This post was kindly contributed by Ron Aharoni. 

Following Ron’s 2009 (Hebrew) book on philosophy  החתול שאיננו שם the two of us had in 2010 a long discussion on various philosophical questions with emphasis on the free will problem. Ron wrote this post explaining his point of view in connection with my 2021 paper on free will (see this post).  See also this birthday post for a few of Aharoni’s mathematical contributions.

The Free Will problem

Ron Aharoni

1. The problem

The Determinism-Free Will (DFW, below) problem is born from a combination of three intuitions. None of these is explicit, and it is not at all clear why we trust them.

A. We are free to choose.

B. Events, including brain processes leading to decisions, are pre-determined.

C. A and B are incompatible.

At least one of these assumptions must be false. There are no paradoxes in real life. The world is consistent, and a paradox does not point at an absurd phenomenon in the real world, but at some flaw in our concepts, an erroneous assumption. Identifying the fallacy requires formulating the three assumptions explicitly:

A’. What is “freedom to choose”?

B’. What does it mean to be “pre-determined”?

C’. Why are the two contradictory?

These are not philosophical questions. They are factual, more specifically – psychological. They ask what happens in the brain of the person using these concepts. What are the intuitions behind the scene.

Circumventing this stage, of explicit formulation of the assumptions, results in coerced arguments. This is what happens with the solution that invokes the deus ex machina of quantum theory. It denies B, without defining A and B precisely, and without explicating C, the intuition of incompatibility. The meaning of all three assumptions is left vague.

2. Free Will as a tautology

So, let us address A’ first. I will go straight to the conclusion: the existence of Free Will is a tautology.

Let me explain.

Like all animals and plants, we are future-oriented. We were formed by Natural Selection, which is, tautologically, biased towards the future. Our eyes are placed in the front of our heads, looking in the direction of the places we shall be in, not backward, where we came from. So, an inherent temporal a-symmetry is ingrained in each living or vegetating creature.

This means that when we ponder an action, we look in the forward temporal direction. We try to predict its consequences, rather than find its causes. (“Consequences” of an event F are defined as events following it, in time, and causally linked to it; causes are defined as preceding F).

We imagine the action, and calculate its impact on future events.

In this process it is essential that we isolate the part of the action that is solely dependent on our deliberation. Namely, those parts whose causal interaction with preceding events is through the deliberation. We must distinguish them from the causal links with the past that circumvent the deliberation. Those that come from aside.

As an illustration, suppose I deliberate whether to eat a tomato or not. Suppose that a health-freak giant studies what I had for breakfast, finds out that I haven’t had my doze of vitamin C for today, by which he decides to force my hand to reach for the tomato. The action is then not given to my free will, because it had a causal link with the past that did not go through my decision process.

We are thoroughly trained to isolate the part of the action that is only dependent on the deliberation process from other past events. This is essential for survival. When I deliberate a trip to Tel Aviv I will take into account the physical possibilities, the rules of Covid isolation, and so forth. These I will not deliberate. I will only consider the part of the action that is given to the deliberation. And that part, by definition, is free.

But this means that we always feel our actions are free. Free Will just means that we know what is linked to our decision process, and what is not. And this knowledge is deeply ingrained in us, down to the physiological level.

But there are demons lurking in the dark, in the form of B and C above. We have to thwart their threats, for which purpose we have to ask for explicit formulation of the arguments.

3. What does it mean to be “pre-determined”?

Pre-determination is usually identified with prediction. The rules of nature tell us that the future event F will occur. F is predictable.

The prediction establishes a link between F and past events. For example, a wise man could predict your next choice, and write it on a piece of paper. Then your choice is pre-determined. It is equivalent to what is written in the paper.

Taking prediction more abstractly – not necessarily as words but as any event that is equivalent to F and preceding it – a prediction is just a causal link between an event and the past. That’s the essence.

For simplicity, let us combine the past events linked to F into one event, E. So E predicts F if it is causally linked to it.

For the purpose of formulation of the Determinism-Free Will paradox it is not compulsory that the prediction is perfect. A correlation between F and E suffices. For example, when I mount a bus, I can predict with good certainty that the bus driver will follow the ordinary route, and will not take us to the beach for him to have a short swim. The latter is possible, but there are good chances it will not occur.

So, pre-determination of F is any causal link connecting F with the past. Say, a giant forces your hand to take a tomato, according to some information he collected in the past. Or, a wise person predicted whether you are going to eat a tomato, and wrote his prediction on a piece of paper. These establish equivalences, or at least correlations, between your action and the past.

Of course, there is a big difference: in the first case the decision is not free, since there is a causal link circumventing the deliberation process. In the second, the wise man predicted the deliberation, so the link goes through the deliberation, not from aside. This choice was free.

The contradiction in C is there, even if we are speaking about correlation, as weak as it may be. If my future action F is in high correlation with a past event E, then I am not totally free. This suffices to form a paradox, since the feeling of being free is total – I feel I am totally free to choose F.

And even the most staunch advocators of the Quantum uncertainty solution to the problem of Free-Will will not deny the existence of such correlation. Without it no rational behavior would be possible.

4. The contradiction

Finally, we get to C’. Looking for an explicit formulation of the contradiction between A and B.

It is very simple. It is the essence of the DFW problem.

(DFW)

We can change (decide on, determine the fate of) future events,

We cannot change the fate of past events.

So, an equivalence, or even correlation, as weak as it may be, between past events and events given to our decision, is impossible.

In other words: if my action F is equivalent to a past event E then since E cannot be decided upon, so does my choice. One cannot change, or decide on, past events, and if there is some equivalence (logical or causal) with the future, I cannot change the future. I am not master of my decisions. There is no free will.

This is at the core of the feeling that determinism is incompatible with free choice.

Summarizing: F is a future action, E a past event, if they are equivalent, then since I cannot decide on E I cannot choose F. I am not free.

(*) A side remark: in a famous conundrum, called “Newcomb’s paradox”, the Determinism-Free Will paradox is stated in the contrapositive direction. It poses a situation in which (seemingly, at least) a past event E is causally linked with a choice of an act F, making it possible to determine E by choosing to do F. Contrary to our profound belief that the past cannot be affected.

The Determinism-Free Will paradox is: I cannot decide on E, so, I cannot affect F.

Newcomb’s paradox is: I can decide on F, so I can decide the fate of E. The same argument.

5. A first step in search for the flaw – looking from aside

Since arguments A and B are flawless, the error leading to the paradox must be in C. The intuition that A and B are incompatible is based on some flawed argument.

Rabi Akiva (~50 – 136), the great Jewish sage, put it:

“Everything is foreseen yet freedom of choice is granted” (Pirkey Avot 3:15)

Of course, this is an evasion, not a solution. It evades the explicit paradox, given in (DFW)
above.

Still, the persistence of the claim indicates that it is based on some deep intuition. There is something to it.

Here is this something, which is the fact most relevant to DFW:

Everything is foreseen from the outside, freedom of choice is granted from the inside.

Which means: for an onlooker, things are determined; The decider feels they are not. He cannot see the determinism. Not as long as he or she are deliberating.

This is the most crucial observation about DFW: the problem does not exist when viewed from the outside.

Why is this? Simply, because the punch line in (DFW), “so I cannot decide on F” can only be said by a decider. Looking from aside, you cannot say “so I cannot decide” – you are not deciding anyway.

For example, observing a colony of ants without intervention in their decisions, you can know the regularity governing their actions, and still view their actions as given to their will (yes, ants certainly have wills, just look at an ant fighting a grain of wheat). The two facts are totally compatible.

So, the secret of Hobbes, Hume and Mill is that they look from aside. From the point of view of a detached observer. The secret of their opponents is that they look from the inside. From the point of view of the decider. They want to play the role of the decider and the describer at the same time.

Who is right? The onlookers or the deciders?

Or is the truth in the middle? Or each side has its right for its point of view?

In this case there is a side that is right: the detached observers – Hobbes, Hume, and Mill.

The detached observers are always right. The right way to study human thinking is from aside. Separating object from subject.

A rule of thumb: if a problem disappears upon detachment between observer and observed, it is a sign that it is the result of a special type of sin, namely of an error. It means sinning in circularity. Some circular (self-defined) argument is at work.

But before I explain why, here is a small digression, on a big subject, “What is philosophy”.

6. An aside: what is philosophy?

In my book “The cat that is not there” I tried to answer the question “what is philosophy” in a non-philosophical way. Indeed, it is not at all a philosophical question, it is empirical. It is answered by observing what kind of conceptual structure people identify as “philosophical”.

My answer is that every philosophical discussion commits the same sin, of non-separation between observer and observed.

A philosophical investigation studies some conceptual structure, from the point of view of its user. This is problematic – the right way to study one’s thinking is to partition oneself into two totally separate entities, observer and observed. If this is not done, philosophy emerges.

Non-separation can lead to two possible outcomes:

A. Absurdities. Circularly constructed concepts easily lead to paradoxes.

B. Philosophical flavor of the problem. The problem is a factual one, about human thought, but a feeling arises that the problem cannot be answered by observing reality. This is the famous feeling of loss of stable ground, absence of Archimedian leverage point, characteristic of philosophy.

Both are unfounded, which can be realized when separation is applied.

Upon separation, every philosophical problem has one of two fates:

A. It can disappear, testimony to its entire existence being the result of an error. There are problems that just disappear, like the problem of Idealism – is there an external world. Watching Joe speaking about the chair in front of him, and informing us about the chair, we can just check whether indeed there is a chair there, and validate his observation. Yes, there is a chair in the external world. There is no self-reliance in this. When I ask about my own consciousness, my testimony “yes, there is a chair there” relies on the same perception that was put to doubt. It looks circular. Of course, the sin is viewing myself as both observer and observed. Separation should apply, after which the problem disappears.

The problems that disappear are the paradoxical ones – like the Mind-Body
problem. It does not exist in detached observation of other people. The DFW problem is another problem of this type. It, too, does not exist when the point of view of a detached onlooker is adopted.

B. The problem can lose its philosophical flavor. It becomes factual, an ordinary empirical problem about the world. For example, “What is truth” becomes “How does Joe handle the concept of truth”, or “How does Western society use the concept”. “What is “good”?”, the classical Socratean problem, becomes “how do we use the word “good”?”, in other words what are our ethical values, where “our” can be my own personally, or the set of values of our society. A famous definition of “philosophy” is that it clarifies concepts. But clarifying the concepts of Joe does not generate a sense of philosophicality. No more than understanding in depth the workings of a computer program.

7. The fallacy

Let us return to the person deciding whether to eat a tomato or not.

We noted that there are two types of causal links connecting the decision with the past.

If the motion of the hand is forced by a giant, then it is by definition “not free”, so there is no problem. A pre-determined action which is not free – this is to be expected.

This is true for any causal link between F (the decision on the tomato) and E (any past event) that circumvents the process of deliberation. Such a link means the action is not free.

So, the only problem is if the causal link goes through the process of deliberation. For example, when a wise man predicted the deliberation. In this case the paradox arises: the deliberator feels his decision is free (no giant forcing his hand), and yet there is a past event equivalent to it (say, the prediction the sage wrote in his piece of paper).

Here comes the deception, the fallacious argument. The argument leading to the contradiction is: “If I can change (determine, decide upon) F then I can change the past event E”. But in the second case in effect what this means is: “I will change F, so that the deliberation process will be such and such, so that E is so and so”.

In other words, in the second case, we deliberate F with the aim in mind of affecting the deliberation process.

We want to decide on our decision process. We want the decision process to be such and such.

An obviously impossible task.

Thus the argument “If I can change F then I can change E”, or contra-positively – “Since I cannot determine the fate of E I am not free to choose F”, is flawed. It is trying to lift yourself by pulling at your hair. You cannot decide on your decision process, or choose your very present motives.

Not very surprising: a problem that exists in self-perception and not from the point of view of a detached observer is bound to be born from the sin of circular argumentation.

8. Summary: Thou shalt not look back

The above can be summarized in one rule:

The decider feels free, because he does not look back.

He just can’t look back. He is wearing blinders, like horses. The kind of blinders Lot may have regretted his wife didn’t wear (as you may remember, when she disobeyed God’s order and looked back she turned into a pillar of salt).

You do not deliberate by looking back, at your motives and your history. You enact the motives, not observe them. You think about the future outcomes of your pondered action, not about the causality behind the action.

This has two reasons, both having to do with circularity. One is shallow and the other deep.

The simple reason is the familiar phenomenon of measurement affecting the measured – a popular interpretation of the uncertainty principle of quantum theory. If you take your motives into account in the deliberation (“I will do so and so because my motives are such and such”) the knowledge becomes part of the motive and may change it. The likely effect of knowing your motives will be – “Yes, but I and not obliged to choose this way. I can always choose otherwise!”

This is a circularity phenomenon – knowledge interfering with its object.

The deeper circularity phenomenon is the one discussed above. It hinders not only the use of knowing (in real time, not in hindsight) of one’s deliberation process. It hinders the use of its very existence. Deliberation means finding, and using, causal links between your action and future events. If you want to use a link with the past, there are two possibilities: if the link circumvents the decision process, the action is not free; if the link goes through the deliberation, then using it is tantamount to choosing your deliberation process, in other words, choosing your motives. An obviously circular task.

The deliberation is a partition, that separates us from the past. It makes us look only forward in time. We cannot know the rules governing our actions, and we cannot even use their existence for the purpose of deliberation. When deciding, our face is only to the future.