"All theory is against free will; all experience for it.” So said Dr Johnson, in his famous formulation. Which, then, should we follow: theory or experience? Is it our responsibility to follow the inexorable logic of theories wherever they might lead, even if they deny us the reality of our freedom? Or do we take as our guide the practical knowledge that for anything we do to be meaningfully ours at all, it must have been chosen freely? Both options are open to the philosopher, and both suggest not only different pre-theoretical commitments, but different conceptions of what philosophy might help us do with our freedom.
The theoretical arguments against free will are familiar. The natural world is governed by exceptionless and immutable laws. Everything we do is an effect of causes outside of our control, so even when we think we are choosing between alternative futures, there is in truth no way we could have done otherwise, and therefore no meaningful sense in which we are free. All said, we are nothing but a conduit for natural forces: we never act, things only happen to us.
This possibility terrified Immanuel Kant. Like many before and since, Kant saw a deterministic universe as a kind of desert, bereft of anything that could make human life meaningful. Without free will there is no morality, no taking responsibility for our own life or the lives of others. The task of philosophy is to show a way out of this uninhabitable desert, to show how free will is possible.
This was not the only response to determinism. Spinoza asks us to consider a stone falling from the sky. Were we to ask the stone, Spinoza suggests, it would claim that it moves of its own accord, and could just as well decide to change direction if it pleased. Human freedom, he argues, like that of the stone, consists solely in our being conscious of our desires yet ignorant of their causes. Stubbornly clinging to our intuitions of freedom even where they contradict rational thought is a kind of betrayal, an abdication of philosophical responsibility. The purpose of philosophy is not to find space for freedom – there is none – but rather to conceive what a meaningful human life might look like given its absence.
Free will and science: a reconciliation?
The very title of Raymond Tallis’s new book tells us where he stands. Freedom: An Impossible Reality – impossible according to theory, and yet affirmed by our every action. For Tallis, the experience of freedom is non-negotiable: we cannot but experience ourselves as choosing and deciding, intervening in the world in ways that make a difference to it. Beginning from the reality of this experience, Tallis argues that where our theories appear to contradict free will, it is a sign we have misinterpreted them. Scientific theories, far from providing arguments against free will, are powerful evidence for its existence.
Tallis is a philosopher, but he also spent much of his career as a clinical neuroscientist. Early on in the book, he takes on the concept of “neurodeterminism”, according to which it is not us but the neurochemistry of our brains that really calls the shots in human agency. Everything we do, according to this theory, is pre-determined by the firings of neurons in our brain, as is supposedly demonstrated by the famous experiments of Benjamin Libet, in which certain neurons are seen to fire in advance of the self-reported taking of a “decision” (whatever that is supposed to mean, neuroscientifically speaking). Tallis presents a convincing argument that such interpretations tend to turn good science into bad philosophy.
The most original part of Tallis’s argument is his account of causation. Determinism relies on the idea of causal necessity: the earthquake in the ocean bed causes a chain of events that necessarily leads to the tsunami crashing on the coast. But, Tallis argues, causal necessity is not at all inherent in nature. David Hume famously claimed that the “necessary connection” between cause and effect is formed in the mind, and Tallis pushes the argument further, arguing not only that the necessary connection between cause and effect is forged in the mind, but that what we call “causes” and “effects” are themselves mind-dependent, picked out from a fundamentally undifferentiated nature for pragmatic purposes. If causes and effects are not building blocks of reality, but useful tools that are simply assigned that status for explanatory purposes, it makes little sense to think of ourselves as constrained by them. Causation is not something outside us that limits our freedom, but an expression of the free and creative choices we make in constructing scientific theories.
This brings us to Tallis’s controversial claim of the “unnaturalness of natural science”: the claim that the very practice of experimental science demonstrates our freedom, because it shows that in an important sense, we stand outside of nature. Nature, left to its own devices, has certain habits; there are patterns and regularities to its behaviour. But for these “habits of nature” to become “laws of science”, there must be conscious subjects to discover and elaborate these laws – there must be something which “stands outside” nature, holding a mirror up to it.
The importance of "intentionality"
What allows us to stand outside the laws of nature, Tallis argues, is “intentionality”, the relation between a mind and a world by virtue of which thoughts can be about anything at all. He argues that this is a property unique to human subjects: earthquakes are, but they are not about anything. The thoughts of seismologists, on the other hand, are quite frequently about earthquakes. It is this aboutness that “opens up a distance”, what Tallis calls the “virtual distance created by intentionality”. This distance allows the scientist to observe the world, to carve events into “causes” and “effects” for his own purposes, and to open up a space of possibility outside of that which actually exists. Crucially, the intentionality that allows for action and for the scientific gaze cannot itself be explained scientifically: “telereception explains how the light gets in, but not how a gaze looks out.”
If this sounds less razor-sharp than the earlier critiques, it is. Tallis does not suffer from the inhibition of academic philosophers, or share the restraint of their conclusions. This makes for an invigorating treatise, especially in the critical sections, and it is perhaps natural that Tallis is more convincing arguing against determinism than for free will. If free will just is, then Tallis’s task is to rid those overly enamoured of scientific materialism of the strange delusions that lead them to deny manifest reality.
But which is the delusion? Denying the experience of freedom affirmed by our every action, or insisting, like Spinoza’s stone, that in spite of everything we know, we are free, for no other reason than we feel we must be? One final response suggests itself: a shrug of the shoulders. Being truly, really, metaphysically free might mean very little to me. Whether or not I am truly free, I still have to get out of bed in the morning. I still make plans for the future, hope for their success and risk disappointment if they fail. Does any of this depend on my being radically free? Would any of it be compromised if I was but a conduit for natural forces? If not, if I were to go about my life the same way in either case, then the distinction between free will and determinism, in which so much of our humanity appears to be at stake, can come to seem a difference that makes no difference at all.
This piece is from the New Humanist summer 2022 edition. Subscribe here.
