The Mystery of Human Agency: A Brief Critique of "Free Will"

Human beings are the only known animal in existence with a complex sense of self. This is not to say that other animals don’t exhibit some primitive sense of individuality. For instance, dogs can learn and respond to their names which is just a noise human beings assign them, but they realize it is their own unique identifier. However there is no consensus that animals have the cognitive capacity to understand their sense of self in the same way that humans do. Humans have a much more complex dynamic of their sense of self including a history of their past and how it has contributed to the person they are today, an intimate understanding of their own consciousness, and a set of dreams and aspirations for the abstract concept of the future.

Many cultures throughout history have bestowed a special aspect of life upon the human condition which suggests that people are more than the sum of our biological reality and we therefore transcend our physical interpretation of the world. This idea often is referred to as the soul. The soul is this metaphysical aspect of what it means to be a person. It is the part of us that is divine and makes us unique. This conceptualization of humanity has led to an egocentrism surrounding what it means to be a person that has aided the development of the idea of free will.

Free will is the underlying assumption that individuals are ultimately in charge of and are responsible for their actions. People make determinations about how they will behave within a given context. This freedom grants a sense of purpose to the individual. Because they can choose what kind of life they want to live, they are free to live their life in an infinite amount of possibilities and their is destination a direct consequence of the decisions they’ve made.

Within a society structured by value systems, the idea of free will appears quite useful. Since individuals have control over how they act within a given context. They can be held accountable and face the consequences of their actions. If an individual behaves properly, they should be praised and rewarded. On the other hand if they do not behave properly, they should be punished and made to feel guilty. This structure allows people and society to orient themselves in an effective way to minimize the overall suffering of the human condition.

I find it difficult, however, to view free will as an objective truth about the reality of behavior. To clarify what I mean by this, Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson have discussed the differences between objective truths and metaphorical truths. Objective truths are an undeniable aspect of reality while metaphorical truths are ideas which may be factually incorrect, but serve ultimately as useful to individuals who follow that truth. A great example Sam Harris brings up to describe this difference is in the way gun owners treat guns. This is to say that a safe gun owner always assumes the gun is loaded. They could check to make sure the gun is loaded a thousand times and still act as if it had a bullet in it. This is a metaphorical truth because it has been determined that there is no bullet, but the individual still behaves as if there is one in order to absolutely ensure that no fatal accidents occur.

It has occurred to me that free will may serve as a metaphorical truth of human behavior, serving as something that ultimately is useful, but is not necessarily factually correct. In the current blog, I will not be able to exhaust all the arguments for and against free will, however I will raise a few brief critiques.

I first want to get into a discussion that Neil Degrasse Tyson has with some degree of frequency regarding religion and science. It seems that people often ask NDT about how he feels about religious individuals suggesting that areas of science that we do not yet currently understand are actually where God exists in the universe. For instance, we are unable to explain the big bang or dark matter, and so some believers suggest that this is because God is responsible for these aspects of religion. NDT’s response to this typically is that when people argue their faith in God to rest in areas past the brink of scientific discovery, they will slowly lose the areas of their faith until there is nothing left. This is because all of these questions will eventually be answered by science.

See this interview to hear NDT’s words first hand:

It strikes me that proponents of the idea of free fall under a similar fallacy when trying to explain behavior. When people behave in a certain way and we are unable to explain it, instead of searching for the cause of that behavior or the objective truth underlying it, people revert to the idea of free will. This may be because it is an easy explanation and it satisfies the egocentric notion of us as special and unique.

The truth is, behavior is extremely difficult to understand. Part of the reason is because we do not have measurement tools with a high enough resolution to account for all of the variables which explain behavior. Individuals acting within a given context offer a complex dynamic which is currently beyond our capacity to compute. This is not to say that we will never be able to understand behavior, though.

Much work in the area of behavior as something that is environmentally determined has been done in Behavioral Psychology, most notably championed by B. F. Skinner. Within this framework are two broad categories including classical and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning refers to the control of reflex behaviors, such as the salivation of dogs as exemplified by Pavlov. Operant behavior however is behavior that falls outside of the realm of biologically determined reflexes and is behavior that is controlled by the consequences that it produces.

To give a simple example, if you encounter a stranger while walking down the street and smile at them, that action may or may elicit a response from the stranger. Perhaps they smile back at you and you for some reason find this rewarding (maybe it releases serotonin in your brain). Since your behavior elicited a response which is rewarding to you, you will be more likely to smile at strangers again in the future under similar contexts. The context matters, though, and can be described by certain discriminative stimuli. For example, if men and women respond differently to your smile, that behavior will be differentially reinforced. If men are less likely to smile back at you and you find that aversive, but women are more likely to smile back at you and you find that reinforcing, the sex of the individual you encounter will serve as a discriminative stimulus which occasions reinforcement or aversion. As a consequence, you will respond differently depending on the discriminative stimulus that you encounter.

This is a simple example attempting to explain very complex behavioral processes. For a full read on the origins of operant behavior, see “The Behavior of Organisms” by B. F. Skinner.

This perspective rests on the underlying assumption that behavior is environmentally determined and is in direct conflict with the underlying assumptions needed to support the idea of free will. This is not to say that free will is bad, though. I just struggle to reconcile free will outside of the realm of operant conditioning. Even setting up a value system where people should be held responsible for their behaviors falls within the realm of behavioral psychology. Societies punish undesirable behavior and reinforce desirable behavior. This leads ultimately to the reinforcement of successive approximations to the appropriate ways for individuals to conduct themselves in society and is not inherently non-deterministic.

While neither of these positions can currently be falsified, it may be important to note that free will may act as a metaphorical truth that holds a significant degree of importance for the structuring of our societal contingencies of punishment and reward. As a consequence, it may be necessary to keep this metaphorical truth over the supposed objective truth of determined behavior that I have argued for.