essay freedom and determinism

Chapter 5: The problem of free will and determinism

The problem of free will and determinism

Matthew Van Cleave

“You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.”

-Leo Tolstoy

“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”

-Arthur Shopenhauer

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The term “freedom” is used in many contexts, from legal, to moral, to psychological, to social, to political, to theological. The founders of the United States often extolled the virtues of “liberty” and “freedom,” as well as cautioned us about how difficult they were to maintain. But what do these terms mean, exactly? What does it mean to claim that humans are (or are not) free? Almost anyone living in a liberal democracy today would affirm that freedom is a good thing, but they almost certainly do not all agree on what freedom is. With a concept as slippery as that of free will, it is not surprising that there is often disagreement. Thus, it will be important to be very clear on what precisely we are talking about when we are either affirming or denying that humans have free will. There is an important general point here that extends beyond the issue of free will: when debating whether or not x exists, we must first be clear on defining x, otherwise we will end up simply talking past each other . The philosophical problem of free will and determinism is the problem of whether or not free will exists in light of determinism. Thus, it is crucial to be clear in defining what we mean by “free will” and “determinism.” As we will see, these turn out to be difficult and contested philosophical questions. In this chapter we will consider these different positions and some of the arguments for, as well as objections to, them.

Let’s begin with an example. Consider the 1998 movie, The Truman Show . In that movie the main character, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey), is the star of a reality television show. However, he doesn’t know that he is. He believes he is just an ordinary person living in an ordinary neighborhood, but in fact this neighborhood is an elaborate set of a television show in which all of his friends and acquaintances are just actors. His every moment is being filmed and broadcast to a whole world of fans that he doesn’t know exists and almost every detail of his life has been carefully orchestrated and controlled by the producers of the show. For example, Truman’s little town is surrounded by a lake, but since he has been conditioned to believe (falsely) that he had a traumatic boating accident in which his father died, he never has the desire to leave the small little town and venture out into the larger world (at least at first). So consider the life of Truman as described above. Is he free or not? On the one hand, he gets to do pretty much everything he wants to do and he is pretty happy. Truman doesn’t look like he’s being coerced in any explicit way and if you asked him if he was, he would almost certain reply that he wasn’t being coerced and that he was in charge of his life. That is, he would say that he was free (at least to the same extent that the rest of us would). These points all seem to suggest that he is free. For example, when Truman decides that he would rather not take a boat ride out to explore the wider world (which initially is his decision), he is doing what he wants to do. His action isn’t coerced and does not feel coerced to him. In contrast, if someone holds a gun to my head and tells me “your wallet or your life!” then my action of giving him my wallet is definitely coerced and feels so.

On the other hand, it seems clear the Truman’s life is being manipulated and controlled in a way that undermines his agency and thus his freedom. It seems clear that Truman is not the master of his fate in the way that he thinks he is. As Goethe says in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, there’s a sense in which people like Truman are those who are most helplessly enslaved, since Truman is subject to a massive illusion that he has no reason to suspect. In contrast, someone who knows she is a slave (such as slaves in the antebellum South in the United States) at least retains the autonomy of knowing that she is being controlled. Truman seems to be in the situation of being enslaved and not knowing it and it seems harder for such a person to escape that reality because they do not have any desire to (since they don’t know they are being manipulated and controlled).

As the Truman Show example illustrates, it seems there can be reasonable disagreement about whether or not Truman is free. On the one hand, there’s a sense in which he is free because he does what he wants and doesn’t feel manipulated. On the other hand, there’s a sense in which he isn’t free because what he wants to do is being manipulated by forces outside of his control (namely, the producers of the show). An even better example of this kind of thing comes from Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopia, Brave New World . In the society that Huxley envisions, everyone does what they want and no one is ever unhappy. So far this sounds utopic rather than dystopic. What makes it dystopic is the fact that this state of affairs is achieved by genetic and behavioral conditioning in a way that seems to remove any choice. The citizens of the Brave New World do what they want, yes, but they seems to have absolutely no control over what they want in the first place. Rather, their desires are essentially implanted in them by a process of conditioning long before they are old enough to understand what is going on. The citizens of Brave New World do what they want, but they have no control over what the want in the first place. In that sense, they are like robots: they only have the desires that are chosen for them by the architects of the society.

So are people free as long as they are doing what they want to—that is, choosing the act according to their strongest desires? If so, then notice that the citizens of Brave New World would count as free, as would Truman from The Truman Show , since these are both cases of individuals who are acting on their strongest desires. The problem is that those desires are not desires those individuals have chosen. It feels like the individuals in those scenarios are being manipulated in a way that we believe we aren’t. Perhaps true freedom requires more than just that one does what one most wants to do. Perhaps true freedom requires a genuine choice. But what is a genuine choice beyond doing what one most wants to do?

Philosophers are generally of two main camps concerning the question of what free will is. Compatibilists believe that free will requires only that we are doing what we want to do in a way that isn’t coerced—in short, free actions are voluntary actions. Incompatibilists , motivated by examples like the above where our desires are themselves manipulated, believe that free will requires a genuine choice and they claim that a choice is genuine if and only if, were we given the choice to make again, we could have chosen otherwise . I can perhaps best crystalize the difference between these two positions by moving to a theological example. Suppose that there is a god who created the universe, including humans, and who controls everything that goes on in the universe, including what humans do. But suppose that god does this not my directly coercing us to do things that we don’t want to do but, rather, by implanting the desire in us to do what god wants us to do. Thus human beings, by doing what the want to do, would actually be doing what god wanted them to do. According to the compatibilist, humans in this scenario would be free since they would be doing what they want to do. According to the incompatibilist, however, humans in this scenario would not be free because given the desire that god had implanted in them, they would always end up doing the same thing if given the decision to make (assuming that desires deterministically cause behaviors). If you don’t like the theological example, consider a sci-fi example which has the same exact structure. Suppose there is an eccentric neuroscientist who has figured out how to wire your brain with a mechanism by which he can implant desire into you.

Suppose that the neuroscientist implants in you the desire to start collecting stamps and you do so. However, you know none of this (the surgery to implant the device was done while you were sleeping and you are none the wiser).

From your perspective, one day you find yourself with the desire to start collecting stamps. It feels to you as though this was something you chose and were not coerced to do. However, the reality is that given this desire that the neuroscientist implanted in you, you could not have chosen not to have started collecting stamps (that is, you were necessitated to start collecting stamps, given the desire). Again, in this scenario the compatibilist would say that your choice to start collecting stamps was free (since it was something you wanted to do and did not feel coerced to you), but the incompatibilist would say that your choice was not free since given the implantation of the desire, you could not have chosen otherwise.

We have not quite yet gotten to the nub of the philosophical problem of free will and determinism because we have not yet talked about determinism and the problem it is supposed to present for free will. What is determinism?

Determinism is the doctrine that every cause is itself the effect of a prior cause. More precisely, if an event (E) is determined, then there are prior conditions (C) which are sufficient for the occurrence of E. That means that if C occurs, then E has to occur. Determinism is simply the claim that every event in the universe is determined. Determinism is assumed in the natural sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology (with the exception of quantum physics for reasons I won’t explain here). Science always assumes that any particular event has some law-like explanation—that is, underlying any particular cause is some set of law- like regularities. We might not know what the laws are, but the whole assumption of the natural sciences is that there are such laws, even if we don’t currently know what they are. It is this assumption that leads scientists to search for causes and patterns in the world, as opposed to just saying that everything is random. Where determinism starts to become contentious is when we move into the human sciences, such as psychology, sociology, and economics. To illustrate why this is contentious, consider the famous example of Laplace’s demon that comes from Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Laplace’s point is that if determinism were true, then everything that every happened in the universe, including every human action ever undertaken, had to have happened. Of course humans, being limited in knowledge, could never predict everything that would happen from here out, but some being that was unlimited in intelligence could do exactly that. Pause for a moment to consider what this means. If determinism is true, then Laplace’s demon would have been able to predict from the point of the big bang, that you would be reading these words on this page at this exact point of time. Or that you had what you had for breakfast this morning. Or any other fact in the universe. This seems hard to believe, since it seems like some things that happen in the universe didn’t have to happen. Certain human actions seem to be the paradigm case of such events. If I ate an omelet for breakfast this morning, that may be a fact but it seems strange to think that this fact was necessitated as soon as the big bang occurred. Human actions seem to have a kind of independence from web of deterministic web of causes and effects in a way that, say, billiard balls don’t.

Given that the cue ball his the 8 ball with a specific velocity, at a certain angle, and taking into effect the coefficient of friction of the felt on the pool table, the exact location of the 8 ball is, so to speak, already determined before it ends up there. But human behavior doesn’t seem to be like the behavior of the 8 ball in this way, which is why some people think that the human sciences are importantly different than the natural sciences. Whether or not the human sciences are also deterministic is an issue that helps distinguish the different philosophical positions one can take on free will, as we will see presently. But the important point to see right now is that determinism is a doctrine that applies to all causes, including human actions. Thus, if some particular brain state is what ultimately caused my action and that brain state itself was caused by a prior brain state, and so on, then my action had to occur given those earlier prior events. And that entails that I couldn’t have chosen to act otherwise, given that those earlier events took place . That means that the incompatibilist position on free will cannot be correct if determinism is true. Recall that incompatibilism requires that a choice is free only if one could have chosen differently, given all the same initial conditions. But if determinism is true, then human actions are no different than the 8 ball: given what has come before, the current event had to happen. Thus, if this morning I cooked an omelet, then my “choice” to make that omelet could not have been otherwise. Given the complex web of prior influences on my behavior, my making that omelet was determined. It had to occur.

Of course, it feels to us, when contemplating our own futures, that there are many different possible ways our lives might go—many possible choices to be made. But if determinism is true, then this is an illusion. In reality, there is only one way that things could go, it’s just that we can’t see what that is because of our limited knowledge. Consider the figure below. Each junction in the figure below represents a decision I make and let’s suppose that some (much larger) decision tree like this could represent all of the possible ways my life could go. At any point in time, when contemplating what to do, it seems that I can conceive of my life going many different possible ways. Suppose that A represents one series of choices and B another. Suppose, further, that A represents what I actually do (looking backwards over my life from the future). Although from this point in time it seems that I could also have made the series of choices represented in B, if determinism is true then this is false. That is, if A is what ends up happening, then A is the only thing that ever could have happened . If it hasn’t yet hit you how determinism conflicts with our sense of our own possibilities in life, think about that for a second.

As the foregoing I hope makes clear, the incompatibilist definition of free will is incompatibile with determinism (that’s why it’s called “incompatibilist”). But that leaves open the question of which one is true. To say that free will and determinism are logically incompatible is just to say that they cannot both be true, meaning that one or the other must be false. But which one? Some will claim that it is determinism which is false. This position is called libertarianism (not to be confused with political libertarianism, which is a totally different idea). Others claim that determinism is true and that, therefore, there is no free will. This position is called hard determinism. A third type of position, compatibilism , rejects the incompatibilist definition of freedom and claims that free will and determinism are compatible (hence the name). The table below compares these different positions. But which one is correct? In the remainder of the chapter we will consider some arguments for and against these three positions on free will and determinism.

Libertarianism

Both libertarianism and hard determinism accept the following proposition: If determinism is true, then there is no free will. What distinguishes libertarianism from hard determinism is the libertarian’s claim that there is free will. But why should we think this? This question is especially pressing when we recognize that we assume a deterministic view in many other domains in life. When you have a toothache, we know that something must have caused that toothache and whatever cause that was, something else must have caused that cause. It would be a strange dentist who told you that your toothache didn’t have a cause but just randomly occurred. When the weather doesn’t go as the meteorologist predicts, we assume there must be a cause for why the weather did what it did. We might not ever know the cause in all its specific details, but assume there must be one. In cases like meteorology, when our scientific predictions are wrong, we don’t always go back and try to figure out what the actual causes were—why our predictions were wrong. But in other cases we do. Consider the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. Years later it was finally determined what led to that explosion (“O-ring” seals that were not designed for the colder condition of the launch). There’s a detailed deterministic physical explanation that one could give of how the failure of those O-rings led to the explosion of the Challenger. In all of these cases, determinism is the fundamental assumption and it seems almost nothing could overturn it.

But the libertarian thinks that the domain of human action is different than every other domain. Humans are somehow able to rise above all of the influences on them and make decisions that are not themselves determined by anything that precedes them. The philosopher Roderick Chisholm accurately captured the libertarian position when he claimed that “we have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we really act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing and no one, except we ourselves, causes us to cause those events to happen” (Chisholm, 1964). But why should we think that we have such a godlike ability? We will consider two arguments the libertarian makes in support of her position: the argument from intuitions and the argument from moral responsibility.

The argument from intuitions is based on the very strong intuition that there are some things that we have control over and that nothing causes us to do those things except for our own willing them. The strongest case for this concerns very simple actions, such as moving one’s finger. Suppose that I hold up my index finger and say that I am going to move it to the right or the to the left, but that I have not yet decided which way to move it. At the moment before I move my finger one way or the other, it truly seems to me that my future is open.

Nothing in my past and nothing in my present seems to be determining me to move my finger to the right or to the left. Rather, it seems to me that I have total control over what happens next. Whichever way I move my finger, it seems that I could have moved it the other way. So if, as a matter of fact, I move my finger to the right, it seems unquestionably true that I could have moved it to the left (and vice versa, mutatis mutandis ). Thus, in cases of simple actions like moving my finger to the right or left, it seems that the strong incompatibilist definition of freedom is met: we have a very strong intuition that no matter what I actually did, I could have chosen otherwise, were I to be given that exact choice again . The libertarian does not claim that all human actions are like this. Indeed, many of our actions (perhaps even ones that we think are free) are determined by prior causes. The libertarian’s claim is just that at least some of our actions do meet the incompatibilist’s definition of free and, thus, that determinism is not universally true.

The argument from moral responsibility is a good example of what philosophers call a transcendental argument . Transcendental arguments attempt to establish the truth of something by showing that that thing is necessary in order for something else, which we strongly believe to be true, to be true. So consider the idea that normally developed adult human beings are morally responsible for their actions. For example, if Bob embezzles money from his charity in order to help pay for a new sports car, we would rightly hold Bob accountable for this action. That is, we would punish Bob and would see punishment as appropriate. But a necessary condition of holding Bob responsible is that Bob’s action was one that he chose, one that he was in control of, one that he could have chosen not to do. Philosophers call this principle ought implies can : if we say that someone ought (or ought not) do something, this implies that they can do it (that is, they are capable of doing it). The ought implies can principle is consistent with our legal practices. For example, in cases where we believe that a person was not capable of doing the right thing, we no longer hold them morally or criminally liable. A good example of this within our legal system is the insanity defense: if someone was determined to be incapable of appreciating the difference between right and wrong, we do not find them guilty of a crime. But notice what determinism would do to the ought implies can principle. If everything we ever do had to happen (think Laplace’s demon), that means that Bob had to embezzle those funds and buy that sports car. The universe demanded it. That means he couldn’t not have done those things. But if that is so, then, by the ought implies can principle, we cannot say that he ought not to have done those things. That is, we cannot hold Bob morally responsible for those things. But this seems absurd, the libertarian will say.

Surely Bob was responsible for those things and we are right to hold him responsible. But the only we way can reasonably do this is if we assume that his actions were chosen—that he could have chosen to do otherwise than he in fact chose. Thus, determinism is incompatible with the idea that human beings are morally responsible agents. The practice of holding each other to be morally responsible agents doesn’t make sense unless humans have incompatibilist free will—unless they could have chosen to do otherwise than they in fact did. That is the libertarian’s transcendental argument from moral responsibility.

Hard determinism

Hard determinism denies that there is free will. The hard determinist is a “tough-minded” individual who bravely accepts the implication of a scientific view of the world. Since we don’t in general accept that there are causes that are not themselves the result of prior causes, we should apply this to human actions too. And this means that humans, contrary to what they might believe (or wish to believe) about themselves, do not have free will. As noted above, hard determininsm follows from accepting the incompatibilist definition of free will as well as the claim that determinism is universally true. One of the strongest arguments in favor of hard determinism is based on the weakness of the libertarian position. In particular, the hard determinist argues that accepting the existence of free will leaves us with an inexplicable mystery: how can a physical system initiate causes that are not themselves caused?

If the libertarian is right, then when an action is free it is such that given exactly the same events leading up to one’s action, one still could have acted otherwise than they did. But this seems to require that the action/choice was not determined by any prior event or set of events. Consider my decision to make a cheese omelet for breakfast this morning. The libertarian will say that my decision to make the cheese omelet was not free unless I could have chosen to do otherwise (given all the same initial conditions). But that means that nothing was determining my decision. But what kind of thing is a decision such that it causes my actions but is not itself caused by anything? We do not know of any other kind of thing like this in the universe. Rather, we think that any event or thing must have been caused by some (typically complex) set of conditions or events. Things don’t just pop into existence without being caused . That is as fundamental a principle as any we can think of. Philosophers have for centuries upheld the principle that “nothing comes from nothing.” They even have a fancy Latin phrase for it: ex nihilo nihil fir [1] . The problem is that my decision to make a cheese omelet seems to be just that: something that causes but is not itself caused. Indeed, as noted earlier, the libertarian Roderick Chisholm embraces this consequence of the libertarian position very clearly when he claimed that when we exercise our free will,

“we have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we really act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing and no one, except we ourselves, causes us to cause those events to happen” (Chisholm, 1964).

How could something like this exist? At this point the libertarian might respond something like this:

I am not claiming that something comes from nothing; I am just claiming that our decisions are not themselves determined by any prior thing. Rather, we ourselves, as agents, cause our decisions and nothing else causes us to cause those decisions (at least in cases where we have acted freely).

However, it seems that the libertarian in this case has simply pushed the mystery back one step: we cause our decisions, granted, but what causes us to make those decisions? The libertarian’s answer here is that nothing causes us. But now we have the same problem again: the agent is responsible for causing the decision but nothing causes the agent to make that decision. Thus we seem to have something coming from nothing. Let’s call this argument the argument from mysterious causes. Here’s the argument in standard form:

• The existence of free will implies that when an agent freely decides to do something, the agent’s choice is not caused (determined) by anything.
• To say that something has no cause is to violate the ex nihilo nihil fit principle.
• But nothing can violate the ex nihilo nihil fit principle.
• Therefore, there is no free will (from 1-3)

The hard determinist will make a strong case for premise 3 in the above argument by invoking basic scientific principles such as the law of conservation of energy, which says that the amount of energy within a closed system stays that same. That is, energy cannot be created or destroyed. Consider a billiard ball. If it is to move then it must get the required energy to do so from someplace else (typically another billiard ball knocking into it, the cue stick hitting it or someone tilting the pool table). To allow that something could occur without any cause—in this case, the agent’s decision—would be a violation of the conservation of energy principle, which is as basic a scientific principle as we know. When forced to choose between uphold such a basic scientific principle as this and believing in free will, the hard determinist opts for the former. The hard determinist will put the ball in the libertarian’s court to explain how something could come from nothing.

I will close this section by indicating how these problems in philosophy often ramify into other areas of philosophy. In the first place, there is a fairly common way that libertarians respond to the charge that their view violates basic principles such as ex nihilo nihil fit and, more specifically, the physical law of conservation of energy. Libertarians could claim that the mind is not physical—a position known in the philosophy of mind as “substance dualism” (see philosophy of mind chapter in this textbook for more on substance dualism). If the mind isn’t physical, then neither are our mental events, such our decisions.

Rather, all of these things are nonphysical entities. If decisions are nonphysical entities, there is at least no violation of the physical laws such as the law of conservation of energy. [2] Of course, if the libertarian were to take this route of defending her position, she would then need to defend this further assumption (no small task). In any case, my main point here is to see the way that responses to the problem of free well and determinism may connect with other issue within philosophy. In this case, the libertarian’s defense of free will may turn out to depend on the defensibility of other assumptions they make about the nature of the mind. But the libertarian is not the only one who will need to ultimately connect her account of free will up with other issues in philosophy. Since hard determinists deny that free will exists, it seems that they will owe us some account of moral responsibility. If, moral responsibility requires that humans have free will (see previous section), then in denying free will we seem to also be denying that humans have moral responsibility. Thus, hard determinists will face the objection that in rejecting free will they also destroy moral responsibility.

But since it seems we must hold individuals morally to account for certain actions (such as the embezzler from the previous section), the hard determinist

needs some account of how it makes sense to do this given that human being don’t have free will. My point here is not to broach the issue of how the hard determinist might answer this, but simply to show how hard determinist’s position on the problem of free will and determinism must ultimately connect with other issues in philosophy, such issues in metaethics [3] . This is a common thing that happens in philosophy. We may try to consider an issue or problem in isolation, but sooner or later that problem will connect up with other issues in philosophy.

Compatibilism

The best argument for compatibilism builds on a consideration of the difficulties with the incompatibilist definition of free will (which both the libertarian and the hard determinist accept). As defined above, compatibilists agree with the hard determinists that determinism is true, but reject the incompatibilist definition of free will that hard determinists accept. This allows compatbilists to claim that free will is compatible with determinism. Both libertarians and hard compatibilists tend to feel that this is somehow cheating, but the compatibilist attempts to convince us arguing that the strong incompatibilist definition of freedom is problematic and that only the weaker compatibilist definition of freedom—free actions are voluntary actions—will work. We will consider two objections that the compatibilist raises for the incompatibilist definition of freedom: the epistemic objection and the arbitrariness objection . Then we will consider the compatibilist’s own definition of free will and show how that definition fits better with some of our common sense intuitions about the nature of free actions.

The epistemic objection is that there is no way for us to ever know whether any one of our actions was free or not. Recall that the incompatibilist definition of freedom says that a decision is free if and only if I could have chosen otherwise than I in fact chose, given exactly all the same conditions. This means that if we were, so to speak, rewind the tape of time and be given that decision to make over again, we could have chosen differently. So suppose the question is whether my decision to make a cheese omelet for breakfast was free. To answer this question, we would have to know when I could have chosen differently. But how am I supposed to know that ? It seems that I would have to answer a question about a strange counterfactual : if given that decision to make over again, would I choose the same way every time or not? How on earth am I supposed to know how to answer that question? I could say that it seems to me that I could make a different decision regarding making the cheese omelet (for example, I could have decided to eat cereal instead), but why should I think that that is the right answer? After all, how things seem regularly turn out to be not the case—especially in science. The problem is that I don’t seem to have any good way of answering this counterfactual question of what I would choose if given the same decision to make over again. Thus the epistemic objection [4] is that since I have no way of knowing whether I would/wouldn’t make the same decision again, I can never know whether any of my actions are free.

The arbitrariness objection is that it turns our free actions into arbitrary actions. And arbitrary actions are not free actions. To see why, consider that if the incompatibilist definition is true, then nothing determines our free choices, not even our own desires . For if our desires were determining our choices then if we were to rewind the tape of time and, so to speak, reset everything— including our desires —the same way, then given those same desires we would choose the same way every time. And that would mean our choice was not free, according to the incompatbilist. It is imperative to remember that incompatibilism says that if an action is not free if it is determined ( including if it is determined by our own desires ). But now the question is: if my desires are not causing my decision, what is? When I make a decision, where does that decision come from, if not from my desires and beliefs? Presumably it cannot come from nothing ( ex nihilo nihil fit ). The problem is that if the incompatibilist rejects that anything is causing my decisions, then how can my decisions be anything but arbitrary?

Presumably an arbitrary decision—a decision not driven by any reason at all—is not an exercise of my freedom. Freedom seems to require that we are exercising some kind of control over my actions and decisions. If my action or decision is arbitrary that means that no reason or explanation of the action/decision can be given. Here’s the arbitrariness objection cast as a reductio ad absurdum argument:

• A free choice is one that isn’t determined by anything, including our desires. [incompatibilist definition of freedom]
• If our own desires are not determining our choices, then those choices are arbitrary.
• If a choice is arbitrary then it is not something over which we have control
• If a choice isn’t something over which we have control, then it isn’t a free choice
• Therefore, a free choice is not a free choice (from 1-4)

A reductio ad absurdum argument is one that starts with a certain assumption and then derives a contradiction from that assumption, thereby showing that assumption must be false. In this case, the incompatibilist’s definition of a free choice leads to the contradiction that something that is a free choice isn’t a free choice.

What has gone wrong here? The compatibilist will claim that what has gone wrong is incompatibilist’s idea that a free action must be one that isn’t caused/determined by anything. The compatibilist claims that free actions can still be determined, as long as what is determining them is our own internal reasons, over which we have some control, rather than external things over which we have no control. Free choices, according to the compatibilist, are just choices that are caused by our own best reasons . The fact that, given the exact same choices, I couldn’t have chosen otherwise doesn’t undermine what freedom is (as the incompatibilist claims) but defines what it is. Consider an example. Suppose that my goal is to spend the shortest amount of time on my commute home from work so that I can be on time for a dinner date. Also suppose, for simplicity, that there are only three possible routes that I can take: route 1 is the shortest, whereas route 2 is longer but scenic and 3 is more direct but has potentially more traffic, especially during rush hour. I am leaving early from work today so that I can make my dinner date but before I leave, I check the traffic and learn that there has been a wreck on route 1. Thus, I must choose between routes 2 and 3. I reason that since I am leaving earlier, route 3 will be the quickest since there won’t be much traffic while I’m on my early commute home. So I take route 3 and arrive home in a timely manner: mission accomplished. The compatibilist would say that this is a paradigm case of a free action (or a series of free actions). The decisions I made about how to get home were drive both by my desire to get home quickly and also by the information I was operating with. Assuming that that information was good and I reasoned well with it and was thereby able to accomplish my goal (that is, get home in a timely manner), then my action is free. My action is free not because my choices were undetermined, but rather because my choices were determined (caused) by my own best reasons—that is, by my desires and informed beliefs. The incompatibilist, in contrast, would say that an action is free only if I could have chosen otherwise, given all the same conditions again. But think of what that would mean in the case above! Why on earth would I choose routes 1 or 2 in the above scenario, given that my most pressing goal is to be able to get to my dinner date on time? Why would anyone knowingly choose to do something that thwarts their primary goals? It doesn’t seem that, given the set of beliefs and desires that I actually had at the time, I could have chosen otherwise in that situation. Of course, if you change the information I had (my beliefs) or you change what I wanted to accomplish (my desires), then of course I could have acted otherwise than I did. If I didn’t have anything pressing to do when I left work and wanted a scenic and leisurely drive home in my new convertible, then I probably would have taken route 2! But that isn’t what the incompatibilist requires for free will. As we’ve seen, they require the much stronger condition that one’s action be such that it could have been different even if they faced exactly the same condition over again. But in this scenario that would be an irrational thing to do. Of course, if one’s goal were to be irrational and to thwart one’s own desires, I suppose they could do that. But that would still seem to be acting in accordance with one’s desires.

Many times free will is treated as an all or nothing thing, either humans have it or they don’t. This seems to be exactly how the libertarian and hard determinist see the matter. And that makes sense given that they are both incompatibilists and view free will and determinism like oil and water—they don’t mix. But it is interesting to note that it is common for us to talk about decisions, action, or even whole lives (or periods of a life) as being more or less free . Consider the Goethe quotation at the beginning of this chapter: “none are more enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Here Goethe is conceiving of freedom as coming in degrees and claiming that those who think they are free but aren’t as less free than those who aren’t free and know it. But this way of speaking implies that free will and determinism are actually on a continuum rather than a black and white either or. The compatibilist can build this fact about our ordinary ways of speaking about freedom into an argument for their position. Call this the argument from ordinary language . The argument from ordinary language is that only compatibilism is able to accommodate our common way of speaking about freedom coming in degrees—that is, as actions or decisions being more or less free. The libertarian can’t account for this since the libertarian sees freedom as an all or nothing matter: if you couldn’t have done otherwise then your action was not truly free; if you could have done otherwise, then it was. In contrast, the compatibilist is able to explain the difference between more/less free action on the continuum. For the compatibilist, the freest actions are those in which one reasons well with the best information, thus acting for one’s own best reasons, thus furthering one’s interests. The least free actions are those in which one lacks information and reason poorly, thus not acting for one’s own best reasons, thus not furthering one’s interests. Since reasoning well, being informed, and being reflective are all things that come in degrees (since one can possess these traits to a greater or lesser extent) and since these attribute define what free will is for the compatibilist, it follows that free will comes in degrees. And that means that the compatibilist is able to make sense or a very common way that we talk about freedom (as coming in degrees) and thus make sense of ourselves, whereas the libertarian isn’t.

There’s one further advantage that compatibilists can claim over libertarians. Libertarians defend the claim that there are at least some cases where one exercises one’s free will and that this entails that determinism is false. However, this leaves totally open the extent of human free will. Even if it were true that there are at least some cases where humans exercise free will, there might not be very many instances and/or those decisions in which we exercise free will might be fairly trivial (for example, moving one’s finger to the left or right). But if it were to turn out that free will was relatively rare, then even if the libertarian were correct that there are at least some instances where we exercise free will, it would be cold comfort to those who believe in free will. Imagine: if there were only a handful of cases in your life where your decision was an exercise of your free will, then it doesn’t seem like you have lived a life which was very free. In other words, in such a case, for all practical purposes, determinism would be true.

Thus, it seems like the question of how widespread free will is is an important one. However, the libertarian seems unable to answer it for reasons that we’ve already seen. Answering the question requires knowing whether or not one could have acted otherwise than one in fact did. But in order to know this, we’d have to know how to answer a strange counterfactual—whether I could have acted differently given all the same conditions. As noted earlier (“the epistemic objection”), this raises a tough epistemological question for the libertarian: how could he ever know how to answer this question? And so how could he ever know whether a particular action was free or not? In contrast, the compatibilist can easily answer the question of how widespread free will is: how “free” one’s life is depends on the extent to which one’s actions are driven by their own best reasons. And this, in turn, depends on factors such as how well-informed, reflective, and reasonable a person is. This might not always be easy to determine, but it seems more tractable than trying to figure out the truth conditions of the libertarian’s counterfactual.

In short, it seems that compatibilism has significant advantages over both libertarianism and hard determinism. As compared to the libertarian, compatibilism gives a better answer to how free will can come in degrees as well as how widespread free will is. It also doesn’t face the arbitrariness objection or the epistemic objection. As compared to the hard determinist, the compatibilist is able to give a more satisfying answer to the moral responsibility issue. Unlike the hard determinist, who sees all action as equally determined (and so not under our control), the compatibilist thinks there is an important distinction within the class of human actions: those that are under our control versus those that aren’t. As we’ve seen above, the compatibilist doesn’t see this distinction as black and white, but, rather, as existing on a continuum. However, a vague boundary is still a boundary. That is, for the compatibilist there are still paradigm cases in which a person has acted freely and thus should be held morally responsible for that action (for example, the person who embezzles money from a charity and then covers it up) and clear cases in which a person hasn’t acted freely (for example, the person who was told to do something by their boss but didn’t know that it was actually something illegal). The compatibilist’s point is that this distinction between free and unfree actions matters, both morally and legally, and that we would be unwise to simply jettison this distinction, as the hard determinist does. We do need some distinction within the class of human actions between those for which we hold people responsible and those for which we don’t. The compatibilist’s claim is that they are able to do with while the hard determinist isn’t. And they’re able to do it without inheriting any of the problems of the libertarian position.

Study questions

• True or false: Compatibilists and libertarians agree on what free will is (on the concept of free will).
• True or false: Hard determinists and libertarians agree that an action is free only when I could have chosen otherwise than I in fact chose.
• True or false: the libertarian gives a transcendental argument for why we must have free will.
• True or false: both compatibilists and hard determinists believe that all human actions are determined.
• True or false: compatibilists see free will as an all or nothing matter: either an action is free or it isn’t; there’s no middle ground.
• True or false: compatibilists think that in the case of a truly free action, I could have chosen otherwise than I in fact did choose.
• True or false: One objection to libertarianism is that on that view it is difficult to know when a particular action was free.
• True or false: determinism is a fundamental assumption of the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, and so on).
• True or false: the best that support the libertarian’s position are cases of very simple or arbitrary actions, such as choosing to move my finger to the left or to the right.
• True or false: libertarians thinks that as long as my choices are caused by my desires, I have chosen freely.

For deeper thought

• Consider the Shopenhauer quotation at the beginning of the chapter. Which of the three views do you think this supports and why?
• Consider the movie The Truman Show . How would the libertarian and compatibilist disagree regarding whether or not Truman has free will?
• Consider the Tolstoy quote at the beginning of the chapter. Which of the three views does this support and why?
• Consider a child being raised by white supremacist parents who grows up to have white supremacist views and to act on those views. As a child, does this individual have free will? As an adult, do they have free will? Defend your answer with reference to one of the three views.
• Consider the eccentric neuroscientist example (above). How might a compatibilist try to show that this isn’t really an objection to her view? That is, how might the compatibilist show that this is not a case in which the individual’s action is the result of a well-informed, reflective choice?
• Actually, the phrase was originally a Latin phrase, not an English one because at the time in Medieval Europe philosophers wrote in Latin. ↵
• On the other hand, if these nonphysical decisions are supposed to have physical effects in the world (such as causing our behaviors) then although there is no problem with the agent’s decision itself being uncaused, there would still be a problem with how that decision can be translated into the physical world without violating the law of conservation of energy. ↵
• One well-known and influential attempt to reconcile moral responsibility with determinism is P.F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” (1962). ↵
• The term “epistemic” just denotes something relating to knowledge. It comes from the Greek work episteme, which means knowledge or belief. ↵

Introduction to Philosophy Copyright © by Matthew Van Cleave is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Determinism, freedom, and moral responsibility: essays in ancient philosophy , by susanne bobzien.

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Brad Inwood, Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility: Essays in Ancient Philosophy , by Susanne Bobzien, Mind , 2022;, fzac007, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzac007

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It is the separability of an incorporeal soul from the body that brings the theories and debates on freedom to a new level. Aristotle’s hylomorphism and Epicurean and Stoic materialism do not permit a human soul to survive the destruction or demise of the human body. This is not so with Platonist and Christian philosophy.

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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Freedom and Determinism

Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke, and David Shier (eds.), Freedom and Determinism , MIT Press, 2004, 352pp, $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 0262532573.

Reviewed by Eddy Nahmias, Georgia State University

The free will debate has taken off in recent decades, driven largely by Peter van Inwagen's revitalization of incompatibilism, Harry Frankfurt's ammunition for compatibilism, interesting libertarian theories, and well-developed compatibilist theories. In the last few years this work has been collected into numerous volumes. [1] The latest is Freedom and Determinism , edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke, and David Shier, and drawn from papers presented at the 2001 meeting of the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference. [2]

This volume offers five essays in which well-known philosophers in the field offer reviews of their positions, along with nine essays that offer interesting new arguments (see below). There is not too much overlap in content with the other recent collections on free will, and many of the important positions and arguments in the current debates are covered, with the notable exceptions of agent-causation theories and recent skeptical positions about the existence of free will and moral responsibility. [3] Unfortunately, however, the book is not ideal for either of its two potential markets. Many of its selections are too narrow and technical for non-specialists (including most students) who want an introduction to the contemporary debates. And for more advanced audiences, most of its review pieces cover familiar ground, limiting the book's primary appeal to the new work, some of which is tangential to the more central debates. Having said this, there is still much to offer both of these audiences, and several essays are indispensable for philosophers engaged in the free will debate, including a few that discuss tangential issues that should be more central to the traditional debates.

The volume's essays can be categorized in two ways: review essays vs. essays presenting new arguments, and (more reviewer-relative) "must-read" essays vs. "optional" essays. After I summarize and occasionally critique the essays below, I label them according to these categories:

R = primarily review of author's previous work

N = primarily new discussion

ME = must-read for expert in free will debate

MS = must-read for student (or other non-specialist)

OE = optional-read for expert

OS = optional-read for student

I hope this exercise will help this review serve what I take to be one of its intended purposes -- to inform potential readers whether they will want to get the book, and if so, which parts of it to spend their valuable time reading. [4]

Introduction, "Freedom and Determinism: A Framework," by Campbell, O'Rourke, and Shier:

This chapter does an excellent job of describing the central debates and positions in the literature and then providing useful summaries of the fourteen chapters that follow. The authors define various conceptions of freedom, offer five central questions in the debate, and introduce van Inwagen's Consequence argument (and its unavoidability operator Beta ) and Frankfurt cases. My only qualm is with their stipulation that the concept "free will" refer to having alternatives for action (3). [ME, MS]

1) "Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still Don't Know" by John Earman:

Earman offers a very technical review of his work on the status of determinism in modern physics. For those who are not proficient in the philosophy of physics, this chapter is not accessible. This is unfortunate since Earman makes several significant points philosophers often overlook regarding the thesis of determinism. He explains why "there is no simple and clean answer" to the question "If we believe modern physics, is the world deterministic or not?" (43). It has yet to be "determined" whether the best interpretation of quantum mechanics will be consistent with determinism. [5] I take this conclusion to bolster the claim that whether humans are (and have ever been) free and responsible should not be "held hostage" to future discoveries by physicists (see Fischer on p. 197). But now I've gone and exposed my compatibilist tendencies! While I'm at it, Earman also explains why determinism does not entail predictability, undermining what I take to be one of the intuitive sources for the thought that determinism precludes free will (i.e., that it would make us predictable and manipulable). [R, OE, OS]

2) "Freedom and the Power of Preference" by Keith Lehrer:

Lehrer's essay reviews his impressive compatibilist theory developed in Metamind (1990), based on the idea that free action is action performed in accord with one's preferences (including one's "ultrapreference" to reason about one's preferences in ways one prefers). Preferences, unlike desires, are not passive and are subject to evaluation. Here, Lehrer adds the condition that free agents must have the preference structure they have because they prefer to have it. This condition aims to avoid manipulation counterexamples in which agents have their preference structure only because another agent creates it in them. In typical compatibilist fashion, Lehrer accepts that one's preference structure can be free though fully caused but not if it is caused in certain ways (e.g., by manipulation), and he also offers a conditional analysis of being able to prefer otherwise. Finally, he offers responses to the Consequence argument, pointing out (accurately) that the argument depends heavily on one's understanding of ability and of laws of nature: "If one builds incompatibility with freedom into the definition of laws by defining the latter in such terms, then incompatibility will be the result" (68). Incompatibilists will be skeptical of these responses, as well as Lehrer's attempt to invoke "mutual causal support and dependency" (57) to address concerns about infinite regresses of preferences. Nonetheless, they will have to work to develop these objections, as Lehrer's essay offers the most plausible, comprehensive defense of a compatibilist theory in this volume. [R, ME, MS]

3) "Agency, Responsibility, and Indeterminism: Reflections on Libertarian Theories of Free Will" by Robert Kane:

Kane, meanwhile, offers the volume's only comprehensive defense of a libertarian theory of free will. His view will be familiar to anyone who has read his outstanding book, The Significance of Free Will (1996), or his more recent defenses of it. While there is nothing new in this essay, for those unfamiliar with his work, it helpfully presents Kane's views on why, rather than just alternative possibilities (AP), "UR [ultimate responsibility] should be moved to center stage in free will debates" (74), and why indeterminism in decision-making need not undermine control. As usual, Kane succeeds in showing why event-causal libertarianism is no worse than compatibilist theories but fails in showing why it is any better (at least in grounding moral responsibility). And as usual, he does so in clear and eminently readable prose. [R, OE, MS]

4) "Trying to Act" by Carl Ginet:

Ginet's essay is less lucid. It is filled with variables and complex examples used to develop a detailed analysis of four disjunctive sufficient conditions for an agent's trying to act. For specialists interested in this question, the essay will be illuminating. But Ginet does not explain how his analysis connects with questions of freedom or moral responsibility (including his own incompatibilist arguments), so it seems out of place in this volume. And it will be inaccessible to most non-specialists. [N, OE, OS]

5) "The Sense of Freedom" by Dana Nelkin:

Nelkin addresses a topic too often neglected in free will debates, the nature of rational deliberation and its connection to the belief in freedom. She argues that rational deliberators necessarily have a sense that they are free and argues that this sense of freedom does not entail a belief in indeterminism but rather a belief that one's actions are up to oneself such that one is accountable for them, where this belief derives from seeing oneself as responsive to reasons. Deliberation requires a belief that one can typically succeed in reaching a decision and implementing it, so in this sense one must believe one has the ability to act on one's deliberations, though this does not commit one to a belief that each of one's alternatives for action are undetermined by prior conditions. Nelkin's conclusion challenges libertarians who claim that our experience of deliberation manifests a belief in indeterminism, and it offers the first step in an antiskeptical argument that uses our sense of freedom to show that we actually are free. [N, ME, OS]

6) "Libertarian Openness, Blameworthiness, and Time" by Ishtiyaque Haji:

Like Nelkin, Haji addresses a neglected but important issue, whether responsibility must be backwards-looking. He challenges the traditional thesis ("blame past") that an agent can only be blamed for an action after he has performed it, a thesis that is supported by the intuitive idea that an agent cannot be blamed for an action (or its consequences) unless he can do otherwise, and if he can do otherwise, one cannot know what he will do until he has in fact done it. Haji shrewdly applies Frankfurt cases to this idea to develop a case where one can know that an agent will kill before he does, suggesting that it is appropriate to blame the agent before he has done anything wrong. Though the complexity of Haji's cases may be confusing me, it seems that they only show that one can blame someone for making a decision before he actually carries it out and only if there are conditions that ensure the decision will be acted on. But libertarians could concede this point and maintain that an agent cannot be blamed for a (free) decision until it has been made. And for reasons familiar to Frankfurt-case devotees, the debate will then turn to whether Frankfurt cases can cut off all undetermined robust alternatives so as to suggest that an agent can be blameworthy without having an alternative decision available. Haji's note 7 (p. 148) suggests that his cases will be less effective against libertarians (e.g., Kane and van Inwagen) who emphasize the importance of an agent's indecisiveness for free actions (an emphasis that I take to weaken the plausibility of libertarianism). I think that the final section of Haji's essay is more interesting than the technical discussion that precedes it. There he points out that different conceptions of moral responsibility influence one's view of the temporal questions and suggests that his own "self-disclosure" view does not entail "blame past" since an agent can disclose what she morally stands for before she acts on it. [N, ME, OS]

7) "Moderate Reasons-responsiveness, Moral Responsibility, and Manipulation" by Todd Long:

Long brings the issue of manipulation into the discussion, an issue I believe is taking center stage in the free will debate since one of the strongest remaining arguments for incompatibilism is that there is no principled way to distinguish between an agent who satisfies compatibilist conditions because she was causally determined to do so and an agent who satisfies the same conditions because she was manipulated by another agent to do so. Long uses this point in the context of a Frankfurt case to put pressure on Fischer and Ravizza's reasons-responsive (RR) compatibilist theory. Long suggests that the same RR mechanism can issue in the same decision in both the non-manipulated (actual) branch of a Frankfurt case and in the manipulated (counterfactual) branch, because the manipulator can drive the desired decision by changing the inputs (e.g., reasons) to the RR mechanism rather than by bypassing the RR mechanism and using a process that is not RR. Long thinks this forces Fischer and Ravizza either to supplement their theory by explaining the difference between the two branches or to accept that an agent who acts on an RR mechanism can be responsible even if severely manipulated. Like Haji, Long uses Frankfurt cases in a creative and illuminating way. I think he is right to conclude that his case need not undermine this compatibilist account but that it does force compatibilists to deal with manipulation cases. And I think they can do so. They can begin by pointing out that manipulation by a goal-directed agent cuts off alternatives that "blind" causal processes do not. A manipulator can adjust his manipulation however required to achieve his goals; natural causal processes do not have goals. So, for a determined agent, had things gone differently (and determinism does not preclude this since the past and laws are not necessary), the agent could act differently; whereas, for a manipulated agent, had things gone differently, the manipulator would find a way to make sure the agent did not act differently. At a minimum, this difference, I suspect, drives our intuitions that many types of manipulation are clearly freedom-compromising whereas our intuitions about determinism's relationship to free will are not so clear. [6] Another difference is that responsibility can be shared among agents so that a manipulator may (intuitively if not justifiably) "drain away" some, though perhaps not all, of the responsibility from the manipulated agent, though the latter may still be partially responsible (e.g., she may have developed beliefs and desires that take only minimal tinkering to issue -- through an RR mechanism -- in a blameworthy choice). Long's lucid essay effectively brings attention to these important issues. [N, ME, MS]

8) "Which Autonomy?" by Nomy Arpaly:

Arpaly's main point is that the concept of autonomy is used in too many ways to be functional as a label for the condition(s) required for agents to be morally responsible. I agree (I'd like us to use "free will" to label those conditions -- contra the editors' use of it). However, I think the concept of agent autonomy is the one on Arpaly's list most compatibilists are analyzing, though some think agent autonomy requires authenticity , and Arpaly, as she does in her other work, offers interesting literary counterexamples to the necessity of authenticity for responsibility. Though it would be a rhetorical mistake for compatibilists to use "autonomy" while giving "free will" to the incompatibilists, it would not be as confusing as Arpaly suggests so long as authors are clear about what they mean by "autonomy" and its precise relations to moral responsibility (as, for example, Al Mele is). Arpaly also worries that such accounts of autonomy are often too stringent to serve as viable conditions for attributing responsibility (e.g., 176), but this worry neglects the possibility that these accounts are -- or should be -- put in terms of capacities agents possess and exercise to varying degrees that map (perhaps imperfectly) onto the degree to which agents should be held accountable for their actions. Finally, Arpaly, like Long, draws attention to the problem of differentiating between manipulation and other causal histories, including ones like conversion that involve rapid and extreme changes in one's character and preference structure (183-4). This problem is significant, but again, I think it is not insurmountable. [N, OE, OS]

9) "The Transfer of Nonresponsibility" by John Martin Fischer:

Fischer's essay reviews his counterexamples to the "direct argument" for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility, which employs a principle of transfer of nonresponsibility (e.g., if A is not responsible for p, and if p then q and A is not responsible for this fact, then A is not responsible for q). Fischer offers new responses to objections from Eleanor Stump and Michael McKenna that focus on the fact that his counterexamples require overdetermination or preemption, and he concludes that his argument can withstand these objections, at least enough to maintain what he accurately labels a "dialectical stalemate" (defined on 198-199). I think Fischer is right that, in the face of the numerous stalemates that litter the free will debate, the burden of proof is on the incompatibilist. Fischer puts this in terms of the attractions of compatibilism (e.g., it makes it more likely we are morally responsible). I would add that incompatibilist arguments have the burden because they rely on a conception of free will that makes more demanding metaphysical claims than compatibilist alternatives. [7] [R, OE, OS]

10) "Van Inwagen on Free Will" by Peter van Inwagen (of course!):

Van Inwagen, on the other hand, takes the dialectical complexity of the free will debate to suggest "mysterianism," the view that, while we obviously have free will, it seems incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism and hence impossible. So, it is a mystery how free will exists. Unlike Fischer, van Inwagen thinks it must (somehow) be that free will is compatible with in determinism since he thinks his Consequence argument succeeds in showing free will is incompatible with determinism. Beginning with the genesis of this argument, van Inwagen offers a comprehensive summary of four decades of van Inwagen's thoughts on free will. He proceeds through his "restrictivism" (the view that acts of free will are rare because they occur only when we make close-call decisions), his response to Frankfurt's assault on the necessity of alternative possibilities, his rethinking of principle Beta , and finally his mysterianism, including his concluding point that agent causation cannot help make sense of free will. It's a shame that "van Inwagen has thought little about free will in the last ten years" (222). He seems to take the view regarding most objections to his positions that he takes regarding Frankfurt cases, that "as far as he is concerned, his original arguments for this position are the only answer to these counter-arguments that was really needed" (222). But it would be helpful to see how he would respond to other impressive responses to the Consequence argument, since it remains the most influential argument for incompatibilism (I take the view that most other incompatibilist and skeptical arguments, such as Galen Strawson's, rely on the same basic premises and principles as the Consequence argument). For instance, it would be nice to see how van Inwagen would respond to the objections that John Perry advances in the subsequent chapter. [R, OE, MS]

11) "Compatibilist Options" by John Perry:

Perry's essay is, along with Lehrer's and Long's, the highlight of this volume. Perry offers important distinctions among various accounts of laws of nature and of abilities to set up his responses to the Consequence argument. These responses will not be convincing to most incompatibilists but they do convince me of two points: first, that the free will debate revolves largely around one's understanding of laws of nature -- and specifically, whether the laws are reductionistic or include laws regarding human choices -- as well as one's understanding of cognitive abilities (or capacities); and second, that the debate about the Consequence argument, including how to understand laws and abilities, illustrates further examples of Fischer's "dialectical stalemates." Perry distinguishes between strong and weak accounts of laws of nature. In contrast to the strong (necessitarian) account of laws, the weak account takes laws to be descriptions of true generalizations. This Humean view suggests that, contrary to a crucial premise in the Consequence argument, a determined agent is able to act otherwise in that if she did act otherwise, a law that describes her choice would be different. [8] Perry does not find this view attractive but takes another tack by distinguishing different accounts of ability. In contrast to the strong account, the weak account of ability says that an agent is able to perform an action even if it is "settled" that she will not perform it. [9] Though Perry does not put it quite this way, I take him to be distinguishing between general capacities agents have to perform types of actions (including making choices) and particular occasions on which agents exercise (or fail to exercise) those capacities to act in certain ways, and to be arguing that we have the freedom-relevant ability to act in ways we do not act as long as we possess the relevant capacities to do so at the time, even if it is settled (e.g., determined) that we will not exercise our capacities in that way on this particular occasion (see 245). Since I've always been dubious of the suggestion that determinism entails that "does not" implies "cannot" (248), Perry's argument convinces me. And it demands that incompatibilists be more explicit about what abilities they have in mind when they conclude from Consequence-style arguments that determinism entails that agents lack the ability to do otherwise. [N, ME, MS]

12) "Freedom and Contextualism" by Richard Feldman:

Feldman raises objections to John Hawthorne's exploratory application of contextualism to the free will debate. Though he raises important critiques of Hawthorne's account, I think Feldman does not explore some of the possibilities for contextualism in this debate or important neighboring ideas, such as Manuel Vargas' "revisionism." [10] Contextualism about freedom claims that the truth-value of a statement about free action (and presumably moral responsibility) depends on the context of the utterance of the statement. In ordinary contexts it may be true that a determined action is free even if the same action may not count as free in a philosophical context. Feldman ignores the "may" in these claims and argues that this position concedes too much to the incompatibilist. But a compatibilist contextualist need not concede the truth of incompatibilism in philosophical contexts but instead use contextualist ideas as an error theory to explain what contextual factors lead some people (e.g., some philosophers) to accept incompatibilist arguments when the context is "demanding," while most people (including these philosophers) continue to act in the "real world" with the belief that we are free and responsible despite being ignorant about whether we are determined or not. Feldman is certainly right that contextualism does not answer the question of why, within philosophical contexts, intuitions diverge about free will (as with knowledge), leading to those pesky "dialectical stalemates." [N, OE, OS]

13) "Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will: Pali and Mahayanist Responses" by Nicholas Gier and Paul Kjellberg:

The volume ends with two essays that, in my opinion, could have been excluded. Non-Western approaches to Western philosophical problems can be illuminating, including Buddhist approaches to free will. [11] But Gier and Kjellberg's essay tries to do too much, dealing with several different Buddhist perspectives on causation and the self in addition to freedom and responsibility. I think I understood enough to say that it looks as though Buddhists are either compatibilists or skeptics about free will. And I appreciated the authors' discussion of why our version of the free will problem arose in the Modern era in light of Descartes' fracturing the inner and outer worlds and Newtonian physics' painting causation as mechanistic, linear interactions. [N, OE, OS]

14) "After Compatibilism and Incompatibilism" by Ted Honderich:

Honderich's "rapid paper" (311) reads like a talk and offers a sketchy version of his expansive and interesting views on the free will problem. He is right that there are conflicting conceptions and intuitions about free will but too quick to suggest that this entails that philosophers aren't debating some generally shared concept or that his "attitudinism" thereby offers a satisfying resolution. He is also right that any solution to debates about freedom and responsibility will turn on (perhaps radical) responses to the thorny problems of consciousness and causation. But in this essay Honderich does not tell us much about what such responses might look like. [R, OE, OS]

Freedom and Determinism thus offers several useful outlines of influential arguments in the free will debates and several interesting responses to these arguments and new discussions of neglected topics that bear on them. Some chapters seem out of place or too sketchy. But most have something valuable to offer the expert, the novice, or both.

[1] From (roughly) most to least expertise required of the reader: The Oxford Handbook of Free Will , edited by Robert Kane (Oxford, 2002), Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities , edited by David Widerker and Michael McKenna (Ashgate, 2003), Free Will, 2 nd edition , edited by Gary Watson (Oxford, 2003), Agency and Responsibility , edited by Ekstrom (Westview, 2001), and Free Will , edited by Robert Kane (Blackwell, 2002).

[2] The volume is not just a conference proceedings. The dozens of contributors to the conference were invited to submit their essays for review and revision, from which the volume's 14 chapters were selected.

[3] Such skepticism is the position that free will and moral responsibility do not exist (or are even impossible), as represented by philosophers such as Derk Pereboom and Galen Strawson (van Inwagen's chapter offers arguments that might lead one to skepticism). The volume also does not cover less active areas of the free will debate, such as logical fatalism or God's foreknowledge, nor does it address relevant work in the cognitive sciences.

[4] Another way to divide up the essays is according to whether they support an incompatibilist position (libertarian vs. skeptical) or a compatibilist position. In fact, only two essays support incompatibilism (both libertarian), Kane's and van Inwagen's (chapters 3 and 10). The others either support compatibilism (chapters 2, 5, 6, 9, and 11), do not deal with the compatibility question (chapters 1, 4, and 8) or are best read as neutral between the two positions (chapters 7, 12, 13, and 14).

[5] In fact, Earman argues for the surprising conclusion that classical Newtonian physics, but not quantum mechanics or special relativity, is inconsistent with determinism (23-28).

[6] For thoughts along these lines, see Gideon Yaffe's "Indoctrination, Coercion and Freedom of the Will," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2003): 335-356. For discussion of prephilosophical intuitions about the determinism and free will, see Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner's "Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (forthcoming).

[7] See Nahmias et al. , "Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?" (forthcoming).

[8] Perry distinguishes his discussion from David Lewis' similar response by avoiding the need for Lewis' "local miracles." For a more detailed discussion of how a Humean conception of laws influences the compatibility question, see Helen Beebee and Al Mele's "Humean Compatibilism," Mind 111 (2002): 235-241.

[9] An agent's doing A at t is "settled" if there is some proposition (or set of propositions) P that is made true prior to t and P entails the proposition that the agent does A at t. Hence, determinism would entail that all human actions are settled in that a proposition P (describing the world at some time prior to any human actions and the laws of nature) entails any proposition describing a human action. Perry offers an important discussion of how to understand the idea of a proposition being "made true" (234-237).

[10] Revisionism is the view that philosophical accounts of free will and moral responsibility can (and often do) revise some but not all of our ordinary conceptions about these concepts and the relevant practices. Feldman does not address the original Lewis-style contextualist discussion of free will, Terry Horgan and George Graham's "In Defense of Southern Fundamentalism," Philosophical Studies 62 (1991): 107-134.

[11] See Charles Goodman's "Resentment and Reality: Buddhism on Moral Responsibility," American Philosophical Quarterly 39 (2002): 359-372.

Freedom and Determinism

Joseph Keim Campbell is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Washington State University.

Michael O'Rourke is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University.

David Shier is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Washington State University.

This collection of contemporary essays by prominent contemporary thinkers on the topics of determinism and free agency concentrates primarily on two areas: the compatibility problem and the metaphysics of moral responsibility. There are also essays on the related fields of determinism and action theory. The book is unique in that it contains up-to-date summaries of the life-work of five influential philosophers: John Earman, Ted Honderich, Keith Lehrer, Robert Kane, and Peter van Inwagen. There are also contributions by other familiar and distinguished authors, including Richard Feldman, John Martin Fischer, Carl Ginet, and John Perry, as well as important rising philosophers. While most of the articles are written from a Western, analytic perspective, the volume includes a paper that addresses Buddhist perspectives on freedom of the will. With an opening essay written by the editors—"Freedom and Determinism: A Framework"—that sets the terms of the discussion, the book provides a remarkably comprehensive set of articles that are of value to a wide audience, from students of philosophy to scholars.

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Freedom and Determinism Edited by: Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke, David Shier https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.001.0001 ISBN (electronic): 9780262269773 Publisher: The MIT Press Published: 2004

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• [ Front Matter ] Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0020 Open the PDF Link PDF for [ Front Matter ] in another window
• Freedom and Determinism: A Framework By Joseph Keim Campbell , Joseph Keim Campbell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Michael O'Rourke , Michael O'Rourke Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar David Shier David Shier Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0001 Open the PDF Link PDF for Freedom and Determinism: A Framework in another window
• 1: Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still Don’t Know By John Earman John Earman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0003 Open the PDF Link PDF for 1: Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still Don’t Know in another window
• 2: Freedom and the Power of Preference By Keith Lehrer Keith Lehrer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0004 Open the PDF Link PDF for 2: Freedom and the Power of Preference in another window
• 3: Agency, Responsibility, and Indeterminism: Reflections on Libertarian Theories of Free Will By Robert Kane Robert Kane Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0005 Open the PDF Link PDF for 3: Agency, Responsibility, and Indeterminism: Reflections on Libertarian Theories of Free Will in another window
• 4: Trying to Act By Carl Ginet Carl Ginet Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0006 Open the PDF Link PDF for 4: Trying to Act in another window
• 5: The Sense of Freedom By Dana K. Nelkin Dana K. Nelkin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0008 Open the PDF Link PDF for 5: The Sense of Freedom in another window
• 6: Libertarian Openness, Blameworthiness, and Time By Ishtiyaque Haji Ishtiyaque Haji Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0009 Open the PDF Link PDF for 6: Libertarian Openness, Blameworthiness, and Time in another window
• 7: Moderate Reasons-responsiveness, Moral Responsibility, and Manipulation By Todd R. Long Todd R. Long Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0010 Open the PDF Link PDF for 7: Moderate Reasons-responsiveness, Moral Responsibility, and Manipulation in another window
• 8: Which Autonomy? By Nomy Arpaly Nomy Arpaly Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0011 Open the PDF Link PDF for 8: Which Autonomy? in another window
• 9: The Transfer of Nonresponsibility By John Martin Fischer John Martin Fischer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0012 Open the PDF Link PDF for 9: The Transfer of Nonresponsibility in another window
• 10: Van Inwagen on Free Will By Peter van Inwagen Peter van Inwagen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0014 Open the PDF Link PDF for 10: Van Inwagen on Free Will in another window
• 11: Compatibilist Options By John Perry John Perry Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0015 Open the PDF Link PDF for 11: Compatibilist Options in another window
• 12: Freedom and Contextualism By Richard Feldman Richard Feldman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0016 Open the PDF Link PDF for 12: Freedom and Contextualism in another window
• 13: Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will: Pali and Mahayanist Responses By Nicholas F. Gier , Nicholas F. Gier Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Paul Kjellberg Paul Kjellberg Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0017 Open the PDF Link PDF for 13: Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will: Pali and Mahayanist Responses in another window
• 14: After Compatibilism and Incompatibilism By Ted Honderich Ted Honderich Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0018 Open the PDF Link PDF for 14: After Compatibilism and Incompatibilism in another window
• Index Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3104.003.0019 Open the PDF Link PDF for Index in another window
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An Essay on Free will and Determinism

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Causal Determinism

Causal determinism is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature. The idea is ancient, but first became subject to clarification and mathematical analysis in the eighteenth century. Determinism is deeply connected with our understanding of the physical sciences and their explanatory ambitions, on the one hand, and with our views about human free action on the other. In both of these general areas there is no agreement over whether determinism is true (or even whether it can be known true or false), and what the import for human agency would be in either case.

1. Introduction

2.1 the world, 2.2 the way things are at a time t, 2.3 thereafter, 2.4 laws of nature, 3.1 laws again, 3.2 experience, 3.3 determinism and chaos, 3.4 metaphysical arguments, 4.1 classical mechanics, 4.2 special relativistic physics, 4.3 general relativity (gtr), 4.4 quantum mechanics, 5. chance and determinism, 6. determinism and human action, other internet resources, related entries.

In most of what follows, I will speak simply of determinism , rather than of causal determinism . This follows philosophical practice of sharply distinguishing views and theories of what causation is from any conclusions about the success or failure of determinism (cf. Earman, 1986; an exception is Mellor 1995).

Traditionally determinism has been given various, usually imprecise definitions. This is only problematic if one is investigating determinism in a specific, well-defined theoretical context; but it is important to avoid certain major errors of definition. In order to get started we can begin with a loose and (nearly) all-encompassing definition as follows:

Determinism: Determinism is true of the world if and only if, given a specified way things are at a time t , the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law .

The italicized phrases are elements that require further explanation and investigation, in order for us to gain a clear understanding of the concept of determinism.

The notion of determinism may be seen as one way of cashing out a historically important nearby idea: the idea that everything can, in principle, be explained , or that everything that is, has a sufficient reason for being and being as it is, and not otherwise, i.e., Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason. Leibniz’s PSR, however, is not linked to physical laws; arguably, one way for it to be satisfied is for God to will that things should be just so and not otherwise. This does not require that physical or causal determinism hold. On the other hand, on a strict reading Leibniz’s PSR may be more demanding than determinism. Under determinism, particular facts and events are the way they are due to the laws and the particular facts of how things stood at an earlier time, for example at the beginning of time. But there need be no answer to the question “Why were things just so at the beginning of time?”, and hence no complete sufficient reason for all facts and events. [ 1 ]

Since the first clear articulations of the concept of determinism, there has been a tendency among philosophers to believe in the truth of some sort of determinist doctrine. There has also been a tendency, however, to confuse determinism proper with two related notions: predictability and fate.

Fatalism is the thesis that all events (or in some versions, at least some events) are destined to occur no matter what we do. The source of the guarantee that those events will happen is located in the will of the gods, or their divine foreknowledge, or some intrinsic teleological aspect of the universe, rather than in the unfolding of events under the sway of natural laws or cause-effect relations. Fatalism is therefore clearly separable from determinism, at least to the extent that one can disentangle mystical forces and gods’ wills and foreknowledge (about specific matters) from the notion of natural/causal law. Not every metaphysical picture makes this disentanglement possible, of course. But as a general matter, we can imagine that certain things are fated to happen, without this being the result of deterministic natural laws alone; and we can imagine the world being governed by deterministic laws, without anything at all being fated to occur (perhaps because there are no gods, nor mystical/teleological forces deserving the titles fate or destiny , and in particular no intentional determination of the “initial conditions” of the world). In a looser sense, however, it is true that under the assumption of determinism, one might say that given the way things have gone in the past, all future events that will in fact happen are already destined to occur.

Prediction and determinism are also easy to disentangle, barring certain strong theological commitments. As the following famous expression of determinism by Laplace shows, however, the two are also easy to commingle:

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence. (Laplace 1820)

In this century, Karl Popper (1982) defined determinism in terms of predictability also, in his book The Open Universe .

Laplace probably had God in mind as the powerful intelligence to whose gaze the whole future is open. If not, he should have: 19 th and 20 th century mathematical studies showed convincingly that neither a finite, nor an infinite but embedded-in-the-world intelligence can have the computing power necessary to predict the actual future, in any world remotely like ours. But even if our aim is only to predict a well-defined subsystem of the world, for a limited period of time, this may be impossible for any reasonable finite agent embedded in the world, as many studies of chaos (sensitive dependence on initial conditions) show. Conversely, certain parts of the world could be highly predictable, in some senses, without the world being deterministic. When it comes to predictability of future events by humans or other finite agents in the world, then, predictability and determinism are simply not logically connected at all.

The equation of “determinism”with “predictability” is therefore a façon de parler that at best makes vivid what is at stake in determinism: our fears about our own status as free agents in the world. In Laplace’s story, a sufficiently bright demon who knew how things stood in the world 100 years before my birth could predict every action, every emotion, every belief in the course of my life. Were she then to watch me live through it, she might smile condescendingly, as one who watches a marionette dance to the tugs of strings that it knows nothing about. We can’t stand the thought that we are (in some sense) marionettes. Nor does it matter whether any demon (or even God) can, or cares to, actually predict what we will do: the existence of the strings of physical necessity , linked to far-past states of the world and determining our current every move, is what alarms us. Whether such alarm is actually warranted is a question well outside the scope of this article (see Hoefer (2002a), Ismael (2016) and the entries on free will and incompatibilist theories of freedom ). But a clear understanding of what determinism is, and how we might be able to decide its truth or falsity, is surely a useful starting point for any attempt to grapple with this issue. We return to the issue of freedom in section 6, Determinism and Human Action , below.

2. Conceptual Issues in Determinism

Recall that we loosely defined causal determinism as follows, with terms in need of clarification italicized:

Determinism: The world is governed by (or is under the sway of ) determinism if and only if, given a specified way things are at a time t , the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law .

Why should we start so globally, speaking of the world , with all its myriad events, as deterministic? One might have thought that a focus on individual events is more appropriate: an event E is causally determined if and only if there exists a set of prior events { A , B , C …} that constitute a (jointly) sufficient cause of E . Then if all—or even just most —events E that are our human actions are causally determined, the problem that matters to us, namely the challenge to free will, is in force. Nothing so global as states of the whole world need be invoked, nor even a complete determinism that claims all events to be causally determined.

For a variety of reasons this approach is fraught with problems, and the reasons explain why philosophers of science mostly prefer to drop the word “causal” from their discussions of determinism. Generally, as John Earman quipped (1986), to go this route is to “… seek to explain a vague concept—determinism—in terms of a truly obscure one—causation.” More specifically, neither philosophers’ nor laymen’s conceptions of events have any correlate in any modern physical theory. [ 2 ] The same goes for the notions of cause and sufficient cause . A further problem is posed by the fact that, as is now widely recognized, a set of events { A , B , C …} can only be genuinely sufficient to produce an effect-event if the set includes an open-ended ceteris paribus clause excluding the presence of potential disruptors that could intervene to prevent E . For example, the start of a football game on TV on a normal Saturday afternoon may be sufficient ceteris paribus to launch Ted toward the fridge to grab a beer; but not if a million-ton asteroid is approaching his house at .75 c from a few thousand miles away, nor if his phone is about to ring with news of a tragic nature, …, and so on. Bertrand Russell famously argued against the notion of cause along these lines (and others) in 1912, and the situation has not changed. By trying to define causal determination in terms of a set of prior sufficient conditions, we inevitably fall into the mess of an open-ended list of negative conditions required to achieve the desired sufficiency.

Moreover, thinking about how such determination relates to free action, a further problem arises. If the ceteris paribus clause is open-ended, who is to say that it should not include the negation of a potential disruptor corresponding to my freely deciding not to go get the beer? If it does, then we are left saying “When A , B , C , … Ted will then go to the fridge for a beer, unless D or E or F or … or Ted decides not to do so.” The marionette strings of a “sufficient cause” begin to look rather tenuous.

They are also too short. For the typical set of prior events that can (intuitively, plausibly) be thought to be a sufficient cause of a human action may be so close in time and space to the agent, as to not look like a threat to freedom so much as like enabling conditions. If Ted is propelled to the fridge by {seeing the game’s on; desiring to repeat the satisfactory experience of other Saturdays; feeling a bit thirsty; etc}, such things look more like good reasons to have decided to get a beer, not like external physical events far beyond Ted’s control. Compare this with the claim that {state of the world in 1900; laws of nature} entail Ted’s going to get the beer: the difference is dramatic. So we have a number of good reasons for sticking to the formulations of determinism that arise most naturally out of physics. And this means that we are not looking at how a specific event of ordinary talk is determined by previous events; we are looking at how everything that happens is determined by what has gone before. The state of the world in 1900 only entails that Ted grabs a beer from the fridge by way of entailing the entire physical state of affairs at the later time.

The typical explication of determinism fastens on the state of the (whole) world at a particular time (or instant), for a variety of reasons. We will briefly explain some of them. Why take the state of the whole world, rather than some (perhaps very large) region, as our starting point? One might, intuitively, think that it would be enough to give the complete state of things on Earth , say, or perhaps in the whole solar system, at t , to fix what happens thereafter (for a time at least). But notice that all sorts of influences from outside the solar system come in at the speed of light, and they may have important effects. Suppose Mary looks up at the sky on a clear night, and a particularly bright blue star catches her eye; she thinks “What a lovely star; I think I’ll stay outside a bit longer and enjoy the view.” The state of the solar system one month ago did not fix that that blue light from Sirius would arrive and strike Mary’s retina; it arrived into the solar system only a day ago, let’s say. So evidently, for Mary’s actions (and hence, all physical events generally) to be fixed by the state of things a month ago, that state will have to be fixed over a much larger spatial region than just the solar system. (If no physical influences can go faster than light, then the state of things must be given over a spherical volume of space 1 light-month in radius.)

But in making vivid the “threat” of determinism, we often want to fasten on the idea of the entire future of the world as being determined. No matter what the “speed limit” on physical influences is, if we want the entire future of the world to be determined, then we will have to fix the state of things over all of space, so as not to miss out something that could later come in “from outside” to spoil things. In the time of Laplace, of course, there was no known speed limit to the propagation of physical things such as light-rays. In principle light could travel at any arbitrarily high speed, and some thinkers did suppose that it was transmitted “instantaneously.” The same went for the force of gravity. In such a world, evidently, one has to fix the state of things over the whole of the world at a time t , in order for events to be strictly determined, by the laws of nature, for any amount of time thereafter.

Ismael (2016) has argued that even this is not enough to secure the desired logical entailment of the full future: in addition, one must add an “and nothing else” clause or premise, saying that in the (putatively) full description of the way things are at t , nothing has been left out that could interfere with the natural time-evolution of the world-state. In the next section we will see an example of such a thing that could be “left out” of the earlier description of the world.

A final assumption may be worth mentioning here, that usually goes unremarked. It is assumed that the state of the world is completely sharp and determinate . That is, there is no mathematical or ontological vagueness in the description of the way things are at time t . This assumption goes hand in hand with our usual tendency to think of the past as fully determinate and “fixed”. Without this assumption, in most theoretical frameworks mathematical predictability of future states would be impossible.

In all this, we have been presupposing the common-sense Newtonian framework of space and time, in which the world-at-a-time is an objective and meaningful notion. Below when we discuss determinism in relativistic theories we will revisit this assumption.

For a wide class of physical theories (i.e., proposed sets of laws of nature), if they can be viewed as deterministic at all, they can be viewed as bi-directionally deterministic. That is, a specification of the state of the world at a time t , along with the laws, determines not only how things go after t , but also how things go before t . Philosophers, while not exactly unaware of this symmetry, tend to ignore it when thinking of the bearing of determinism on the free will issue. The reason for this is that, as noted just above, we tend to think of the past (and hence, states of the world in the past) as sharp and determinate , and hence fixed and beyond our control . Forward-looking determinism then entails that these past states—beyond our control, perhaps occurring long before humans even existed—determine everything we do in our lives. It then seems a mere curious fact that it is equally true that the state of the world now determines everything that happened in the past. We have an ingrained habit of taking the direction of both causation and explanation as being past → present, even when discussing physical theories free of any such asymmetry. We will return to this point shortly.

Another point to notice here is that the notion of things being determined thereafter is usually taken in an unlimited sense—i.e., determination of all future events, no matter how remote in time. But conceptually speaking, the world could be only imperfectly deterministic: things could be determined only, say, for a thousand years or so from any given starting state of the world. For example, suppose that near-perfect determinism were regularly (but infrequently) interrupted by spontaneous particle creation events, which occur only once every thousand years in a thousand-light-year-radius volume of space. This unrealistic example shows how determinism could be strictly false, and yet the world be deterministic enough for our concerns about free action to be unchanged.

In the loose statement of determinism we are working from, metaphors such as “govern” and “under the sway of” are used to indicate the strong force being attributed to the laws of nature. Part of understanding determinism—and especially, whether and why it is metaphysically important—is getting clear about the status of the presumed laws of nature.

In the physical sciences, the assumption that there are fundamental, exceptionless laws of nature, and that they have some strong sort of modal force, usually goes unquestioned. Indeed, talk of laws “governing” and so on is so commonplace that it takes an effort of will to see it as metaphorical. We can characterize the usual assumptions about laws in this way: the laws of nature are assumed to be pushy explainers . They make things happen in certain ways and, by having this power, their existence lets us explain why things happen in certain ways. (For a defense of this perspective on laws, see Maudlin (2007)). Laws, we might say, are implicitly thought of as the cause of everything that happens. If the laws governing our world are deterministic, then in principle everything that happens can be explained as following from states of the world at earlier times. (Again, we note that even though the entailment typically works in the future→past direction also, we have trouble thinking of this as a legitimate explanatory entailment. In this respect also, we see that laws of nature are being implicitly treated as the causes of what happens: causation, intuitively, can only go past→future.)

Interestingly, philosophers tend to acknowledge the apparent threat determinism poses to free will, even when they explicitly reject the view that laws are pushy explainers. Earman (1986), for example, advocates a theory of laws of nature that takes them to be simply the best system of regularities that systematizes all the events in universal history. This is the Best Systems Analysis (BSA), with roots in the work of Hume, Mill and Ramsey, and most recently refined and defended by David Lewis (1973, 1994) and by Earman (1984, 1986). (cf. entry on laws of nature ). Yet he ends his comprehensive Primer on Determinism with a discussion of the free will problem, taking it as a still-important and unresolved issue. Prima facie this is quite puzzling, for the BSA is founded on the idea that the laws of nature are ontologically derivative, not primary; it is the events of universal history, as brute facts, that make the laws be what they are, and not vice-versa. Taking this idea seriously, the actions of every human agent in history are simply a part of the universe-wide pattern of events that determines what the laws are for this world. It is then hard to see how the most elegant summary of this pattern, the BSA laws, can be thought of as determiners of human actions. The determination or constraint relations, it would seem, can go one way or the other, not both.

On second thought, however, it is not so surprising that broadly Humean philosophers such as Ayer, Earman, Lewis and others still see a potential problem for freedom posed by determinism. For even if human actions are part of what makes the laws be what they are, this does not mean that we automatically have freedom of the kind we think we have, particularly freedom to have done otherwise given certain past states of affairs. It is one thing to say that everything occurring in and around my body, and everything everywhere else, conforms to Maxwell’s equations and thus the Maxwell equations are genuine exceptionless regularities, and that because they in addition are simple and strong, they turn out to be laws. It is quite another thing to add: thus, I might have chosen to do otherwise at certain points in my life, and if I had, then Maxwell’s equations would not have been laws. One might try to defend this claim—unpalatable as it seems intuitively, and Lewis (1981) does this. But it does not follow directly from a Humean approach to laws of nature, and Loewer (2020, Other Internet Resources) defends a different Humean compatibilism, to which we will return in section 6.

A second important genre of theories of laws of nature holds that the laws are in some sense necessary . For any such approach, laws are just the sort of pushy explainers that are assumed in the traditional language of physical scientists and free will theorists. But a third and growing class of philosophers holds that (universal, exceptionless, true) laws of nature simply do not exist . Among those who hold this are influential philosophers such as Nancy Cartwright, Bas van Fraassen, and John Dupré. For these philosophers, there is a simple consequence: determinism is a false doctrine. As with the Humean view, this does not mean that concerns about human free action are automatically resolved; instead, they must be addressed afresh in the light of whatever account of physical nature without laws is put forward. See Dupré (2001) for one such discussion.

We can now put our—still vague—pieces together. Determinism requires a world that (a) has a well-defined state or description, at any given time, and (b) laws of nature that are true at all places and times. If we have all these, then if (a) and (b) together logically entail the state of the world at all other times (or, at least, all times later than that given in (a)), the world is deterministic. Logical entailment, in a sense broad enough to encompass mathematical consequence, is the modality behind the determination in “determinism.”

3. The Epistemology of Determinism

How could we ever decide whether our world is deterministic or not? Given that some philosophers and some physicists have held firm views—with many prominent examples on each side—one would think that it should be at least a clearly decidable question. Unfortunately, even this much is not clear, and the epistemology of determinism turns out to be a thorny and multi-faceted issue.

As we saw above, for determinism to be true there have to be some laws of nature. Most philosophers and scientists since the 17 th century have indeed thought that there are. But in the face of more recent skepticism, how can it be proven that there are? And if this hurdle can be overcome, don’t we have to know, with certainty, precisely what the laws of our world are , in order to tackle the question of determinism’s truth or falsity?

The first hurdle can perhaps be overcome by a combination of metaphysical argument and appeal to knowledge we already have of the physical world. Philosophers are currently pursuing this issue actively, in large part due to the efforts of the anti-laws minority. The debate has been most recently framed by Cartwright in The Dappled World (Cartwright 1999) in terms psychologically advantageous to her anti-laws cause. Those who believe in the existence of traditional, universal laws of nature are fundamentalists ; those who disbelieve are pluralists . This terminology seems to be becoming standard (see Belot 2001), so the first task in the epistemology of determinism is for fundamentalists to establish the reality of laws of nature (see Hoefer 2002b).

Even if the first hurdle can be overcome, the second, namely establishing precisely what the actual laws are, may seem daunting indeed. In a sense, what we are asking for is precisely what 19 th and 20 th century physicists sometimes set as their goal: the Final Theory of Everything. But perhaps, as Newton said of establishing the solar system’s absolute motion, “the thing is not altogether desperate.” Many physicists in the past 60 years or so have been convinced of determinism’s falsity, because they were convinced that (a) whatever the Final Theory is, it will be some recognizable variant of the family of quantum mechanical theories; and (b) all quantum mechanical theories are non-deterministic. Both (a) and (b) are highly debatable, but the point is that one can see how arguments in favor of these positions might be mounted. The same was true in the 19 th century, when theorists might have argued that (a) whatever the Final Theory is, it will involve only continuous fluids and solids governed by partial differential equations; and (b) all such theories are deterministic. (Here, (b) is almost certainly false; see Earman (1986),ch. XI). Even if we now are not, we may in future be in a position to mount a credible argument for or against determinism on the grounds of features we think we know the Final Theory must have.

Determinism could perhaps also receive direct support—confirmation in the sense of probability-raising, not proof—from experience and experiment. For theories (i.e., potential laws of nature) of the sort we are used to in physics, it is typically the case that if they are deterministic, then to the extent that one can perfectly isolate a system and repeatedly impose identical starting conditions, the subsequent behavior of the systems should also be identical. And in broad terms, this is the case in many domains we are familiar with. Your computer starts up every time you turn it on, and (if you have not changed any files, have no anti-virus software, re-set the date to the same time before shutting down, and so on …) always in exactly the same way, with the same speed and resulting state (until the hard drive fails). The light comes on exactly 32 µsec after the switch closes (until the day the bulb fails). These cases of repeated, reliable behavior obviously require some serious ceteris paribus clauses, are never perfectly identical, and always subject to catastrophic failure at some point. But we tend to think that for the small deviations, probably there are explanations for them in terms of different starting conditions or failed isolation, and for the catastrophic failures, definitely there are explanations in terms of different conditions.

There have even been studies of paradigmatically “chancy” phenomena such as coin-flipping, which show that if starting conditions can be precisely controlled and outside interferences excluded, identical behavior results (see Diaconis, Holmes & Montgomery 2007). Most of these bits of evidence for determinism no longer seem to cut much ice, however, because of faith in quantum mechanics and its indeterminism. Indeterminist physicists and philosophers are ready to acknowledge that macroscopic repeatability is usually obtainable, where phenomena are so large-scale that quantum stochasticity gets washed out. But they would maintain that this repeatability is not to be found in experiments at the microscopic level, and also that at least some failures of repeatability (in your hard drive, or coin-flipping experiments) are genuinely due to quantum indeterminism, not just failures to isolate properly or establish identical initial conditions.

If quantum theories were unquestionably indeterministic, and deterministic theories guaranteed repeatability of a strong form, there could conceivably be further experimental input on the question of determinism’s truth or falsity. Unfortunately, the existence of Bohmian quantum theories casts strong doubt on the former point, while chaos theory casts strong doubt on the latter. More will be said about each of these complications below.

If the world were governed by strictly deterministic laws, might it still look as though indeterminism reigns? This is one of the difficult questions that chaos theory raises for the epistemology of determinism.

A deterministic chaotic system has, roughly speaking, two salient features: (i) the evolution of the system over a long time period effectively mimics a random or stochastic process—it lacks predictability or computability in some appropriate sense; (ii) two systems with nearly identical initial states will have radically divergent future developments, within a finite (and typically, short) timespan. We will use “randomness” to denote the first feature, and “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” (SDIC) for the latter. Definitions of chaos may focus on either or both of these properties; Batterman (1993) argues that only (ii) provides an appropriate basis for defining chaotic systems.

A simple and very important example of a chaotic system in both randomness and SDIC terms is the Newtonian dynamics of a pool table with a convex obstacle (or obstacles) (Sinai 1970 and others). See Figure 1 .

Figure 1: Billiard table with convex obstacle

The usual idealizing assumptions are made: no friction, perfectly elastic collisions, no outside influences. The ball’s trajectory is determined by its initial position and direction of motion. If we imagine a slightly different initial direction, the trajectory will at first be only slightly different. And collisions with the straight walls will not tend to increase very rapidly the difference between trajectories. But collisions with the convex object will have the effect of amplifying the differences. After several collisions with the convex body or bodies, trajectories that started out very close to one another will have become wildly different—SDIC.

In the example of the billiard table, we know that we are starting out with a Newtonian deterministic system—that is how the idealized example is defined. But chaotic dynamical systems come in a great variety of types: discrete and continuous, 2-dimensional, 3-dimensional and higher, particle-based and fluid-flow-based, and so on. Mathematically, we may suppose all of these systems share SDIC. But generally they will also display properties such as unpredictability, non-computability, Kolmogorov-random behavior, and so on—at least when looked at in the right way, or at the right level of detail. This leads to the following epistemic difficulty: if, in nature, we find a type of system that displays some or all of these latter properties, how can we decide which of the following two hypotheses is true?

• The system is governed by genuinely stochastic, indeterministic laws (or by no laws at all), i.e., its apparent randomness is in fact real randomness.
• The system is governed by underlying deterministic laws, but is chaotic.

In other words, once one appreciates the varieties of chaotic dynamical systems that exist, mathematically speaking, it starts to look difficult—maybe impossible—for us to ever decide whether apparently random behavior in nature arises from genuine stochasticity, or rather from deterministic chaos. Patrick Suppes (1993, 1996) argues, on the basis of theorems proven by Ornstein (1974 and later) that “There are processes which can equally well be analyzed as deterministic systems of classical mechanics or as indeterministic semi-Markov processes, no matter how many observations are made.” And he concludes that “Deterministic metaphysicians can comfortably hold to their view knowing they cannot be empirically refuted, but so can indeterministic ones as well.” (Suppes 1993, p. 254) For more recent works exploring the extent to which deterministic and indeterministic model systems may be regarded as empirically indistinguishable, see Werndl (2016) and references therein.

There is certainly an interesting problem area here for the epistemology of determinism, but it must be handled with care. It may well be true that there are some deterministic dynamical systems that, when viewed properly , display behavior indistinguishable from that of a genuinely stochastic process. For example, using the billiard table above, if one divides its surface into quadrants and looks at which quadrant the ball is in at 30-second intervals, the resulting sequence is no doubt highly random. But this does not mean that the same system, when viewed in a different way (perhaps at a higher degree of precision) does not cease to look random and instead betray its deterministic nature. If we partition our billiard table into squares 2 centimeters a side and look at which quadrant the ball is in at .1 second intervals, the resulting sequence will be far from random. And finally, of course, if we simply look at the billiard table with our eyes, and see it as a billiard table , there is no obvious way at all to maintain that it may be a truly random process rather than a deterministic dynamical system. (See Winnie 1997 for a nice technical and philosophical discussion of these issues. Winnie explicates Ornstein’s and others’ results in some detail, and disputes Suppes’ philosophical conclusions.)

The dynamical systems usually studied under the label of “chaos” are usually either purely abstract, mathematical systems, or classical Newtonian systems. It is natural to wonder whether chaotic behavior carries over into the realm of systems governed by quantum mechanics as well. Interestingly, it is much harder to find natural correlates of classical chaotic behavior in true quantum systems (see Gutzwiller 1990). Some, at least, of the interpretive difficulties of quantum mechanics would have to be resolved before a meaningful assessment of chaos in quantum mechanics could be achieved. For example, SDIC is hard to find in the Schrödinger evolution of a wavefunction for a system with finite degrees of freedom; but in Bohmian quantum mechanics it is handled quite easily on the basis of particle trajectories (see Dürr, Goldstein and Zhangì 1992).

The popularization of chaos theory in the relatively recent past perhaps made it seem self-evident that nature is full of genuinely chaotic systems. In fact, it is far from self-evident that such systems exist, other than in an approximate sense. Nevertheless, the mathematical exploration of chaos in dynamical systems helps us to understand some of the pitfalls that may attend our efforts to know whether our world is genuinely deterministic or not.

Let us suppose that we shall never have the Final Theory of Everything before us—at least in our lifetime—and that we also remain unclear (on physical/experimental grounds) as to whether that Final Theory will be of a type that can or cannot be deterministic. Is there nothing left that could sway our belief toward or against determinism? There is, of course: metaphysical argument. Metaphysical arguments on this issue are not currently very popular. But philosophical fashions change at least twice a century, and grand systemic metaphysics of the Leibnizian sort might one day come back into favor. Conversely, the anti-systemic, anti-fundamentalist metaphysics propounded by Cartwright (1999) might also come to predominate. As likely as not, for the foreseeable future metaphysical argument may be just as good a basis on which to discuss determinism’s prospects as any arguments from mathematics or physics.

4. The Status of Determinism in Physical Theories

John Earman’s Primer on Determinism (1986) remains the richest storehouse of information on the truth or falsity of determinism in various physical theories, from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics and general relativity. (See also his update on the subject, “Aspects of Determinism in Modern Physics” (2007)). Here I will give only a brief discussion of some key issues, referring the reader to Earman (1986) and other resources for more detail. Figuring out whether well-established theories are deterministic or not (or to what extent, if they fall only a bit short) does not do much to help us know whether our world is really governed by deterministic laws; all our current best theories, including General Relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics, are too flawed and ill-understood to be mistaken for anything close to a Final Theory. Nevertheless, as Earman stressed, the exploration is very valuable because of the way it deepens our understanding of the richness and complexity of determinism.

Despite the common belief that classical mechanics (the theory that inspired Laplace in his articulation of determinism) is perfectly deterministic, in fact the theory is rife with possibilities for determinism to break down. One class of problems arises due to the absence of an upper bound on the velocities of moving objects. Below we see the trajectory of an object that is accelerated unboundedly, its velocity becoming in effect infinite in a finite time. See Figure 2 :

Figure 2: An object accelerates so as to reach spatial infinity in a finite time

By the time t = t* , the object has literally disappeared from the world—its world-line never reaches the t = t* surface. (Never mind how the object gets accelerated in this way; there are mechanisms that are perfectly consistent with classical mechanics that can do the job. In fact, Xia (1992) showed that such acceleration can be accomplished by gravitational forces from only 5 finite objects, without collisions. No mechanism is shown in these diagrams.) This “escape to infinity,” while disturbing, does not yet look like a violation of determinism. But now recall that classical mechanics is time-symmetric: any model has a time-inverse, which is also a consistent model of the theory. The time-inverse of our escaping body is playfully called a “space invader.”

Figure 3: A ‘space invader’ comes in from spatial infinity

Clearly, a world with a space invader does fail to be deterministic. Before t = t* , there was nothing in the state of things to enable the prediction of the appearance of the invader at t = t* + . [ 3 ] One might think that the infinity of space is to blame for this strange behavior, but this is not obviously correct. In finite, “rolled-up” or cylindrical versions of Newtonian space-time space-invader trajectories can be constructed, though whether a “reasonable” mechanism to power them exists is not clear. [ 4 ]

A second class of determinism-breaking models can be constructed on the basis of collision phenomena. The first problem is that of multiple-particle collisions for which Newtonian particle mechanics simply does not have a prescription for what happens. (Consider three identical point-particles approaching each other at 120 degree angles and colliding simultaneously. That they bounce back along their approach trajectories is possible; but it is equally possible for them to bounce in other directions (again with 120 degree angles between their paths), so long as momentum conservation is respected.)

Moreover, there is a burgeoning literature of physical or quasi-physical systems, usually set in the context of classical physics, that carry out supertasks (see Earman and Norton (1998) and the entry on supertasks for a review). Frequently, the puzzle presented is to decide, on the basis of the well-defined behavior before time t = a , what state the system will be in at t = a itself. A failure of CM to dictate a well-defined result can then be seen as a failure of determinism.

In supertasks, one frequently encounters infinite numbers of particles, infinite (or unbounded) mass densities, and other dubious infinitary phenomena. Coupled with some of the other breakdowns of determinism in CM, one begins to get a sense that most, if not all, breakdowns of determinism rely on some combination of the following set of (physically) dubious mathematical notions: {infinite space; unbounded velocity; continuity; point-particles; singular fields}. The trouble is, it is difficult to imagine any recognizable physics (much less CM) that eschews everything in the set.

Figure 4: A ball may spontaneously start sliding down this dome, with no violation of Newton’s laws. (Reproduced courtesy of John D. Norton and Philosopher’s Imprint)

Finally, an elegant example of apparent violation of determinism in classical physics has been created by John Norton (2003). As illustrated in Figure 4 , imagine a ball sitting at the apex of a frictionless dome whose equation is specified as a function of radial distance from the apex point. This rest-state is our initial condition for the system; what should its future behavior be? Clearly one solution is for the ball to remain at rest at the apex indefinitely.

But curiously, this is not the only solution under standard Newtonian laws. The ball may also start into motion sliding down the dome—at any moment in time, and in any radial direction. This example displays “uncaused motion” without, Norton argues, any violation of Newton’s laws, including the First Law. And it does not, unlike some supertask examples, require an infinity of particles. Still, many philosophers are uncomfortable with the moral Norton draws from his dome example, and point out reasons for questioning the dome’s status as a Newtonian system (see e.g. Malament (2007)).

Two features of special relativistic physics make it perhaps the most hospitable environment for determinism of any major theoretical context: the fact that no process or signal can travel faster than the speed of light, and the static, unchanging spacetime structure. The former feature, including a prohibition against tachyons (hypothetical particles travelling faster than light) [ 5 ] ), rules out space invaders and other unbounded-velocity systems. The latter feature makes the space-time itself nice and stable and non-singular—unlike the dynamic space-time of General Relativity, as we shall see below. For source-free electromagnetic fields in special-relativistic space-time, a nice form of Laplacean determinism is provable. Unfortunately, interesting physics needs more than source-free electromagnetic fields. Earman (1986) ch. IV surveys in depth the pitfalls for determinism that arise once things are allowed to get more interesting (e.g. by the addition of particles interacting gravitationally).

Defining an appropriate form of determinism for the context of general relativistic physics is extremely difficult, due to both foundational interpretive issues and the plethora of weirdly-shaped space-time models allowed by the theory’s field equations. The simplest way of treating the issue of determinism in GTR would be to state flatly: determinism fails, frequently, and in some of the most interesting models. Here we will briefly describe some of the most important challenges that arise for determinism, directing the reader yet again to Earman (1986, 2007), and also Earman (1995) for more depth.

4.3.1 Determinism and manifold points

In GTR, we specify a model of the universe by giving a triple of three mathematical objects, < M, g , T >. M represents a continuous “manifold”: that means a sort of unstructured space (-time), made up of individual points and having smoothness or continuity, dimensionality (usually, 4-dimensional), and global topology, but no further structure. What is the further structure a space-time needs? Typically, at least, we expect the time-direction to be distinguished from space-directions; and we expect there to be well-defined distances between distinct points; and also a determinate geometry (making certain continuous paths in M be straight lines, etc.). All of this extra structure is coded into g , the metric field. So M and g together represent space-time. T represents the matter and energy content distributed around in space-time (if any, of course).

For mathematical reasons not relevant here, it turns out to be possible to take a given model spacetime and perform a mathematical operation called a “hole diffeomorphism” h* on it; the diffeomorphism’s effect is to shift around the matter content T and the metric g relative to the continuous manifold M . [ 6 ] If the diffeomorphism is chosen appropriately, it can move around T and g after a certain time t = 0 , but leave everything alone before that time. Thus, the new model represents the matter content (now h* T ) and the metric ( h* g ) as differently located relative to the points of M making up space-time. Yet, the new model is also a perfectly valid model of the theory. This looks on the face of it like a form of indeterminism: GTR’s equations do not specify how things will be distributed in space-time in the future, even when the past before a given time t is held fixed. See Figure 5 :

Figure 5: “Hole” diffeomorphism shifts contents of spacetime

Usually the shift is confined to a finite region called the hole (for historical reasons). Then it is easy to see that the state of the world at time t = 0 (and all the history that came before) does not suffice to fix whether the future will be that of our first model, or its shifted counterpart in which events inside the hole are different.

This is a form of indeterminism first highlighted by Earman and Norton (1987) as an interpretive philosophical difficulty for realism about GTR’s description of the world, especially the point manifold M . They showed that realism about the manifold as a part of the furniture of the universe (which they called “manifold substantivalism”) commits us to an automatic indeterminism in GTR (as described above), and they argued that this is unacceptable. Note that this indeterminism, unlike most others we are discussing in this section, is empirically undetectable: our two models < M , g , T > and the shifted model < M , h* g , h* T > are empirically indistinguishable.

A huge range of responses to the Hole Argument have been published since 1989; after an initial burst of articles in the late 1980s and early-mid 1990s, there was a relatively quiet period, followed by a revival of interest from 2011 onward (see the hole argument for in-depth consideration of a number of responses to the argument). One popular family of responses (e.g., Hoefer 1996, Pooley 2006) departs from the observation that the differences represented by the models < M , g , T > and < M , h* g , h* T > are purely haecceitistic and therefore may be rejected if one adopts an anti-haecceitistic metaphysics. Following Belot & Earman (2001), anti-haecceitist substantivalism is sometimes called “sophisticated substantivalism”.

4.3.2 Singularities

The separation of space-time structures into manifold and metric (or connection) facilitates mathematical clarity in many ways, but also opens up Pandora’s box when it comes to determinism. The indeterminism of the Earman and Norton hole argument is only the tip of the iceberg; singularities make up much of the rest of the berg. In general terms, a singularity can be thought of as a “place where things go bad” in one way or another in the space-time model. For example, near the center of a Schwarzschild black hole, curvature increases without bound, and at the center itself it is undefined, which means that Einstein’s equations cannot be said to hold, which means (arguably) that this point does not exist as a part of the space-time at all! Some specific examples are clear, but giving a general definition of a singularity, like defining determinism itself in GTR, is a vexed issue (see the entry on singularities and black holes and Earman (1995) for extensive treatments; Callender and Hoefer (2001) gives a brief overview). We will not attempt here to catalog the various definitions and types of singularity.

Different types of singularity bring different types of threat to determinism. In the case of ordinary black holes, mentioned above, all is well outside the so- called “event horizon”, which is the spherical surface defining the black hole: once a body or light signal passes through the event horizon to the interior region of the black hole, it can never escape again. Generally, no violation of determinism looms outside the event horizon; but what about inside? Some black hole models have so-called “Cauchy horizons” inside the event horizon, i.e., surfaces beyond which determinism breaks down.

Another way for a model spacetime to be singular is to have points or regions go missing, in some cases by simple excision. Perhaps the most dramatic form of this involves taking a nice model with a space-like surface t = E (i.e., a well-defined part of the space-time that can be considered “the state state of the world at time E ”), and cutting out and throwing away this surface and all points temporally later. The resulting spacetime satisfies Einstein’s equations; but, unfortunately for any inhabitants, the universe comes to a sudden and unpredictable end at time E . This is too trivial a move to be considered a real threat to determinism in GTR; we can impose a reasonable requirement that space-time not “run out” in this way without some physical reason (the spacetime should be “maximally extended”). For discussion of precise versions of such a requirement, and whether they succeed in eliminating unwanted singularities, see Earman (1995, chapter 2).

The most problematic kinds of singularities, in terms of determinism, are naked singularities (singularities not hidden behind an event horizon). When a singularity forms from gravitational collapse, the usual model of such a process involves the formation of an event horizon (i.e. a black hole). A universe with an ordinary black hole has a singularity, but as noted above, (outside the event horizon at least) nothing unpredictable happens as a result. A naked singularity, by contrast, has no such protective barrier. In much the way that anything can disappear by falling into an excised-region singularity, or appear out of a white hole (white holes themselves are, in fact, technically naked singularities), there is the worry that anything at all could pop out of a naked singularity, without warning (hence, violating determinism en passant ). While most white hole models have Cauchy surfaces and are thus arguably deterministic, other naked singularity models lack this property. Physicists disturbed by the unpredictable potentialities of such singularities have worked to try to prove various cosmic censorship hypotheses that show—under (hopefully) plausible physical assumptions—that such things do not arise by stellar collapse in GTR (and hence are not liable to come into existence in our world). To date no very general and convincing forms of the hypothesis have been proven (see the entry on singularities and black holes , section 4) so the prospects for determinism in GTR as a mathematical theory do not look terribly good.

As indicated above, QM is widely thought to be a strongly non-deterministic theory. Popular belief (even among most physicists) holds that phenomena such as radioactive decay, photon emission and absorption, and many others are such that only a probabilistic description of them can be given. The theory does not say what happens in a given case, but only says what the probabilities of various results are. So, for example, according to QM the fullest description possible of a radium atom (or a chunk of radium, for that matter), does not suffice to determine when a given atom will decay, nor how many atoms in the chunk will have decayed at any given time. The theory gives only the probabilities for a decay (or a number of decays) to happen within a given span of time. Einstein and others thought that this was a defect of the theory that should eventually be removed, perhaps by a supplemental hidden variable theory [ 7 ] that restores determinism; but subsequent work showed that no such hidden variables account could exist. At the microscopic level the world is ultimately mysterious and chancy.

So goes the story; but like much popular wisdom, it is partly mistaken and/or misleading. Ironically, quantum mechanics is one of the best prospects for a genuinely deterministic theory in modern times. Everything hinges on what interpretational and philosophical decisions one adopts. The fundamental law at the heart of non-relativistic QM is the Schrödinger equation. The evolution of a wavefunction describing a physical system under this equation is normally taken to be perfectly deterministic. [ 8 ] If one adopts an interpretation of QM according to which that’s it—i.e., nothing ever interrupts Schrödinger evolution, and the wavefunctions governed by the equation tell the complete physical story—then quantum mechanics is a perfectly deterministic theory. There are several interpretations that physicists and philosophers have given of QM which go this way. (See the entries on quantum mechanics for general discussion and Everettian quantum mechanics and many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics for discussion of the most prominent such interpretation).

More commonly in the 20th century—and this is part of the basis for the popular wisdom—physicists resolved the quantum measurement problem by postulating that some process of “collapse of the wavefunction” occurs during measurements or observations that interrupts Schrödinger evolution. The collapse process is usually postulated to be indeterministic, with probabilities for various outcomes, via Born’s rule, calculable on the basis of a system’s wavefunction. The once-standard Copenhagen interpretation of QM posits such a collapse. It has the virtue of solving certain problems such as the infamous Schrödinger’s cat paradox, but few philosophers or physicists can take it very seriously unless they are instrumentalists about the theory. The reason is simple: the collapse process is not physically well-defined, is characterised in terms of an anthropomorphic notion ( measurement ) and feels too ad hoc to be a fundamental part of nature’s laws. [ 9 ] In recent decades, it is more common to preset the “collapse of the wavefunction” as a merely effective or apparent phenomenon, usually by appealing to some sort of “decoherence” that renders the continuing existence of superpositions empirically undetectable. On this approach, the deterministic and unitary evolution of quantum states is not interrupted (see the entry on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics ).

In 1952 David Bohm created an alternative theoretical framework for non-relativistic QM that realizes Einstein’s dream of a hidden variable theory, restoring determinism and definiteness to micro-reality. In Bohmian quantum mechanics , unlike other interpretations, it is postulated that all particles have, at all times, a definite position and velocity. In addition to the Schrödinger equation, Bohm posited a guidance equation that determines, on the basis of the system’s wavefunction and particles’ initial positions and velocities, what their future positions and velocities should be. As much as any classical theory of point particles moving under force fields, then, Bohm’s theory is deterministic. Amazingly, he was also able to show that, as long as the statistical distribution of initial positions and velocities of particles are chosen so as to meet a “quantum equilibrium” condition, his theory is empirically equivalent to standard Copenhagen QM. However, and unfortunately, as Wallace (2020) has forcefully argued, Bohmian mechanics and its later extensions do not yet offer an alternative to the standard quantum field theories of the Standard Model of particle physics. One approach to extending Bohmian mechanics to general quantum field theories, that of John Bell, changes the theory to being stochastic rather than deterministic.

This small survey of determinism’s status in some prominent physical theories, as indicated above, does not really tell us anything about whether determinism is true of our world. Instead, it raises a couple of further disturbing possibilities for the time when we do have the Final Theory before us (if such time ever comes): first, we may have difficulty establishing whether the Final Theory is deterministic or not—depending on whether the theory comes loaded with unsolved interpretational or mathematical puzzles. Second, we may have reason to worry that the Final Theory, if indeterministic, has an empirically equivalent yet deterministic rival (as illustrated by Bohmian quantum mechanics.)

Some philosophers maintain that if determinism holds in our world, then there are no objective chances in our world. And often the word ‘chance’ here is taken to be synonymous with ‘probability’, so these philosophers maintain that there are no non-trivial objective probabilities for events in our world. (The caveat “non-trivial” is added here because on some accounts, under determinism, all future events that actually happen have probability, conditional on past history, equal to 1, and future events that do not happen have probability equal to zero. Non-trivial probabilities are probabilities strictly between zero and one.) Conversely, it is often held, if there are laws of nature that are irreducibly probabilistic, determinism must be false. (Some philosophers would go on to add that such irreducibly probabilistic laws are the basis of whatever genuine objective chances obtain in our world.)

The discussion of quantum mechanics in section 4 shows that it may be difficult to know whether a physical theory postulates genuinely irreducible probabilistic laws or not. If a Bohmian version of QM is correct, then the probabilities dictated by the Born rule are not irreducible. If that is the case, should we say that the probabilities dictated by quantum mechanics are not objective? Or should we say that we need to distinguish ‘chance’ and ‘probability’ after all—and hold that not all objective probabilities should be thought of as objective chances ? The first option may seem hard to swallow, given the many-decimal-place accuracy with which such probability-based quantities as half-lives and cross-sections can be reliably predicted and verified experimentally with QM.

Whether objective chance and determinism are really incompatible or not may depend on what view of the nature of laws is adopted. On a “pushy explainers” view of laws such as that defended by Maudlin (2007), probabilistic laws are interpreted as irreducible dynamical transition-chances between allowed physical states, and the incompatibility of such laws with determinism is immediate. But what should a defender of a Humean view of laws, such as the BSA theory (section 2.4 above), say about probabilistic laws? The first thing that needs to be done is explain how probabilistic laws can fit into the BSA account at all, and this requires modification or expansion of the view, since as first presented the only candidates for laws of nature are true universal generalizations. If ‘probability’ were a univocal, clearly understood notion then this might be simple: We allow universal generalizations whose logical form is something like: “Whenever conditions Y obtain, Pr( A ) = x ”. But it is not at all clear how the meaning of ‘Pr’ should be understood in such a generalization; and it is even less clear what features the Humean pattern of actual events must have, for such a generalization to be held true. (See the entry on interpretations of probability and Lewis (1994).)

Humeans about laws believe that what laws there are is a matter of what patterns are there to be discerned in the overall mosaic of events that happen in the history of the world. It seems plausible enough that the patterns to be discerned may include not only strict associations (whenever X , Y ), but also stable statistical associations. If the laws of nature can include either sort of association, a natural question to ask seems to be: why can’t there be non-probabilistic laws strong enough to ensure determinism, and on top of them, probabilistic laws as well? If a Humean wanted to capture the laws not only of fundamental theories, but also non-fundamental branches of physics such as (classical) statistical mechanics, such a peaceful coexistence of deterministic laws plus further probabilistic laws would seem to be desirable. Loewer (2004), Frigg & Hoefer (2015) and Hoefer (2019) offer forms of this peaceful coexistence that can be achieved within a Humean account of laws.

In the introduction, we noted the threat that determinism seems to pose to human free agency. It is hard to see how, if the state of the world 1000 years ago fixes everything I do during my life, I can meaningfully say that I am a free agent, the author of my own actions, which I could have freely chosen to perform differently. After all, I have neither the power to change the laws of nature, nor to change the past! So in what sense can I attribute freedom of choice to myself?

Philosophers have not lacked ingenuity in devising answers to this question. There is a long tradition of compatibilists arguing that freedom is fully compatible with physical determinism; a prominent recent defender is John Fischer (1994, 2012). Hume went so far as to argue that determinism is a necessary condition for freedom—or at least, he argued that some causality principle along the lines of “same cause, same effect” is required. There have been equally numerous and vigorous responses by those who are not convinced. Can a clear understanding of what determinism is, and how it tends to succeed or fail in real physical theories, shed any light on the controversy?

Physics, particularly 20 th century physics, does have one lesson to impart to the free will debate; a lesson about the relationship between time and determinism. Recall that we noticed that the fundamental theories we are familiar with, if they are deterministic at all, are time-symmetrically deterministic. That is, earlier states of the world can be seen as fixing all later states; but equally, later states can be seen as fixing all earlier states. We tend to focus only on the former relationship, but we are not led to do so by the theories themselves.

Nor does 20 th (21 st ) century physics countenance the idea that there is anything ontologically special about the past, as opposed to the present and the future. In fact, it fails to use these categories in any respect, leading some philosophers to argue that they are merely perspectival and, in a physical sense, illusory. [ 10 ] So there is no support in physics for the idea that the past is “fixed” in some way that the present and future are not, or that it has some ontological power to constrain our actions that the present and future do not have. It is not hard to uncover the reasons why we naturally do tend to think of the past as special, and assume that both physical causation and physical explanation work only in the past present/future direction (see the entry on thermodynamic asymmetry in time ). But these pragmatic matters have nothing to do with fundamental determinism. If we shake loose from the tendency to see the past as special, when it comes to the relationships of determination, it may prove possible to think of a deterministic world as one in which each part bears a determining—or partial-determining—relation to other parts, but in which no particular part (region of space-time, event or set of events, ...) has a special, privileged determining role that undercuts the others. Hoefer (2002a), Ismael (2016), and Loewer (2020, Other Internet Resources) use such considerations to argue in distinct but closely related ways for the compatibility of determinism with human free agency.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Loewer, B., 2020, “ The Consequence Argument Meets the Mentaculus ,” archived manuscript at the PhilSci Archive; accessed 31 August 2023.
• PhilPapers bibliography on free will
• Determinism/Indeterminism at the PhilSci Archive/University of Pittsburgh.

compatibilism | free will | Hume, David | incompatibilism: (nondeterministic) theories of free will | laws of nature | Popper, Karl | probability, interpretations of | quantum mechanics | quantum mechanics: Bohmian mechanics | Russell, Bertrand | space and time: supertasks | space and time: the hole argument | time: thermodynamic asymmetry in

Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of John Norton in the preparation of this entry. Thanks also to A. Ilhamy Amiry for bringing to my attention some errors in an earlier version of this entry.

Copyright © 2023 by Carl Hoefer < carl . hoefer @ ub . edu >

• Accessibility

Why the Classical Argument Against Free Will Is a Failure

In the last several years, a number of prominent scientists have claimed that we have good scientific reason to believe that there’s no such thing as free will — that free will is an illusion. If this were true, it would be less than splendid. And it would be surprising, too, because it really seems like we have free will. It seems that what we do from moment to moment is determined by conscious decisions that we freely make.

We need to look very closely at the arguments that these scientists are putting forward to determine whether they really give us good reason to abandon our belief in free will. But before we do that, it would behoove us to have a look at a much older argument against free will — an argument that’s been around for centuries.

The older argument against free will is based on the assumption that determinism is true. Determinism is the view that every physical event is completely caused by prior events together with the laws of nature. Or, to put the point differently, it’s the view that every event has a cause that makes it happen in the one and only way that it could have happened.

If determinism is true, then as soon as the Big Bang took place 13 billion years ago, the entire history of the universe was already settled. Every event that’s ever occurred was already predetermined before it occurred. And this includes human decisions. If determinism is true, then everything you’ve ever done — every choice you’ve ever made — was already predetermined before our solar system even existed. And if this is true, then it has obvious implications for free will.

Suppose that you’re in an ice cream parlor, waiting in line, trying to decide whether to order chocolate or vanilla ice cream. And suppose that when you get to the front of the line, you decide to order chocolate. Was this choice a product of your free will? Well, if determinism is true, then your choice was completely caused by prior events. The immediate causes of the decision were neural events that occurred in your brain just prior to your choice. But, of course, if determinism is true, then those neural events that caused your decision had physical causes as well; they were caused by even earlier events — events that occurred just before they did. And so on, stretching back into the past. We can follow this back to when you were a baby, to the very first events of your life. In fact, we can keep going back before that, because if determinism is true, then those first events were also caused by prior events. We can keep going back to events that occurred before you were even conceived, to events involving your mother and father and a bottle of Chianti.

If determinism is true, then as soon as the Big Bang took place 13 billion years ago, the entire history of the universe was already settled.

So if determinism is true, then it was already settled before you were born that you were going to order chocolate ice cream when you got to the front of the line. And, of course, the same can be said about all of our decisions, and it seems to follow from this that human beings do not have free will.

Let’s call this the classical argument against free will . It proceeds by assuming that determinism is true and arguing from there that we don’t have free will.

There’s a big problem with the classical argument against free will. It just assumes that determinism is true. The idea behind the argument seems to be that determinism is just a commonsense truism. But it’s actually not a commonsense truism. One of the main lessons of 20th-century physics is that we can’t know by common sense, or by intuition, that determinism is true. Determinism is a controversial hypothesis about the workings of the physical world. We could only know that it’s true by doing some high-level physics. Moreover — and this is another lesson of 20th-century physics — as of right now, we don’t have any good evidence for determinism. In other words, our best physical theories don’t answer the question of whether determinism is true.

During the reign of classical physics (or Newtonian physics), it was widely believed that determinism was true. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, physicists started to discover some problems with Newton’s theory, and it was eventually replaced with a new theory — quantum mechanics . (Actually, it was replaced by two new theories, namely, quantum mechanics and relativity theory. But relativity theory isn’t relevant to the topic of free will.) Quantum mechanics has several strange and interesting features, but the one that’s relevant to free will is that this new theory contains laws that are probabilistic rather than deterministic. We can understand what this means very easily. Roughly speaking, deterministic laws of nature look like this:

If you have a physical system in state S, and if you perform experiment E on that system, then you will get outcome O.

But quantum physics contains probabilistic laws that look like this:

If you have a physical system in state S, and if you perform experiment E on that system, then there are two different possible outcomes, namely, O1 and O2; moreover, there’s a 50 percent chance that you’ll get outcome O1 and a 50 percent chance that you’ll get outcome O2.

It’s important to notice what follows from this. Suppose that we take a physical system, put it into state S, and perform experiment E on it. Now suppose that when we perform this experiment, we get outcome O1. Finally, suppose we ask the following question: “Why did we get outcome O1 instead of O2?” The important point to notice is that quantum mechanics doesn’t answer this question . It doesn’t give us any explanation at all for why we got outcome O1 instead of O2. In other words, as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, it could be that nothing caused us to get result O1 ; it could be that this just happened .

Now, Einstein famously thought that this couldn’t be the whole story. You’ve probably heard that he once said that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” What he meant when he said this was that the fundamental laws of nature can’t be probabilistic. The fundamental laws, Einstein thought, have to tell us what will happen next, not what will probably happen, or what might happen. So Einstein thought that there had to be a hidden layer of reality , below the quantum level, and that if we could find this hidden layer, we could get rid of the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics and replace them with deterministic laws, laws that tell us what will happen next, not just what will probably happen next. And, of course, if we could do this — if we could find this hidden layer of reality and these deterministic laws of nature — then we would be able to explain why we got outcome O1 instead of O2.

But a lot of other physicists — most notably, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr — disagreed with Einstein. They thought that the quantum layer of reality was the bottom layer. And they thought that the fundamental laws of nature — or at any rate, some of these laws — were probabilistic laws. But if this is right, then it means that at least some physical events aren’t deterministically caused by prior events. It means that some physical events just happen . For instance, if Heisenberg and Bohr are right, then nothing caused us to get outcome O1 instead of O2; there was no reason why this happened; it just did .

The debate between determinists like Einstein and indeterminists like Heisenberg and Bohr has never been settled.

The debate between Einstein on the one hand and Heisenberg and Bohr on the other is crucially important to our discussion. Einstein is a determinist. If he’s right, then every physical event is predetermined — or in other words, completely caused by prior events. But if Heisenberg and Bohr are right, then determinism is false . On their view, not every event is predetermined by the past and the laws of nature; some things just happen , for no reason at all. In other words, if Heisenberg and Bohr are right, then indeterminism is true.

And here’s the really important point for us. The debate between determinists like Einstein and indeterminists like Heisenberg and Bohr has never been settled. We don’t have any good evidence for either view. Quantum mechanics is still our best theory of the subatomic world, but we just don’t know whether there’s another layer of reality, beneath the quantum layer. And so we don’t know whether all physical events are completely caused by prior events. In other words, we don’t know whether determinism or indeterminism is true. Future physicists might be able to settle this question, but as of right now, we don’t know the answer.

But now notice that if we don’t know whether determinism is true or false, then this completely undermines the classical argument against free will. That argument just assumed that determinism is true. But we now know that there is no good reason to believe this. The question of whether determinism is true is an open question for physicists. So the classical argument against free will is a failure — it doesn’t give us any good reason to conclude that we don’t have free will.

Despite the failure of the classical argument, the enemies of free will are undeterred. They still think there’s a powerful argument to be made against free will. In fact, they think there are two such arguments. Both of these arguments can be thought of as attempts to fix the classical argument, but they do this in completely different ways.

The first new-and-improved argument against free will — which is a scientific argument — starts with the observation that it doesn’t matter whether the full-blown hypothesis of determinism is true because it doesn’t matter whether all events are predetermined by prior events. All that matters is whether our decisions are predetermined by prior events. And the central claim of the first new-and-improved argument against free will is that we have good evidence (from studies performed by psychologists and neuroscientists) for thinking that, in fact, our decisions are predetermined by prior events.

The second new-and-improved argument against free will — which is a philosophical argument, not a scientific argument — relies on the claim that it doesn’t matter whether determinism is true because in determinism is just as incompatible with free will as determinism is. The argument for this is based on the claim that if our decisions aren’t determined, then they aren’t caused by anything, which means that they occur randomly . And the central claim of the second new-and-improved argument against free will is that if our decisions occur randomly, then they just happen to us , and so they’re not the products of our free will.

My own view is that neither of these new-and-improved arguments succeeds in showing that we don’t have free will. But it takes a lot of work to undermine these two arguments. In order to undermine the scientific argument, we need to explain why the relevant psychological and neuroscientific studies don’t in fact show that we don’t have free will. And in order to undermine the philosophical argument, we need to explain how a decision could be the product of someone’s free will — how the outcome of the decision could be under the given person’s control — even if the decision wasn’t caused by anything.

So, yes, this would all take a lot of work. Maybe I should write a book about it.

Mark Balaguer is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of several books, including “ Free Will ,” from which this article is adapted.

Freewill vs Determinism In Psychology

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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The free will vs. determinism debate revolves around how our behavior results from forces over which we have no control or whether people can decide to act or behave in a certain way.

Determinism

The determinist approach proposes that all behavior has a cause and is thus predictable. Free will is an illusion, and our behavior is governed by internal or external forces over which we have no control.

External Determinism

External (environmental) determinism sees the cause of behavior as being outside the individual, such as parental influence, the media, or school. Approaches that adopt this position include behaviorism and social learning theory .

For example, Bandura (1961) showed that children become aggressive through observation and imitation of their violent parents.

Internal Determinism

The other main supporters of determinism are those who adopt a biological perspective .

However, for them, it is internal, not external, forces that are the determining factor. According to sociobiology , evolution governs the behavior of a species and the genetic inheritance that of each individual within it.

For example, Bowlby (1969) states a child has an innate (i.e., inborn) need to attach to one main attachment figure (i.e., monotropy).

Personality traits like extraversion or neuroticism and the behavior associated with them are triggered by neurological and hormonal processes within the body. There is no need for the concept of an autonomous human being.

Ultimately this view sees us as no more than biological machines, and even consciousness itself is interpreted as a level of arousal in the nervous system.

Psychic Determinism

Freud also viewed behavior as being controlled from inside the individual through unconscious motivation or childhood events, known as psychic determinism.

Freud used this principle to explain phenomena like slips of the tongue (“Freudian slips”), dreams, and symptoms of mental disorders, arguing that they all have meaningful explanations rooted in the individual’s unconscious mind.

Different levels of determinism

Hard determinism.

Hard determinism sees free will as an illusion and believes that every event and action has a cause.

Behaviorists are strong believers in hard determinism. Their most forthright and articulate spokesman has been B. F. Skinner. Concepts like “free will” and “motivation” are dismissed as illusions that disguise the real causes of human behavior.

In Skinner’s scheme of things, the person who commits a crime has no real choice. (S)he is propelled in this direction by environmental circumstances and a personal history, which makes breaking the law natural and inevitable.

For the law-abiding, an accumulation of reinforcers has the opposite effect. Having been rewarded for following rules in the past, the individual does so in the future. There is no moral evaluation or even mental calculation involved. All behavior is under stimulus control.

Soft Determinism

Soft determinism represents a middle ground, people do have a choice, but that choice is constrained by external or internal factors.

For example, being poor doesn’t make you steal, but it may make you more likely to take that route through desperation.

Soft determinism suggests that some behaviors are more constrained than others and that there is an element of free will in all behavior.

However, a problem with determinism is that it is inconsistent with society’s ideas of responsibility and self-control that form the basis of our moral and legal obligations.

An additional limitation concerns the fact that psychologists cannot predict a person’s behavior with 100% accuracy due to the complex interaction of variables that can influence behavior.

Free will is the idea that we are able to have some choice in how we act and assumes that we are free to choose our behavior. In other words, we are self-determined.

For example, people can make a free choice as to whether to commit a crime or not (unless they are a child or they are insane).

This does not mean that behavior is random, but we are free from the causal influences of past events. According to free will a person is responsible for their own actions.

One of the main assumptions of the humanistic approach is that humans have free will; not all behavior is determined. Personal agency is the humanistic term for the exercise of free will. Personal agency refers to the choices we make in life, the paths we go down, and their consequences.

For humanistic psychologists such as Maslow (1943) and Rogers (1951), freedom is not only possible but also necessary if we are to become fully functional human beings. Both see self-actualization as a unique human need and form of motivation setting us apart from all other species. There is, thus, a line to be drawn between the natural and the social sciences.

To take a simple example, when two chemicals react, there is no sense in imagining that they could behave in any other way than the way they do. However, when two people come together, they could agree, fall out, come to a compromise, start a fight, and so on.

The permutations are endless, and in order to understand their behavior, we would need to understand what each party to the relationship chooses to do.

Ranged against the deterministic psychologies of those who believe that what “is” is inevitable are, therefore, those who believe that human beings have the ability to control their own destinies. However, there is also an intermediate position that goes back to the psychoanalytic psychology of Sigmund Freud .

At first sight, Freud seems to be a supporter of determinism in that he argued that our actions and our thoughts are controlled by the unconscious . However, the very goal of therapy was to help the patient overcome that force. Indeed without the belief that people can change therapy itself makes no sense.

This insight has been taken up by several neo-Freudians. One of the most influential has been Erich Fromm (1941). In “Fear of Freedom,” he argues that all of us have the potential to control our own lives but that many of us are too afraid to do so.

As a result, we give up our freedom and allow our lives to be governed by circumstances, other people, political ideologies, or irrational feelings. However, determinism is not inevitable, and in the very choice we all have to do good, or evil, Fromm sees the essence of human freedom.

Critical Evaluation

Psychologists who take the free will view suggest that determinism removes freedom and dignity and devalues human behavior.

By creating general laws of behavior, deterministic psychology underestimates the uniqueness of human beings and their freedom to choose their own destiny.

There are important implications for taking either side in this debate. Deterministic explanations for behavior reduce individual responsibility.

A person arrested for a violent attack, for example, might plead that they were not responsible for their behavior – it was due to their upbringing, a bang on the head they received earlier in life, recent relationship stresses, or a psychiatric problem. In other words, their behavior was determined.

The deterministic approach also has important implications for psychology as a science. Scientists are interested in discovering laws that can then be used to predict events. This is very easy to see in physics, chemistry, and biology.

As a science, psychology attempts the same thing – to develop laws, but this time to predict behavior. If we argue against determinism, we are, in effect, rejecting the scientific approach to explaining behavior

Mental illnesses appear to undermine the concept of free will. For example, individuals with OCD lose control of their thoughts and actions, and people with depression lose control over their emotions.

Clearly, a pure deterministic or free will approach does not seem appropriate when studying human behavior. Most psychologists use the concept of free will to express the idea that behavior is not a passive reaction to forces but that individuals actively respond to internal and external forces.

The term soft determinism is often used to describe this position, whereby people do have a choice, but their behavior is always subject to some form of biological or environmental pressure.

Bandura, A. Ross, D., & Ross,S.A (1961). Transmission of aggression through the imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 63, 575-582

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment. Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1. Loss . New York: Basic Books.

Chorney, M. J., Chorney, K., Seese, N., Owen, M. J., Daniels, J., McGuffin, P., … & Plomin, R. (1998). A quantitative trait locus associated with cognitive ability in children. Psychological Science , 9(3), 159-166.

Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom.

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review , 50(4), 370-96.

Rogers, C. (1951). Client-centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory . London: Constable.

Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior . Acton, MA: Copley Publishing Group.

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May 16, 2024

Has Quantum Physics Determined Your Future?

Everything in the universe may be preordained, according to physics

By Dan Falk

Does physics allow humans to make their own choices, or does it preordain our future?

Prathan Chorruangsak/Getty Images

On the morning of June 28, 1914, a Bosnian Serb student named Gavrilo Princip stood outside Moritz Schiller’s delicatessen near the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo. Sometime after 10:45 A.M., a motorcade carrying archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, passed within meters of Princip, who drew his 0.38-caliber pistol and fired. One bullet struck the archduke in the neck. He was rushed to the military governor’s residence for medical treatment, but by 11:30 A.M. he was pronounced dead.

The assassination helped spark World War I. Historians view history as a series of interconnected but highly contingent events—built of myriad and mostly unseen chains of cause and effect. If Princip’s gun had jammed, the thinking goes, the archduke would have lived, and Europe’s subsequent history may well have been very different. Fiction writers have long been enthralled with these what-ifs (known to philosophers as “ counterfactual histories ”): What if Hitler hadn’t flunked out of art school? What if the Germans had developed the atomic bomb before the Americans? What if John Lennon had never met Paul McCartney? What if an asteroid hadn’t wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago and reptiles still ruled the Earth?

Such contingencies presume, of course, that things could have been different—either because a person exercising their free will could have chosen another course of action (Princip could have chosen not to pull the trigger) or because random events (such as the asteroid strike) could have unfolded differently. But is this attitude compatible with physics? Do the natural laws of the universe allow for free will?

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Scientists and philosophers have been arguing over the question for centuries and are often torn between two competing poles. Some think, Yes, you obviously have free will. (Aren’t you already four paragraphs into a story that you freely chose to read?) Others think, No, you can’t possibly have free will because the laws of physics say that whatever happens was determined by what happened immediately before—and the happenings within human minds are no exception. Recently a new argument for why quantum mechanics is even more deterministic than physicists might have thought has sparked the debate anew.

The notion that physics and free will might be incompatible goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, but it was expressed most forcefully by French scholar and polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace. Perhaps, wondered Laplace, everything that happens is strictly determined by what came before. His thought experiment involved an entity, now known as Laplace’s demon , that can discern the position and momentum of every particle in the universe. For such a demon, the future is fixed: there can be only one way for the universe to unfold. The cosmos would be deterministic, meaning that the future is uniquely determined by the present, which in turn was uniquely determined by the past. If Laplace was right, the notion of contingency—the idea that regardless of what’s happening at any moment in time, what happens next is “up in the air”—would seem to evaporate.

Then at the start of the 20th century came the twin upheavals of quantum mechanics and relativity. Quantum mechanics, in particular, seemed to have profound implications for free will and contingency. The theory sees nature as inherently fuzzy: quantities that were clearly defined in classical physics, such as position or momentum, are indeterminate in quantum mechanics—until they’re measured. Upon measuring a system (at least in the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of the theory), its wave function (a mathematical description of the system) is said to “collapse,” leaving one unique outcome, such as a specific observed position or momentum. The theory tells you only the probability of various outcomes of each observation but not which result you’ll actually see. At first glance, this haziness might seem to rescue physics from the clutches of determinism. On the other hand, it’s not clear how quantum indeterminacy would enable free will because we don’t usually think of our decision-making processes as random any more than we think of them as wholly preordained.

But there is another twist in this story—one that crops up when physicists attempt to apply quantum mechanics to the entire universe (a field known as quantum cosmology ). Some quantum approaches to cosmology, such as the one envisioned by theoretical physicists Jim Hartle and Stephen Hawking (and described by Hawking in A Brief History of Time ), appear to dictate not only the rules governing the evolution of the universe but also its initial state. In this way of seeing things—physicist Roger Penrose called it “strong determinism” in his book The Emperor’s New Mind —the universe can have precisely one history. Nothing could have been different from how it actually was and is. Everything from the trajectory of Princip’s bullet to the fact that you’re now reading this sentence was prescribed, so to speak, at the dawn of time.

That’s one way to interpret quantum mechanics—but not the only way. Another popular take is known as the “ many worlds ” view (or the Everettian view, after physicist Hugh Everett III , who first wrote about it in detail). In this view, everything that can happen does in fact happen—but in a different universe. So rather than saying that the universe has precisely one history, proponents of many worlds would say that the “ multiverse ” has just one history. Within this multiverse, there are branches, or universes, in which Princip pulled the trigger and also ones in which he didn’t. There are universes where Schrödinger’s famous cat is alive and universes where it’s dead. But the cosmos as a whole is fully determined.

Eddy Keming Chen, a philosopher of physics at the University of California, San Diego, believes we should take the idea of strong determinism—and its implications—seriously. If we embrace a theory like the one put forward by Hartle and Hawking, in which both the dynamics and the initial conditions of the universe (or multiverse) are specified, then only one unique history is possible. From this perspective, quantum mechanics is even more deterministic than its classical predecessor, Chen argued recently in Nature . (In a related preprint , Chen developed the idea further, describing what he calls the “Everettian Wentaculus,” which he wrote is “the first realistic and simple strongly deterministic theory of the quantum world.”)

But it’s tricky: even if we live in an Everettian multiverse, we only see one branch—our universe—and within that branch, we still tend to imagine that multiple outcomes are possible. In his preprint, Chen admits that “it is an open question how to think about freedom and agency in a multiverse context.” At the very least, though, the way we usually understand decisions, choices and contingency would need a rethink, Chen says. He believes that under strong determinism, it no longer makes sense to speak of counterfactuals. “You can understand the counterfactuals as referring to different physical possibilities compatible to the laws of physics,” Chen says. “But if I tell you there’s only one single possibility, then there are no counterfactuals. All counterfactuals become meaningless or trivial or vacuous.” And if there are no counterfactuals, he says, there’s no freedom. As he wrote in his Nature essay, strong determinism “makes it harder to appeal to quantum theory to defend free will.”

While physicists continue to debate the idea of strong determinism, Emily Adlam, a philosopher of physics at Chapman University, agrees with Chen that it appears to present more of a threat to free will than traditional determinism, particularly because of its ties to the Everettian multiverse. “In a standard deterministic picture, sure, everything that happens was determined from the past—but your mind was a key part of the causal process by which future events get realized,” Adlam says. “So in some meaningful sense, future events—even though they were predetermined—were mediated through processes that you identify with yourself.” But in the Everettian picture, she says, it’s harder to see where decision-making would fit in. “If you always make every possible decision, that does seem to severely undermine the sense in which you are exercising any meaningful kind of choice,” she says. “So in that sense, you do seem worse off than in the standard picture, where one outcome occurs and you play a role in bringing it about.”

As troubling as quantum mechanics (or at least certain versions of it) may be for the idea of free will, relativity—the other pillar of modern physics—isn’t off the hook. Many theorists think of relativity as describing a universe in which past, present and future are all equally real: a static cosmos that just sits there like a big block of spacetime (sometimes called the “ block universe ”). It’s not that time disappears in this picture—but it no longer “passes” or “flows.” (As Albert Einstein famously put it, the passage of time is a “ stubbornly persistent illusion .”) Conceptually speaking, the strongly deterministic quantum universe and the block universe of relativity may not be so far apart. The quantum version can be thought of as “a kind of enriched block universe,” says Alastair Wilson, a philosopher of science at the University of Leeds in England. “Imagine taking a block universe and adding an extra dimension to it—the dimension of possibility.”

Still, theories about the fundamental nature of space and time need to be taken with a grain of salt. Physicists have a reasonably good grip on most of the universe’s 13.8-billion-year history. As we rewind the tape, though, we find that our understanding of space and time becomes more tenuous as we get closer to the big bang. In the universe’s first moments, neither relativity nor quantum mechanics on their own can offer an accurate description of what’s happening, and there’s no agreed-upon unified theory of quantum gravity to take their place. In this realm, “notions of space and time themselves start breaking down at the fundamental level in ways we don’t understand,” says David Wallace, a physicist and philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh. “If the notion of time breaks down, then the sharp distinction between laws, which say how things change over time, and initial conditions, which say how things are at the initial time, starts breaking down as well.” Despite how much interest the Hartle-Hawking proposal has garnered, Wallace cautions that it is still “speculative.” And although Wallace is an ardent Everettian (as are the well-known scientists David Deutsch, Max Tegmark and Sean Carroll), the Everettian multiverse remains controversial as well.

Skepticism about free will is hardly new. Long before quantum mechanics and relativity came along, people wondered what sort of freedom, if any, could be found in a universe in which matter merely moves about in response to forces like balls in a never-ending game of cosmic billiards. The latest in a long line of free will skeptics is biologist and neurologist Robert Sapolsky, whose most recent book is entitled Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will . You are who you are, Sapolsky argues, because of everything that came before, both in your own life’s history and long before you were born. After decades of trying to see what wiggle room science might leave for personal freedoms, he has concluded that “we have no free will at all,” he wrote in his book.

The preferred “solution” to reconciling possibly deterministic physics and seemingly free personal choices—the quotation marks are important because not everyone is onboard—is a position known as compatibilism . Whatever the fundamental particles and forces might be doing at the subatomic level, the compatibilist says, human freedom can still exist because we live our lives in the macroscopic world, where very different rules apply. Yes, we’re made of atoms (or fluctuating quantum fields , if you prefer), but it would be absurd to try to describe any feature of human behavior by analyzing our atoms (or our quantum fields). And although a slight majority of philosophers identify as compatibilists (polls put the figure at around 60 percent), others see it as a cop out. Immanuel Kant, for example, dismissed compatibilism as “wretched subterfuge.” More recently, neuroscientist Sam Harris wrote in his book Free Will that “from both a moral and a scientific perspective, [compatibilism] seems deliberately obtuse.”

For compatibilists, it comes down to a matter of perspective. Wilson gives the example of astronomer Arthur Eddington, who, writing a century ago, pointed out that a table loses its tablelike properties when examined at the microscopic level. “He discovered there’s a lot of empty space between the particles in the table,” Wilson says. “Does that mean it’s not solid? Or does that mean that solidity is not what we thought it was?” He suggests looking at the Everettian multiverse in the same light. From one perspective, we might say that the very notion of probability has vanished—or we could say “that there are probabilities—they’re just not what we thought they were.”

For committed compatibilists, the issue of free will doesn’t depend on what physics says about atoms, forces, quantum fields or anything else that applies at the microscopic level, and strong determinism is no more upsetting than regular determinism. As Adlam puts it: “On one level of description, people are the source of their decisions, and on a different, physical level of description, the distant past and the laws of physics are the source of their decisions. And I think if you keep those two levels of description separate, as you should, then you don’t really have a problem with free will.”

Determinism and Freedom in the movie ‘Donnie Darko’ Essay

Introduction, analysis of the movie.

First of all, it is necessary to mention, that the matters of freedom and determinism had been viewed by lots of philosophers, theologists, who are known as determinists. The term determinism states, the all the processes in the world are determined beforehand, and only chosen may see or determine the future. The key opponent of determinism is freedom. It would be necessary to note, that the notion of freedom is much more optimistic, as it states that fate is changeable, and it is possible to avoid lots of troubles.

To clearly define the problem with the relation to the movie, it would be necessary to give a summary of the plot. It starts like any other drama, with a picturesque life of the ordinary teenager Donnie. But soon, strange things start happening in his life. The world is going to end in about twenty-eight days. Donnie Darko knows this as Frank, the human-sized rabbit (his hallucination) told him so. The Darko family lives amid suburban Middlesex. Donnie is troubled. He is schizophrenic, not taking his medication, and up to this point, is inclined to antisocial behavior and sleepwalking. This all changes when a jet engine crashes into their residence. The only problem is that no airliner is missing an engine.

Aside from his mental problems and violent tendencies, Donnie is different from others. He can see beyond the surface and owns the skill to think. That’s why he violently dislikes his teacher Kittie Farmer and her blind esteem of self-help spiritual leader Jim Cunningham, who divides the world into love and fear. As the claimed end of the world nears, Donnie’s condition gets worse. His delusions are more bright, and his actions more unsafe. He is either on the verge of losing his mind or on the breakthrough of some grand epiphany.

The story ends on the morning after the jet engine accident. Donnie is dead and his body is removed from the house as his family mourns. As all the people upon whom Donnie’s actions had an impact (or rather, would have had an impact upon) sit stunned, Frank, with a prototype bunny Halloween mask, subconsciously touches his right eye. Gretchen is alive and rides by on her bicycle.

A lot of themes and symbols may be found in the plot of the movie, but the main one is that knowledge of the future kills. Ancients also believed that, as they animated time, and considered, that it cruelly dislikes, when someone wants to see the future, especially if it were fatal.

As for the issues of freedom and determinism, here we can see, that this division is as right as nothing else. It is explained in the example of Darko’s illusions. Donnie could not get rid of his ugly imaginary friend Frank, who followed him everywhere, and became the slave of Frank’s will (some may argue that the will was not Frank’s will, but Donnie’s as Frank was just the result of Donnie’s deceased imagination).

It is also necessary to highlight, that the principle of free will has religious, ethical, and scientific implications. For example, in the religious realm, free will may imply that an invincible divinity does not state its power over personality will and choices. In ethics, it may imply that persons can be held morally accountable for their actions. In the scientific realm, it may imply that the actions of the body, comprising the brain and the mind, are not wholly unwavering by corporeal causality. The matter of free will has been a central issue since the origin of philosophical thought.

The fact is there is genuine freedom in the world. When we view it from the exterior, it takes the form of quantum-mechanical randomness; when we observe it from inside, we call it our free will. We know that the reason why our behavior is irregular from the outside is that we have eventual freedom of choice. This freedom is the very heart of our individualities, the treasure of our lives. It is given us as the first element of the world we come into.

Logically, the notion of free will is principal, impractical to derive or to explain from something else. The concept of obligation, comprising the concept of natural law, is plagiaristic.

In the twentieth century, the logical worldview has experienced a radical change. It has twisted out that subatomic physics can not be realized within the frames of the Naive Realism of nineteenth-century scientists. The theory of Relativity and, particularly, Quantum Mechanics require that our worldview be grounded on critical attitude, according to which all our theories and psychological images of the world are only tools to arrange and predict our skill.

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IvyPanda. (2021, September 16). Determinism and Freedom in the movie 'Donnie Darko'. https://ivypanda.com/essays/determinism-and-freedom-in-the-movie-donnie-darko/

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IvyPanda . (2021) 'Determinism and Freedom in the movie 'Donnie Darko''. 16 September.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Determinism and Freedom in the movie 'Donnie Darko'." September 16, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/determinism-and-freedom-in-the-movie-donnie-darko/.

1. IvyPanda . "Determinism and Freedom in the movie 'Donnie Darko'." September 16, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/determinism-and-freedom-in-the-movie-donnie-darko/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Determinism and Freedom in the movie 'Donnie Darko'." September 16, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/determinism-and-freedom-in-the-movie-donnie-darko/.

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