there is no such thing as free will

As I’ve written elsewhere:

Far from being essential to our humanity, the belief in free will holds us back from being more humane and pragmatic.

• Conceptually, “free will” is indistinguishable from magic: it amounts to the ability to defy the laws of cause and effect by injecting our “will” as an uncaused cause in the universe
• We’re attached to the idea of free will for selfish reasons:
  • It allows us to take credit for our own good behavior
  • It gives the privileged an excuse not to be generous, since those less successful than us must have chosen to be so
  • It gives the powerful an excuse to engage in casual sadism by punishing others whose behavior we disapprove of (punishment doesn’t work, and serves the punisher more than the punished)

The Loops episode of Radiolab has a segment about transient global amnesia, a condition where you lose the ability to form new memories for about 24 hours. Observing people in this state who can’t remember what they just said a few minutes ago, they tend to have identical conversations over and over, as if the brain is a computer which, given the same inputs, will produce the same outputs. Thanks to memory, we never truly get the same input: if you tell me the same joke a second time, I’ll remember the first time and the input is now that you’re repeating yourself, to which I’ll naturally respond differently. But without memory, we respond like clockwork. The doctor calls it “creepy”, even:

Another thing that everybody does is that…everybody becomes a broken record, right down to the phrasing of the sentences… It makes the brain seem a little bit more like a machine. You give the machine the exact same set of inputs—every 90 seconds give it the same doctor, the same hospital room, the same beeping machines—and see if the output ever varies. And, it doesn’t. It almost seems like the patient has no free will.

Our future decisions can be predicted from brain activity well before we’re conscious of them

• Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain
• Tracking the Unconscious Generation of Free Decisions Using UItra-High Field fMRI
• Predicting free choices for abstract intentions

Can we consider a choice free if it’s already been made before we’re aware of making it?

What use is the idea that anyone deserves anything?

I see it used in two ways:

• To justify violence, e.g. people who commit crimes deserve to be locked up, or people who resist the state deserve violence (Friedrich Nietzsche: “Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.”)
• To justify inequality, e.g. those lucky enough to be successful deserve their winnings and have no obligation to help the less fortunate

If there is no such thing as free will, the idea of anyone deserving anything falls apart. Good riddance.

Theological Origins

In Western philosophy, free will was postulated by Augustine of Hippo as a solution to the problem of theodicy, of how an all-knowing, all-powerful, compassionate God could allow so much suffering in the world. By introducing the concept of human free will, Augustine makes suffering our fault, not God’s. But this prompts the question of how our will can be free if an omniscient God already knows what choices we’re going to make.