What is Free Will?

It’s not hard from a verbal / spiritual / humanistic perspective to define free will… it’s the ability to decide what you think, free (at least partly) from outside influences such as other people, gods, or physics.

Rocks don’t have free will – you can only ask the question of things that make decisions. Tornadoes decide things, sort of, but they’re slaves to physics. (Tornadoes as a low-level form of life). Worms decide things, but we’re pretty certain they don’t have free will – it’s all impulses determined by biochemistry, right? Humans have free will, of course! What about mammals and birds? Maybe.

But what about for those of us who slavishly stick to the idea that everything is physical? We have problems defining what free will could be.

It’s easy to say what it’s not.

• It’s not determinism. Lots of things are determined, pre-determined in fact, by their initial conditions and the law of physics. Start the same and you always end the same. That’s not free will.
• It’s not random. All quantum-scale interactions have some fundamental randomness. That’s not free will.
• And lots of interactions at all scales have practical randomness, where it’s nearly impossible to prepare the same initial conditions, or to know how the complicated interactions will determine what happens. That’s not free will.

So what is free will? How do we construct free will out of the above set of  deterministic, fundamentally random, and practically random interactions? Seems like no matter how we do it, it still can’t be free will.

Football again

One of the paradoxes of life is you have to believe in spite of the odds. See the Paradox of Sports and Free Will.

Believing the impossible

To win at sports and at life, you have to believe in spite of evidence and reason. The ability to believe what is manifestly false, and for such beliefs to increase the odds of them becoming true (not in any particular case but overall for the organism or at least the species). That, I think, is the materialist’s best definition of free will.

That’s kinda complicated. So why? We can program or train a computer to believe unlikely things. That alone doesn’t mean it has free will. But if those beliefs influence its ability to accomplish those things, then I think we have to say it has free will. By this definition!

It can be believing you can accomplish something that’s unlikely (more optimistic than reality or reason dictates), or believing you’ll be unable to accomplish something that’s likely (more pessimistic than reason or reality dictates). An organism or data processing box that can do this has free will.

According to this definition, if I can program or train a computer to believe the unlikely, in spite of its inputs or what’s in its memory or what its AI concludes, and if this programming or training makes it better at doing its job, then by this definition it has free will.

MORE IN THIS SERIES: The universe doesn’t think like we do