Free Will is Partially Real
You know, kind of
A few weeks ago, two wonderful writers on Substack, and , articulated their vision on free will in a deterministic universe. In the aptly titled ‘We Have Free Will’, Tommy makes a case for compatibilism (free will and a deterministic universe need not be at odds), while Rose beautifully sketches the precarity of free will and clarifies that this does not make us less human in ‘How much agency do we really have?‘ My turn. Buckle up.
Reality is a triple-layer cake
In 2014, historian Yuval Noah Harari burst onto the global scene with his book Sapiens, which chronicles the history of mankind. Since then, Harari has quickly become one of the world’s most popular public intellectuals.
I’m generally suspicious of people who undergo that transformation — fame seems to spur most people to entrench their views and prioritize sensationalism over science, as Darshana Narayanan wrote about Harari. However, I have to admit that I enjoyed Sapiens and its sequel, Homo Deus. Sure, there are omissions, speculations, and poetic liberties in both books, but when you want to cover the history and future of humanity, you’ll have to (almost literally) pick your battles.
One thing that has stuck with me since I first read Sapiens is the concept of intersubjectivity, or the idea that reality has three ‘layers’: objective (what we measure), subjective (what we experience internally), and intersubjective.
It’s that intersubjective layer where the truth about free will is hiding.
But first, what is intersubjective reality?
Consider money.
Money isn’t real. Sure, we stamp coins, print bills, or bite our nails while watching numbers on a screen, but the intrinsic value of these physical things is substantially less than the monetary value they represent and both values only exist when there are humans who attribute value to things.
I like seeing the numbers in my bank account go up, but when the bills that remind me I’m supposed to be an adult arrive, my heart sinks along with those numbers. Why? They’re numbers on a screen. But they’re not just numbers on a screen. As a society, we have collectively decided that those numbers, or those printed papers, or those little circles of metal represent my value or worth as a consumer (which is increasingly considered the synonym of citizen). Money represents my bargaining potential, perhaps.
Deep down, at the atomic nuts and molecular bolts level, the value we attribute to money isn’t real. Its effects on our lives, though, very much are.
Like free will.
In my naturalistic, deterministic view of life, there is no free will in the realm of whirling particles and rippling forcefields. Yet, in the subjective arena, we feel as though we have free will1. In the intersubjective layer, we tacitly agree that our behaviors and motivations are (partially) the result of free will, and that affects how we treat each other. Or, by making free will intersubjectively real, it has ‘real’ (as in objectively measurable2 and quantifiable) effects, like the way our judicial system works, or the way we hold each other accountable for promises made.
Saintly unicorns and holy dragons
Hold on. If simply agreeing that something is ‘real’ (with quotation marks) makes it real, then where are all the unicorns and dragons, you nitwit?
Ah, good point, always snide inner critic.
Did you believe in Santa as a kid? Do your young children believe in Santa? Of course - kids, cover your ears! - Santa isn’t real. But that nonexistent bearded man does affect your kids’ reality. They get up early on Christmas morning, or, if they’re anything like me (let’s hope they’re not), they hatch outrageous schemes to catch the holy man red-suited in the act of chimney diving. Santa isn’t real, but the effects he has are. And not just on kids. Adults throw money at (fake) trees, decorations, gifts, and so on. Not-real Santa has a multiple-billion-dollar effect on economies that are built on not-real money.
Still, Santa feels different from free will, doesn’t he? We know he’s not real. Santa, unicorns, dragons… unlike free will, those are entities we could, if they were real, grab physically. Seeing, touching, and verifying the ‘physicality' of a dragon is enough to at least start proving that dragons are real. We can’t grab hold of free will, real or not.
But that’s not controversial enough, so let’s talk about religion.
For me, all passages in all holy books that talk about a supreme being, miracles, or divine powers are metaphorical and fictional. And yet, if we look at the brains of more-than-just-performative religious people during personal prayers, we (objectively and measurably) see things happen. Executive control drops, cognitive flexibility goes out the window, and the sense of self attenuates (similar to specific types of brain lesions). This is not meant to be dismissive, my religious friends; it merely indicates that praying minds really experience something.
Subjectively, to religious people, god feels real. Objectively, in the nuts and bolts universe, god (in my view) is not real. So far, god appears on par with free will.
Here, at last, is my own injection of trickster juice: even if we grant that a supreme being is not real, no one, not even atheists like myself, would deny that religions and their effects are real. *waves at world history*
In other words, when you posit the independent existence of an entity (god, Santa, Bigfoot), the burden of proving that it exists independently of us (so, objectively) rests on you. If, on the other hand, you propose the existence of a phenomenon that can only exist by virtue of our existence (money, religion, free will(?), love(?)3), what matters is its intersubjective reality. Free will exists in the ties that bind us into a society.
Crowd control
That might all sound like free will is not really real. I just wrote that we have no objective atom-by-atom playbook for how it might be really real.
But when is ‘real’ real enough? Or: the question that matters is not '‘Is free will real?” but “How real is free will?”
One of the most impressive tricks humanity has ever mastered is high-density living in large cities. We’re not made for that. Living in a busy city taxes our mental health, our physical health, and our overall well-being. Very few cities are walkable enough, green and blue enough, unpolluted enough, or community-centered enough for humans to thrive in.
At the same time, that burdensome population density also makes cities hubs of innovation and progress. They allow us to centralize resources, gather bright minds in the same place, and offer specialized services and resources to a lot of people.
To achieve this, we require crowd control mechanisms. Religion may have been one. French sociologist Émile Durkheim saw religion as the original social institution that laid the foundation for modern society by providing a kind of collective consciousness (intersubjective reality?).
This is not to say that free will will remain as (intersubjectively) real as it is now, no matter how strange that is to read. The monopoly of different gods and religions has changed over time, as has the relative proportion of people who no longer share those theistic beliefs. Around 4% of adult Americans identify as atheists, but about 30% identify as ‘none’ — not affiliated with a specific religion. Durkheim already noted the decline of religion in the age of science and increasing individualism4.
Perhaps, one day, we will rethink free will too. If science continues to chip away at our intuitive idea of free will, will we be able to revise our views on it? Perhaps we will reimagine society and the judicial system in a way that focuses less on individual responsibility.
However, I have one final (and completely secular) Hail Mary to save free will. I think there will always be an ember of human free will remaining. The human brain is a pattern-matching prediction blob — a squishy, crinkled crystal ball. But the interesting things happen when reality doesn’t match the blob’s predictions. I’d argue that what makes us human can be found in those prediction errors. The full complexity of human life, its path through time tracked particle by particle, every decision charted and predicted, free will neutered into submission, is out of our reach; it’s the realm of Laplace’s demon (or Laplace’s supercomputer). We will never have perfect knowledge, which leaves the door on a crack for chaos and randomness.
Perhaps this is real enough.
When our brains mispredict an event, we feel fear or anxiety or surprise or awe or love. We become more than a perfectly determined and perfectly determinable recurrent loop of biological processes in a body bag.
We become human, whether we (free) will it or not.
Epilogue: this is how to attack
This is far from a bulletproof argument; it’s a linen shirt riddled with bullet holes. Here are some holes in the current version of my thoughts on free will. These are probably the best routes to dismantle my proposal. Charge!
Who cares about all this intersubjective stuff? Objectively real is the only real that matters.
As a (former?) scientist, I am sympathetic to this argument. The crux here is the ‘that matters’ part. The dollar bills in your wallet are objectively ‘just’ flimsy paper with some scribbles. But is that all about them that matters? I’d argue that the intersubjectively agreed measure of value we give them matters too. If you (dis)agree, consider a paid subscription…
Isn’t this circular reasoning? It’s real because we decide it’s real?
Yes. But - and I’m sure you know what’s coming - we can say the same about money, religion, and so on. These things exist because, at some point, humanity/society benefitted from an easy and standardized way to represent ‘value’ (money) or ‘morals’ (religion). Free will is like that, maybe for ‘responsibility’ or ‘agency’. Maybe humanity will evolve beyond it. Maybe one day we’ll no longer need anything like money. Maybe one day, we’ll figure out how to model society and establish a judicial system while embracing a less free-for-all vision of free will.
What does this mean for me as an individual?
I… am not sure. The argument above does not come with prescriptions or guidelines. If you feel like you have free will, that’s a valid feeling and in itself, that might be enough regardless of which philosophical argument lands in your inbox. But, if you go looking for the chocolate cake in footnote 1, you’ll have to admit we don’t always feel like we have enough free will. In a real-life context, all of the above is scarcely more than an abstract thought exercise. In a real-life context, we will all, as society and as individuals, have to deal with matters of responsibility, agency, and so on. Crowd control, you know.
If you want to prove you have free will, subscribe, like, and share. I dare you. Do you really want to show me? Consider a paid subscription. *demonic laughter*
Interestingly not always to the same degree. As an extreme example, consider crimes of passion or certain forms of sexual deviancy, in which we often hear that the culprits ‘felt as if they had no choice’. If they are truthful, we might conceive this as them lacking the subjective reality of free will. To a lesser extent, most of us have contexts in which we don’t necessarily feel as though we can exercise our free will as much as we’d like to. You probably don’t want to stuff that entire chocolate cake in your mouth when you’re stressed out, but here we are…
Depending on how quantum you want to get, you could argue that no measurement is ever truly objective.
With ‘our’ existence, I mean human. I do wonder where non-human animals fit in this whole argument. Do they have free will or only instinct? Does free will require a certain level of self-awareness or cognitive complexity? Do non-human animals know love? (I’ve become interested in the evolution of romantic love since I came across the proposal that it evolved as a ‘commitment device’ to encourage long-term pair bonding — how romantic!)
I am not a sociologist and most certainly not a Durkheim-ologist. Readers with more expertise, please weigh in if I got this wrong.
Great piece. I’m very drawn to the idea that the notion of free human will greases the wheels of society and that dismantling it is akin to dismantling a currency. Because it undeniably does keep things humming between us all. But a shared misguided belief is even more dangerous than an individual misguided belief, so I see a lot of value in uncovering the extent of our so-called will.
And thank you for the shoutout!!
“Free will exists in the ties that bind us into a society“ - the author is obviously right. But why all the doubting of free will in the first place? When you stuff the entire chocolate cake in your mouth in the first place, 1) nobody made you do it, 2) it wasn’t determined at the time of the Big Bang: you (a composite of interlocking decision making processes, some conscious, some unconscious, BUT ALL FREE) wanted it enough to do it.