Possibly the most important, the most fundamental, issue in philosophy and religious studies generally, is the issue of 'free will'. Free will is the great problem at the heart of both metaphysics and ethics. It seems that we need a concept of free will in order to account for the concept of personal responsibility and that we need a concept of personal responsibility in order to account for any moral system. If we would like people to choose right over wrong, we need to believe people capable of a choice. If we want to improve society by informing and educating people about social ills and encouraging activism (the project carried out by John Oliver's show Last Week Tonight, a political attitude termed 'meliorism'), we need to believe that informed citizens can freely act to improve society. It seems that the presumption that people have free will is a prerequisite for any faith in the possibility of moral action – but good arguments can be made that the feeling of free will is an illusion. And this is a significant problem. Is it possible to have morality without free will?
One of the arguments against free will is this. Every event, including every human action, has causes; every state of affairs arises from, is dependent upon, a prior state of affairs. Each new state of affairs emerges from the previous state of affairs as a consequence of immutable atemporal physical laws of nature. The universe is deterministic. If a person carries out an action, that action has causes themselves conditioned by previous causes; if we are so inclined, we can trace the chain of cause and effect back to situations entirely outside the agent's control, to genetics or to childhood experiences or family environment for example. No one is responsible for his or her actions, the buck never stops.
And yet we still feel that we have free-will. The feeling that we are original authors of our behaviour must then be an illusion; the impression that one has free will must be a self-deception. A great quote that illustrates this idea, the idea that the impression of free will arises from ignorance, is attributable to Spinoza (and can be found in the Wikipedia page on "Free Will"). "Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined." B de Spinoza Ethics[124]
Now, the proposition that the universe is deterministic being inconsistent with our intuition that we really do have free will, we might be able to salvage some conception of freedom and responsibility if we can show conclusively that the universe is not deterministic. In fact, the idea that the universe is not wholly deterministic is the lesson of quantum physics. Sometimes, according to quantum physics, events can occur for no reason at all. Quantum physics introduces the notion of pure chance; reality is aleatory. It becomes possible to argue, as some have, that free will arises somehow from random quantum fluctuations in the brain. A person may choose A rather than B but he or she could indeed have chosen B instead; there was nothing pre-determined about it. He chose A rather than B randomly, as the result of a dice-throw in the brain, a neuronal coin-flip. Quantum physics allows for the possibility of a cause sui. Does quantum physics prevent the notion of free will from being consigned to the bin of senseless concepts? To say that our apparent choices are the result of chance does not seem to me a persuasive or compelling defence of the notion of free will. Can I really be held responsible for a 'decision' arrived at randomly? Events may occur as the result of a combination of prior events and quantum randomness, and this is as true of events that occur in the outer world as much as it is true of my own willed actions. It seems then, if we accept the quantum defence of free-will, that the notion of free will depends on a notion of inside and outside, of all what belongs to me and of all what belongs to others, of all what belongs to the rest of the universe.
Yet, generally, for defenders of the notion of free-will, quantum indeterminacy is a godsend; it provides a way out. For defenders of traditional science (the ones who don't wonder overmuch at the apparent existence of free-will), quantum indeterminacy is a sacrilege or heresy, something to be railed against. Einstein famously said, "God does not play dice with the universe!" Physicists such as Einstein believed fervently that the universe was deterministic and sought to save determinism from the threat posed by some interpretations of quantum physics by proposing 'hidden-variable theories'. It is not that the universe is wholly deterministic, rather the universe remains not fully knowable because we can't get at all the necessary information to sketch out a completely accurate picture of it. Some of the universe is hidden from us now, will perhaps be hidden from us forever. There are hidden variables at play. According to Bell's theorem, any 'hidden-variable theory' must be non-local but this does rule such a theory out of the question and non-locality may, as I shall argue, not be a reason to discount any such theory. It is just such a determinist theory, a hidden-variable theory, that I want to sketch out below.
In the previous post, I talked about Cartesian dualism. According to Descartes, there is a spiritual world and a physical world, a world of the Soul and a world of the Body. Determinists, who oppose the notion of free will, generally also reject Cartesian dualism. The concept relevant to such determinists is 'causal closure', a term that expresses the idea that "no physical event has a cause outside the physical domain". There is no spiritual world, only a physical world that runs according to physical laws. Defenders of free will often (although not always) espouse Cartesian dualism. I wish here to point out something obvious. Even if we accept Cartesian dualism, we have no reason to accept free will also. We can accept Cartesian dualism and also reject free will.
What I am proposing is this. There are two types of causes in the world, physical and spiritual, two types of effects, physical and spiritual, and two types of laws, natural and supernatural. Both realms are deterministic. Spiritual events can cause physical events and physical events can cause spiritual events. There is no such thing as free will. But there is such a thing as a mystical reality.
Consider the following hypothetical example. A soldier in 12th Century Austria falls for a wench, marries her, has children, remains married to her his whole life and dies a couple of months after her from grief; eight-hundred years later this soldier, reincarnated in the body of a sociology studying hipster, encounters the love of his former life, reincarnated in the body of a Pixies' adoring punk, at a Starbucks, and falls in 'love at first sight'. He falls for her because he loved her in a previous life. In this hypothetical example, there is no free will: he does not choose to fall in love with the girl. His fall is caused. Yet his fall depends on ESP (the extrasensory recognition by a soul of its soul-mate) and it depends on the existence of former lives. Neither idea, ESP or reincarnation, is rational, scientific. But the event is still part of a causal chain. What I am describing in this little fable is supernatural causation.
In telling this story, I am not committing myself to the idea that reincarnation is a reality. I am merely inventing a fable which demonstrates how supernatural causation might occur. In this story, spiritual events bring about physical events and physical events bring about spiritual events. This way of approaching Cartesian dualism is sometimes known as 'interactionalist dualism' and can be contrasted with 'epiphenomenalism' which proposes that the spiritual domain and the physical domain run along parallel tracks but don't interact. Epiphenomenalism is useful if one wants to believe in Cartesian dualism but finds it impossible to relinquish belief in a deterministic, materialist universe. Quantum physics, however, offers a mechanism by which the physical and spiritual worlds could interact. According to quantum mechanics, sometimes a physical situation can yield two possible results and there is no rational, scientific way to establish which result will occur. If we believe in interactionalist determinism, we can suppose that the reason why A occurs rather than B is because of some immaterial cause, a 'hidden variable'. This hidden variable is non-local. We can call it Spirit, or God, or Mind, or a Higher Power. An event that can not be wholly accounted for by a scientific rational explanation, might be accounted for if we countenance the possibility of a divine or spiritual antecedent. The materialist indeterminacy of quantum physics allows for the possibility of supernatural causation.
It is possible then to be a Cartesian dualist and not believe in free will. In my own life, I find evidence for the existence of some kind of Fate or Destiny in the fact that several times in my life I have experienced precognition. I have experienced premonitions although I usually never understood the meaning of the premonition until after the event the premonition presaged has occurred. The idea of precognition may seem irrational but in fact it is not wholly irrational. All the laws of physics are time-reversible. According to the Third Law of Thermodynamics, entropy almost always tends to increase but this is another stochastic process; it is possible, although usually very unlikely, for the entropy of a system to spontaneously decrease. In our everyday experience, if an egg falls off a kitchen bench and shatters, we take this as an indication of the direction of time's arrow– the reverse never happens. But in fact there is nothing in the laws of physics to prevent the pieces of a broken egg from spontaneously reassembling and jumping up onto the bench. It is extraordinarily unlikely, yes, but still possible. It never happens, yes, but it always might. If all the laws of physics are time reversible, why should it not be possible to remember future events in the same way as one remembers past ones? It seems the past stamps traces of itself on the present, but perhaps the future can leave traces on the present as well.
If precognition is indeed conceivable, and we live in a predetermined universe, the question then becomes, "Why is precognition not more often reported on?" I wish to tentatively suggest the following hypothesis. Knowledge of future events is not consistent with belief in free will, and so people unconsciously suppress or repress their knowledge of the future in order to preserve the illusion that they possess agency, that they have control over their lives. Individuals hide their knowledge of the future from themselves. The illusion that one has free will, that the future is not predetermined, is necessary for the well-being of both individuals and society generally. It is a necessary fiction. Knowledge that everything is fated is not something anyone can truly live with for very long, and true awareness that one's fate is predestined usually comes to people only in times of great stress or madness. I had a young acquaintance who, during a drug-induced psychotic episode once, hallucinated that a path was laid out in front of him and that every time he tried to step off this path, he felt sick. What meaning could this hallucination have other than that a person cannot fight his or her destiny but must surrender to it? (For a post that explores this idea in more detail, I recommend my interpretation of Donnie Darko "'Fate up against your will' – Donnie Darko's terrible lesson.")
In this post I have proposed two ideas: that there is no such thing as free will and that there is such a thing as supernatural causation. I want now to propose a kind of practical application of this theory. Psychiatrists have no idea of the cause of schizophrenia. Ten years ago they believed there might be a schizophrenia gene but they now know there isn't. Today psychiatrists often blame schizophrenia on drug use, ignoring the facts that many schizophrenics have never used pot and that many, many people have smoked pot without later developing schizophrenia. Why not suppose that the cause of schizophrenia lies in the spiritual realm rather than the physical realm? And that the precise causes of a person's madness differ from person to person? This proposal, that we should locate the aetiology of this 'disease' in the spiritual domain, may not be helpful. It may be better to suggest a more 'rational' explanation. But it can't be worse than what we have now. At the moment, what passes for rationality among psychiatrists is stupidity, cowardice and close-mindedness. Too much faith in materialism, too much emphasis on the body and not enough on the soul, is the problem, not the solution.
The idea that there might be no such thing as free will is a hard creed to live by. The issue of fate vs. free will was the subject of David Foster Wallace's student thesis when he was young and I suspect this issue troubled him, tormented him, his whole life. It seems that we need to have faith in free will even when rationally we know that the concept of free will is logically incoherent, insupportable. Consider the famous poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost. On a superficial reading it seems that he is describing a choice, a description of a decision freely made – yet if we read the poem closely we realise that this reading is false. The poet had no choice about which road to take. He had no choice at all.
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