Free Will and Determinism 1

The scientific world-view and freedom

DO HUMAN BEINGS HAVE FREEWILL?

The idea we are to look at is that the scientific way of thinking of the world is incompatible with some of the beliefs we have traditionally entertained about ourselves as human beings.

Ordinarily we think human beings have 'free-will'

The traditional idea about ourselves that I'm talking about is that we are at least some of the time free agents.

I say 'traditional' without being very sure what I mean. I'm not sure how far back this belief goes.

But I hope it is one that you recognize. It is the belief that as human beings most of us at any rate are free to think out, at least some of the time, what we want to do, and then free, some of the time at least, to do it.

It is not a belief we put into words very often - I think because we don't need to. But it is one that seems to be implied in many of the things we say, many of the attitudes we take, many of the things that we do.

For example, we are forever holding people responsible for what they do. How could we think of doing this unless we think that they had in some sense a free choice when they went in for the action we are blaming them for?

We also, less commonly, praise people for what they do. How could we do that unless we thought they were responsible for it?

Science and the Principle of Causality

THE SCIENTIST IN ALL OF US

So that's the first point. We believe we have free will. But, next, this belief is under threat from science.

I don't mean by science people in white coats who work in laboratories. I mean the science that is in all of us. It started, this science, in the thinking and practice of a few people in the 17th Century. Or at least, that was when modern science took shape as a fundamentally influential system of thought. But since then this system of thought has been so influential we are all scientists now. We all look at the universe not as a story or a picture but as some kind of mechanism.

When something within our physical surroundings happens, we focus as a matter of spontaneous response on what brought it about.

If Los Angeles is rocked by an earthquake, those giving us the news place it against the background of the San Andreas fault line and the movement of the earth's cooling crust.

If there is some kind of epidemic, an outbreak of e. coli for example, we hear, and expect to hear, and are satisfied by hearing about, bacteria or viruses and how they spread, how human vulnerability varies to them, how measures to destroy them are uncertain.

And so on.

We do not, except at the fringes, and except through the stirrings of a long buried sensibility, ask what message God is conveying to us through the earthquake, or what punishment is being imposed through the plague.

We are all scientists in the sense that we expect whatever happens to be have been brought about by causes, and we are all scientists in the sense that our focus of interest is on causation when we show interest in the physical world we think of ourselves as inhabiting.

Prompt:

Do you think there is any incompatibility between belief in causality and belief in a supernatural being?

The Principle of Causality

In other words, at the forefront of our thinking today is the nostrum that 'every event has a cause ' this nostrum, and the agenda set by it.

It is this nostrum that is rather grandly called the principle of causality.

If we are allowed to put the commitment of modern science to causality in this stark form the conflict between science and our belief in human autonomy is pretty clear.

All the things that human beings do are among the things that happen. They are events, occurrences in the physical world which as human beings they belong to.

So that if the principle of causality is correct, if it is true that nothing happens without a cause, all the things that human beings do must be caused, must have causes.

But all those causes are events as well. If the principle of causality is correct, they too in their turn must have been caused, must have had causes.

And so on.

Forever.

What we have hanging down from everything that we do therefore is a chain of causes dropping down into the indefinite, infinite, past.

The topmost links of these chains may be within the human being: they are the things the human being does. But inevitably, since they are indefinitely, infinitely extended, they pass downwards out of the human being on their way into the infinite past.

You have the conclusion then that everything human beings do is fixed.

Fixed long before they born, fixed at the beginning of time if you wish to be dramatic.

Here is an 18th Century figure being dramatic about this picture of the universe:

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) courtesy School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St Andrews, who also provide an introduction.

Pierre-Simon de Laplace, Théorie analytique des probabilités (Veuve Courcier, 1812), 177.

The translation here is by Lloyd Strickland- personal communication, thanks.

Mathematician and theoretical astronomer, Laplace has been called the 'Newton' of France.

That is a picture of the universe which is implied by the principle of causality.

The Principle of Causality and 'free-will'

The upshot is:

The human being him or her self has no control over what they do.

They may appear to think, to deliberate, to weigh the odds and decide this and that, act as they see fit: but if the principle of causality is right, if everything that happens is caused, these appearances of freedom, of autonomy, are illusory. Human beings may be a set of events which cause other events, but if so the set of events which they are in turn caused by other events. Human beings on the scientific assumption, may be nodes in the causal nexus, but they can be the originators of nothing.

I'm sketching very broadly here, and perhaps you will feel I am glossing over things, lumping things together, sliding over gaps of logic. In fact, I positively hope you will feel this, because this will be the beginning of philosophising on this topic.

BUZZ : Can you think of any exceptions to the principle of causality? Can you think of examples of events which don't have causes? What came up previously

This and the next 5 presentations of the module will be devoted to working out whether there is a conflict between our outlook upon the universe and our belief in free-will - between the principle of causality and human autonomy.