Vera Verba

This is an initial re-write of a section of “God Wants You Dead” that Robert “Father of Cryonics” Ettinger said seemed confused, and upon re-reading it, I had to agree with him. I said I would re-write it, so here goes:

4.3.2.4 Free Will

Whenever people start to think about the nature of identity or intelligence, the issue of free will usually comes up.

If our decisions are a product of pre-existing behavior models we have created through previous experience and learning, then how is this any different than a computer running a program?

The simple answer is that it isn’t different, but that this is nothing to be particularly concerned about. Programming does not necessarily negate free will, depending upon how you define it. If you take a look under the hood of human consciousness, you find a machine, and if you could fully understand this machine, you might no longer believe that the things that it does are some sort of magic.

Understanding that our consciousness is a physical process this only negates the concept of “free will” if you can show that physical process produces predictability. It is not enough just to point to a physical cause for actions or limitations on actions. If you believe that having free will requires that human beings be able to act based upon something outside of the physical reality of the organic machines that we are, stop for a moment and think about what you are really requiring.

Would you say that a person does not have free will because they can not jump off a cliff and soar through the air like a bird? Of course you wouldn’t - you accept that human beings don’t have wings. And if you accept that being subject to that sort of physical limitation does not inhibit your concept of free will, why is it any different when you realize that the physical structure and function of the brain will limit the things that someone can ever even form the will to do?

If your definition of  “free will” requires that the will to do something be beyond the constraints of the physical structure of the brain - that the initial impulse to act exist outside of and unbound by physical laws - what you are really requiring, is for such a thing as a Soul to exist. But even the idea of a soul only pushes the issue out a little further. Much like believing that GOD created the universe raises the question of “Where did GOD come from?”, believing that we have free will arising from a metaphysical part of our selves raises the question “How do we know that there are not deterministic rules governing our souls?”

What it comes down to is that it is not determinism that negates free will, but predictability. If you can push the question of whether or not you have free will off to a place above the level that you can perceive, then from your own viewpoint, you have free will - or at least can not know whether or not your will is free - which amounts to much the same thing since there is no perceived predictability.

But you do not have to postulate a soul to find your will free of predictable deterministic mechanisms. The fact that you have self reference may be enough to do that. You are constantly checking and rechecking your mental processes. Before you act on an initial impulse, you think about your actions and decide whether or not to act, and because self reference is cyclical, you can decide to change your decision again and again.

You are not a programmed robot, but rather that you are the program inside the robot – you are a program that can re-write itself.

So how does this offer escape from determinism?

Nothing would seem to be more predictable and deterministic than a computer program calculating a mathematical equation. However, in  mathematics we find that self referential recursive functions (those that have their own output fed back into them as input) often display a truly beautiful level of unpredictability. If you have ever played around with a computer display of fractal equations like the Mandelbrot set, you have seen that as you zoom in on the picture the pattern changes, and continues to change however deep you look. No matter how small the scale, the pattern never settles down into predictability.

A related situation in the physical world is the study of chaotic systems. Because the state of a physical system always feeds back into itself, what start out as tiny differences in initial state are often magnified to produce large difference in a fairly short time frame. Such systems are said to have “extreme sensitivity to initial conditions” and this makes them highly unpredictable. The predictability of such systems is limited to the level that initial conditions can be measured, and the self referential behavior of the human brain makes our conscious will a highly chaotic system.

Self reference can produce the kind of unknowable level of unpredictability that might be found in having some part of one’s will originating outside the laws of physics. Only predictability of actions can prove determinism, and the physical limits on the precision that can theoretically be measured from within the physical world, combined with the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions that the physical systems we call human beings exhibit, puts proof of determinism as far out of reach, without the existence of a soul, as it would be if such a thing provably existed.

Only a being outside the system could make the human condition deterministic. But what if there is a being outside the system? If GOD exists, does that mean that our behavior is deterministic?

The answer is that GOD’s omniscience means that our behavior is predictable and therefore deterministic by definition. However, GOD is also thought to be omnipotent and has supposedly granted us “free will,” so everything works out ok. :-)

Of course the above assumes a both an omniscient and omnipotent GOD who grants free will. Although this is the standard God model, there is no logical reason to assume those three ideas should be linked. There is no logical reason why GOD couldn’t be omniscient but only a little bit omnipotent - unable to grant free will in defiance of logical reasoning. Or omniscient and omnipotent, but not big on the granting of paradoxical abilities like “free will.” However, we can’t know whether GOD exists, and not knowing whether or not you have free will is the same as having free will, since no predictability exists from your own vantage point, and therefor no determinism.

Additionally, if GOD were really also omnibenevolent (as advertised), he would make sure that he did not actually exist, so as to spare us the pain of being deterministic.

(@Ettinger - and you thought the first incarnation of this was confused!)