in my DWR series.) What Ben makes clear in his contributions to that discussion is that compatibilists think deeply about those choices that make human beings causally and morally responsible for at least some of their actions, while distinguishing these from those actions that plausibly account for “determinist” concerns. Other participants to the discussion include my friend Roderick Tracy Long, who defends a libertarian incompatibilist account of free will [pdf]. (And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the many articles written by my friend Roger E. Bissell, defending a form of compatibilism that integrates “value-determinism” and “conditional free will”.)

Ryan’s concerns about the notion of libertarian free will echo my own. As he puts it:

If parts of your brain are messed with or missing, or if you have some sort of psychological disturbance, it seems that “free will” in the sense that most people typically mean (reasonable control over ourselves with deliberation abilities) goes away. … Our development does shape us in significant ways. We’re not “blank slates”. As one example, I don’t “choose” to enjoy or like Oreo cookies. I just do. Similarly, I don’t “choose” to have certain preferences or thinking patterns (think of the way people on the Autism spectrum might differ from those off the spectrum) that can radically shape the way I process and interact with the world.

But this doesn’t commit Ryan to strict determinism. For example, though he is ultimately agnostic on the proposition of a “Block Universe Theory”, he criticizes it as counterintuitive for its physics-driven belief that “everything has, in a sense, a manner of speaking, already happened. … [a]nd … that what we think of as free will is, in a sense, an illusion”. I especially like Ryan’s emphasis on “freedom of will” over “free will” for much the same reason that he prefers the notion of “freer” or “freed markets” over the ahistorical, abstract notion of a “free market”. Indeed, both freedom of will and freer markets exist on a continuum of sorts. This reflects Ryan’s contextualized sensibility and places him squarely in the compatibilist camp. He writes:

Let’s take a more mundane example. I went to the electronics store and had to decide between two TVs. I went back and forth on it and struggled to decide. I eventually just chose one over the other because maybe I liked the physical design more or something. I would say the same holds in that scenario. Given that we turned back the clock (which isn’t possible, so we can’t actually test it), it would make sense that I would make the same exact decision based on all factors affecting me in that moment (thought processes, including reasoning abilities, biological urges, external pressures, social upbringing, etc.). … We can move forward and be put in similar circumstances and act differently because we have different conditions (experiential knowledge, more information, different urges or preferences, thought patterns/brain states, etc.). But absent something changing, I don’t see why there would be a different result. That doesn’t take away freedom of will. It just means that there’s no reason I’d freely choose differently under the exact same conditions with nothing changing.

I think it’s fair to say that we have a constrained freedom of will that is on a spectrum but allows us to actually make decisions. … Freedom of will is not something that is absolute and instead has definite limits. I’d say it varies for all of us every day. Catch me at a time when I’m hungry, tired, sick, or irritable for some reason and that can lead me to acting in ways I wouldn’t otherwise. … Various mental issues and struggles all affect my ability to act in the way I would ideally prefer too. I wouldn’t have shouted at my mom when she was asking me a simple question if I felt good, but due to not feeling great I did. My ability to respond in the way I would have preferred was hampered by the effects of my discomfort. I don’t see how that doesn’t count as restricting freedom of will in a similar way as we’d accept that something like schizophrenia can. … That’s not an argument against there being ANY freedom of will, but rather not a perfect one. Just as I don’t think there can be a perfectly “free” market, I don’t think there can be a perfectly “free” will. Some proponents don’t seem to think that’s the case. I’ve argued about that for many years and always find someone who wants to push back on it.

Like Ryan, I too take issue with the very framing of the question and the labels that are used in the debate. I also agree that nobody has fully resolved this issue and it’s not likely to be resolved. Given our ever-evolving knowledge, shifting definitions, and the enormous complexity of the human mind, I think the dialectical-compatibilist ‘middle way’ through the strict free will/determinist duality is almost unavoidable, precisely because it doesn’t depend on us knowing, thru some “synoptic delusion”, the ultimate answers to all the deepest questions. As I wrote on Ryan’s thread:

Just as I am always emphasizing context in my adherence to dialectical methods, I’d say the same thing about freedom of the will. We are ALL embedded in a context, or MANY contexts, each of which shapes who we are and how we evolve and even how we respond to our own evolution over time. Our contexts include not only our in-born capacities, but also our familial, communal, cultural, and structural contexts, and how each of us responds to these is not a given.

Heck, we’re not even tabula rasa at birth, if you count for the fact that biologically and genetically, we’re affected to varying extents, in terms of our physical, cognitive, and emotional capacities. Some of us are born prodigies and can pick up a violin and play a concerto at age 2. Others struggle with in-born impairments to our physical and even mental health. Studies show that we’re even affected by what’s going on outside the womb: the sounds from outside our protected environment, the effects of the mother’s health, hormones, etc.

That doesn’t mean that we’re “programmed” like automatons, but it does mean that we all function on a uniquely individual spectrum of “freedom of the will”—which also holds out the hope that changing contexts can either nourish us to greater freedom, or further impair our ability to choose. If we didn’t have any such freedom, then we should abandon all hope that any education, pedagogical methods, clinical psychology/psychotherapy, medical attention, changes to our family and community environments, even cultural and social change, would make any difference at all.

On that basis, it seems to me that, yes, we do live on a continuum, and just as factors can shape our decisions, so too can our decisions shape factors.

Yes, we live in a world governed by the “laws of nature”. Yes, we are part of nature. Yes, we engage the world with our minds, while also attempting to understand the means by which our distinctive consciousness grasps that world. But since we are not omniscient, we need to define those contexts that give real, nay, transformative, substance to what is meant by “freedom of the will”. I find it interesting, therefore, that the social-psychological dimension that both Ryan and I touch upon resonates too with philosopher Stephen Cave, who writes:

The kind of free will that I do think exists is one that is actually entirely compatible with the laws of nature as we know them. This kind of free will doesn’t happen at the level of quantum events, or even of individual neurones. It happens at the level studied by psychology—the level of decisions, deliberations and imagination. … The free will debate is such a hardy perennial because these two levels of explanation appear to contradict each other: On the one hand, seeing humans as part of nature’s causal chain; on the other hand, seeing humans as autonomous, creative, deliberating beings. But we are slowly moving towards a better understanding of both levels, and this—more than any fanciful ideas of free-floating consciousness-transmitters—will help us eventually to become the best we can be.

As Cave suggests, we need to focus on both levels in their interconnections, such that no single aspect is grasped to the exclusion of the other. The need to understand the larger contexts that condition our focus and the means by which we are empowered to alter those conditions are two interrelated aspects of the same whole. Indeed, they are deeply connected to the whole project of human freedom and personal flourishing. Freedom—be it the freedom of the will or the freedom to act in the world—external to conditions is an illusion; flourishing without such freedom is an impossibility. But that’s a post for another day …