Freedom isn’t free

I haven’t blogged in a couple weeks, so I thought I’d swing for the fences and go in way above my head. Enjoy!

Free will has been a favourite topic of philosophers since before Socrates, but over the past few decades most of the interesting work on the topic has come from laboratories.

It’s often the case that scientific inquiry doesn’t produce the most comforting answers, and free will is no exception. It might not exist, and in fact consciousness itself might be an illusion cobbled together in the machinery of the brain.

One of the most commonly cited studies on the topic had a subject push a button at a time of their choosing, noting the time when the decision was made. Typically the button was pushed a fraction of a second after the decision was made, but according to an electroencephalograph monitoring the subject’s brain a spike of brain activity took place slightly before the individual was aware they had made a decision.

Some psychologists have interpreted these results to mean that will is simply a feeling that coincides with actions. The decision has been made before the person is conscious of it. For consistency’s sake, the mind retrospectively interprets the action as being caused by a conscious decision.

We all know that absolute free will doesn’t exist. If it did addiction wouldn’t be a problem. I wouldn’t have eaten bacon this morning. I can’t tell you where my thoughts come from. I do as I wish, but my wishes are subject to predispositions that I have no control over.

And yet for most people free will is correlated with moral responsibility. How can we hold people responsible for their actions if they aren’t actually in control of them?

I used to work with a serious born-again Christian. Free will was one of the few things that we agreed about. My friend rejected predestination, because he said he thought it made us into robots. If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, then what room is there for free will?

I’m confronted with a similar situation. I think that everything that has ever happened and ever will happen is part of a massive, cosmic chain reaction. I’ve done a few mental back flips trying to reconcile my bleeding heart liberal beliefs with my scientific deterministic beliefs. For me the question comes down to how determinism is determined.

For me, Nature vs. Nurture has always been a debate within a deterministic framework. Genetics plays a huge role in determining our predispositions, but I don’t think that it follows that human behaviour can be written off as the result of genetic determinism.

I recently read Microcosm, science writer Carl Zimmer’s wonderful new book . The book is an examination of life itself through the lens of Escherichia coli, one of the most studied and understood organisms on the earth. One of the most significant passages for me was when Zimmer described how E. coli clones will behave differently given identical circumstances.

In the same environment, some E. coli will swim for twice as long as others and some will be better at digesting simple sugars, even given an identical genome.

“Living things are more than just programs run by genetic software,” Zimmer writes, “Even in minuscule microbes, the same genes and the same genetic network can lead to different fates.”

E. coli are merely tiny bags of material with a simple genome. You have about a hundred billion living inside you right now. Humans have 25 times as many genes as E. coli. Our bodies are made of trillions of cells, including 100,000,000,000 neurons connected through 100,000,000,000,000 synapses. Each neuron is hundreds of times larger than an E. coli bacterium.

This exponential difference in complexity, and the essential chaos and randomness and biological systems is important for our understanding of human nature. Given these statistics, I believe that human behaviour is determined about equally between genetics and upbringing. But is a deterministic social system any better than a genetic one?

For me this is important because it underscores the importance of a solid moral framework. We’re most certainly not blank slates, but we are susceptible to the influence of our family and social groups. We aren’t slaves to the brutal process of natural selection that picked the genes that went into our recipe.

In the end, the Earth didn’t fall out of the sky when Copernicus pointed out that it’s not the centre of the universe, and we didn’t retreat to the treetops when Darwin discovered our lowly origin. An urge towards personal responsibility seems built in. We’ll never see criminals as faulty units that need repairing, and so the legal system is not likely to change in a significant way.

No matter what we learn, we’ll always be essentially the same. Sure, we’re robots. Who cares?