In a recent blog posting Scott Adams, the creator of the rather wonderful Dilbert cartoons, makes the argument that free will does not exist. His argument is rooted in the idea that since the laws of physics are deterministic at best or random at worst (if you bring the uncertainty principle into play) that free will cannot exist since, essentially, the universe will simply roll on of its own accord and take our brains with it and there’s nothing we can do to change that process. Now Scott is a comic so, free will or not, he can’t help but take a somewhat humorous approach to subjects even as deep as the issue of free will. However, since his post was made on his self-named ’serious Sunday’ we should assume that this is a fairly accurate representation of his views so it is worth a second look.
There are a few different ways I would like to challenge his assertion. Not that I am arguing that free will does (or does not exist) but I want to look at the logic he has used and perhaps demonstrate some flaws in his thinking.
Firstly, taking the argument at face value, there are two axioms has used to construct it. The first is explicit. That is, that the laws of physics are deterministic, or at least random, meaning that they do not provide a basis on which to postulate free will. I have to question this assumption. I would quite confidently assert that at this time our understanding of the laws of physics is far from complete. Such issues as the uncertainty principle and quantum wave functions very well defined mathematics which accurately describes what we know about the physics of the very small, and has been used to make predictions that have been borne out by experiment. However, these well-defined concepts lead to multiple interpretations of ‘reality’ that physicists and philosophers are still arguing over with little sign of any definite answer anytime soon.
Furthermore, the current leading approach to trying to resolve the unanswered questions of the universe is superstring theory which postulates nine or ten additional spatial dimensions that we cannot perceive and, at present, no-one can even conceive of an experiment that might confirm or deny their existence. Along with a lot of other exotic theoretical concepts it seems to me that the laws of physics, far from being so nailed down as to provide a sound basis for denying free will, still leave plenty of wiggle room for the discovery of some aspect of reality that we have not previously even conceived of that could support free will as an intrinsic property of the universe. I would highly recommend reading Brian Greene’s book “The Fabric of the Cosmos” for a very clear, approachable discussion of these issues.
This brings us to the second, implicit, assumption that Scott has used in his argument. That ‘free will’ needs to be an intrinsic property of the universe in order to be meaningful. I contend that, on the contrary, any meaningful definition of free will is as an emergent property of the same complexity that leads to our own consciousness and that free will is most meaningfully defined as the “quality” which we experience moment to moment. In other words, free will exists precisely because we feel that it exists. What Scott calls the “persistent illusion of making choices” is precisely what free will is.
This might sound like a cop-out, but let me take a more familiar example. Few people would doubt that the colour red exists. Unless you are blind or colour-blind you most-likely experience ‘red’ every day of your life. However, a physical description of ‘red’ light is that it is an wave made up of an electric field and a magnetic field oscillating out of phase at a frequency of 448 terahertz. In the view of physics it differs little from ‘blue’ light except in the frequency at which the oscillations occur. It reflects off of and is absorbed by pretty much the same things, travels at the same speed in a vacuum, etc. However, few would deny that the experience of ‘redness’ is qualitatively different from the experience of ‘blueness’. Should we, just by looking at the law of physics, deny that ‘red’ exists?
Take another example, possibly closer to Scott’s heart. Using his argument we could conclude that Dilbert cartoons are not funny. After all, if you look at the physics and even the chemistry of ink and paper, there is nothing to suggest that humour should, or indeed can exist. Sure, I might look at a Dilbert cartoon and think that it is funny (as I often do), but physics tells us that it isn’t really.
Similarly, free will cannot be defined in terms of the raw physics of the universe (no matter how precisely we might understand it). In the same way as ‘red’ or ‘humour’, ‘free will’ is the quality of an experience and an emergent property of our minds, not an intrinsic property of the universe. For a really good development of this idea, and other ones, I suggest reading “Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind” by Ian Stewart and Jack S. Cohen. They do far better justice to it than I’ve been able to in this short post.