Nilesh Jasani's Reviews > Great Philosophical Debates: Free Will and Determinism

Free Will and Determinism is an exceptional course that is highly focussed, well structured, and with countless insights to stimulate thinking. The best tribute is to write one's conclusions to append the Professor's closing remarks about his intentions in the course of not to conclude but to make others think. So, this reviewer's views from hereon on the course's main topics.

The simple reality of a philosophical mind is that it struggles to accept a world that could be running only on specific mathematical, logical, or similar rules. It gets worse: these rational fields in which the world rules are set are not the most natural to a homo Sapien. Humanity has discovered the underlying rule-based structure of the world lately.

Contrasting with this is our philosophers' strong inclination to retain the traditional feeling/experience/intuition-based language concepts passed down to them through the mouths of the most well-known and respected thinkers of our kind. The efforts to reconcile the latest knowledge with historic concepts and queries invariably lead to unresolvable debates on definitions and meanings of the terms that are impossible to pin. More importantly, even after millennia-spanning debates, philosophers never settle debates on pet topics unless comprehensively refuted by later-day scientific studies.

Given this, it could be more productive to approach philosophical questions by starting with what is already known and working backward rather than trying again based on queries posed in the past. There is not enough space in a book review to scratch the surface of these ideas, but it is worth putting them here as notes.

Given the evidence of the weight, let us presume that the world runs on a set of rules. Let's call it a big axiom A. We will show that axiom A is at the root of countless philosophical debates, including free will and determinism: believers and disbelievers of many philosophical concepts effectively differ here.

The rule set of the world may or may not be fully comprehendible now or forever. Thankfully, we do not need assumptions about a sentient's complete comprehensibility for our purpose. One must still note that the whole of the rule set could be just slightly longer than what we know currently in our sciences, or it could be billions of times more complex with the number of parameters, interrelations, forces, fields, constants, etc. so large that no system on a rock like earth could encompass it fully with all the resources at disposal.

When a human language produces concepts like soul, consciousness, free will, determinism, or even God, there is a required assumption of something - like a field or a force - that works outside any rule system governing the material world. We are different from inanimate objects and other life forms. Our ancestors found it necessary to believe additional mystic sources were working on us to account for our higher-order existence.

Given that the rules uncovered so far are, at best, an approximation of the full set, it is impossible to rule out mystery concepts as comprehensively as geocentric theories. Proponents need consciousness and the likes to be outside the rule-based frameworks to give importance and agency to our race, not unlike the importance accorded to earth in geocentric theories. This inherently contradicts the axiom mentioned above. The contradictions lead one group to refute the starting assumption, another to rue the gaps in our knowledge, and the most to debate endlessly on finer points without conclusions. A disagreement on the axiom cannot simply be resolved through rational arguments based on them.

Here is one example from the book that falls into this category. In the chapters on neurosciences, we learn about the struggles of different philosophical schools in finding the space for consciousness and free will in what we are learning about the brain's processing of signals and actions. Some see a potential for consciousness to exert itself in the current measurement gaps between our awareness neurons becoming aware of something and another set acting. The others want to use the gap for free will to guide the action before its neurons are activated. It actually gets this silly!

There are more straightforward, obvious answers that require an overthrowing of historically-cherished concepts (the reviewer realizes practical difficulties but let's leave that aside, given the space constraints).

Let's start with an example from traditional physics - say, fluidity. One needs to know everything about individual liquid molecules and their interrelations when present in an enormous number to understand the behavior of droplets or onwards to fluid down a capillary. The reality is that not only do we not know all at a molecular level, but we cannot understand the complete interplay of even three of them, let alone billions.

Still, fluidity is an emergent concept that can be studied approximately using other types of equations. No scientific person thinks there is something non-scientific in between, like free will or consciousness, that suddenly causes molecules to behave like waves of one type versus the other.

Our minds and bodies are tiny instances of the large world equation set. We cannot work on how our body changes from one moment to the next without any external influence, let alone its dynamic evolution over time, given all the environmental variables. A soul, consciousness, free will, etc., are good functional ways to describe many emergent behaviors like viscosity in fluid mechanics (notwithstanding their utility in reconciling historic, spiritual, or religious beliefs). Yet, searching for their causes in scientific or rational realms is futile.

The last statement is important. A typical philosopher begins with questions like whether there is free will with the promise not to provide an answer through axiomatic authority but with didactic, reasoned discourses. The process of answering first tangles her in describing the term's meaning. The more she parses, the worse it becomes to ignore the gaps in scientific knowledge. Depending on her proclivity, she might feel tempted to use the knowledge gaps to provide the basis for her conclusions on the topic. Unfortunately, the closer she comes to asserting a non-rational concept, the more random and arbitrary it appears if she continues to pursue her logical exercise to find causality or reason. This point will have her recoil and leave the query without a definitive conclusion. Amid such tensions, she would also anguish whether a complete rule-based system will be deterministic, regardless of the possibility of the equation being unsolvable by any system smaller than the universe itself.

The simple reality is that for those who want to believe in concepts like soul, consciousness, or free will, it is imperative to abandon rationality or science somewhere. Efforts to reconcile are doomed to fail, given the starting point in the hypothesis. It is precisely for the same reason that people with different assumptions on the limits of rationality are unlikely to ever agree on the answers to these questions, given the gaps in our knowledge. Those who believe in a rule-based world can still have practical answers to moral, ethical, and legal dilemmas, as shown in the course toward the final chapters.

A small section on the determinism debate, which is slightly different. On the arrow of time, the observed world hurls in only one direction. To call this direction fated or not is a linguist's prerogative. Whether the equation is solvable using anything smaller than the universe is unimportant for our purposes. Like a three-body problem, even the most defined rule-based system may still not yield conclusions on where things are headed without waiting for the actuality to unfold. The defined rule-based system may have probabilistic parts. However, it is still an axiomatic assumption if we want to believe that there is no more profound, hidden theory behind any probabilistic fallout we observe. In the end, without mystic forces, a rule-based system is definitionally just rule-based, which is almost synonymous with the word deterministic. Some may use probabilistic parameters to dispute this, but that's an issue with the word's definition; it does not create any room for concepts like free will.

Back to the course: it is worth going through because it will make many come up with ideas, like for this reviewer.