20.0. Buridan’s ass and the psychological origins of objective probability

The medieval philosopher Buridan reportedly constructed a thought experiment to support his view that human behavior is determined rather than “free”—hence rational agents can't choose between two equally good alternatives. In the Buridan’s Ass Paradox, an ass finds itself between two equal equidistant bales of hay, noticed simultaneously; the bales’ distance and size are the only variables influencing the ass’s behavior. Under these idealized conditions, the ass must starve, its predicament indistinguishable from a physical object suspended between opposite forces, such as a planet that neither falls into the sun nor escapes into outer space. (Since the ass served Buridan as metaphor for the human agent, in what follows I speak of “ass” and “agent” interchangeably.)

Computer scientist Leslie Lamport formalized the paradox as “Buridan’s Principle,” which states that the ass will starve if it is situated in a range of possibilities that include midpoints where two opposing forces are equal and it must choose in a sufficiently short time span. We assume, based on a principle of physical continuity, that the larger the bale of hay compared to the other, the faster will the ass be able to decide. Since this is true on the left and on the right, at the midpoint, where the bales are equal, symmetry requires an infinite decision time.  Conclusion: within some range of bale comparisons, the ass will require decision time greater than a given bounded time interval. (For rigorous treatment, see Buridan’s Principle (1984).)

Buridan’s Principle is counterintuitive, as Lamport discovered when he first tried to publish. Among the objections to Buridan’s Principle summarized by Lamport, the main objection provides an insight about the source of the mind-projection fallacy, which treats probability as a feature of the world. The most common objection is that when the agent can’t decide it may use a default metarule. Lamport points out this substitutes another decision subject to the same limits: the agent must decide that it can’t decide. My point differs from that of Lamport, who proves that binary decisions in the face of continuous inputs are unavoidable and that with minimal assumptions they preclude deciding in bounded time; whereas I draw a stronger conclusion: no decision is substitutable when you adhere strictly to the problem’s conditions specifying that the agent be equally balanced between the options. Any inclination to substitute a different decision is a bias toward making the decision that the substitute decision entails. In the simplest variant, the ass may use the rule: turn left when you can’t decide, potentially entrapping it in the limbo between deciding whether it can’t decide. If the ass has a metarule resolving conflicts to favor the left, it has an extraneous bias.

Lamport’s analysis discerns a kind of physical law; mine elucidates the origins of the mind-projection fallacy. What’s psychologically telling is that the most common metarule is to decide at random. But if by random we mean only apparently random, the strategy still doesn’t free the ass from its straightjacket. If it flips a coin, an agent is, in fact, biased toward whatever the coin will dictate, bias, here, means an inclination to use means causally connected with a certain outcome, but the coin flip’s apparent randomness is due to our ignorance of microconditions; truly random responding would allow the agent to circumvent the paradox’s conditions. The theory that the agent might use a random strategy expresses the intuition that the agent could turn either way. It seems a route to where the opposites of functioning according to physical law and acting “freely” in perceived self-interest are reconciled.

This false reconciliation comes through confusing two kinds of symmetry: the epistemic symmetry of “chance” events and the dynamic symmetry in the Buridan’s ass paradox. If you flip a coin, the symmetry of the coin (along with your lack of control over the flip) is what makes your reasons for preferring heads and tails equivalent, justifying assigning each the same probability. We encounter another symmetry with Buridan’s ass, where we also have the same reason to think the ass will turn in either direction. Since the intuition of “free will” precludes impossible decisions, we construe our epistemic uncertainty as describing a decision that’s possible but inherently uncertain.

When we conceive of the ass as a purely physical process  subject to two opposite forces (which, of course, it is), then it’s obvious that the ass can be “stuck.” What miscues intuition is that the ass need not be confined to one decision rule. But if by hypothesis it is confined to one rule, the rule may preclude decision. This hypothetical is made relevant by the necessity of there being some ultimate decision rule.

The intuitive physics of an agent that can’t get stuck entails: a) two equal forces act on an object producing an equilibrium; b) without breaking the equilibrium, an additional natural law is added specifying that the ass will turn. Rather than conclude this is impossible, intuition “resolves” the contradiction through conceiving that the ass will go in each direction half the time: the probability of either course is deemed .5. Confusion of kinds of symmetry, fueled by the intuition of free will, makes Buridan’s Principle counter-intuitive and objective probabilities intuitive.

How do we know that reality can’t be like this intuitive physics? We know because realizing a and b would mean that the physical forces involved don’t vary continuously. It would make an exception, a kind of singularity, of the midpoint.  

17.0. Akrasia explained. Part 1 of "Philosophical and political implications of ego-depletion theory"

A recent empirical theory in social psychology solves the problem of weakness of the will (akrasia). Before Roy F. Baumeister developed ego-depletion theory, philosophers and psychologists (besides Freud) hadn’t seen need for an energy construct to explain the limits of the ego’s ability to exercise control. Ego-depletion theory’s message is that practical rationality consists of allocating the brain’s minuscule energy supply fueling our capacity to decide.

The problem of akrasia (weakness of will)

Weakness of the will (akrasia) has remained an unsolved philosophical problem since articulated by the ancients. Why do we accord the present moment more importance than the future, when rationality demands an Archimedean impartiality between our “present and future selves”? Why would you judge an action rational, as in your interest all things considered, yet not perform it?

The problem of akrasia is one of reconciliation with our commonsense introspective knowledge that, despite our failings, we clearly can (sometimes) make ourselves do things that we believe are the better choices. We make (some) rational choices and conform our behavior accordingly. What stops us from doing so consistently and biases us for the immediate? Something limits our ability to decide, but only Freud previously formulated that the limitation consists of the leaden weight of decisions recently made.

Attempted Solutions

Decision theory redefines rewardingness as including, as a feature, the time its utility is experienced. The utility function describes the decreased value of the same object enjoyed later, but it doesn’t render it rational. To the extent the timing of experience is relevant in no other respect, it isn’t rational to discount time. Why does the rational-choice assumption, that we will do what’s best for ourselves, fail so miserably when the rewards happen to occur later?

I can recollect only a single theory of why we discount future selves: Derek Parfit takes the language of “future selves” literally to maintain that they present to us as the same, in principle, as other persons’ selves, with which we identify only according to the degree of their relatedness. The cost of Parfit’s move is the concept of personhood. But while personhood doesn’t deserve to be part of our ontology, it’s a useful fiction over most of our personal transactions, failing conspicuously with regard to time discounting. We should aim to discover why.

Notice seems not to have been taken by philosophers of what would seem a scientific solution to the problem of why somewhat rational beings are so akrasic. The simple empirical answer offered is that we have a tiny daily ration of willpower. Rational beings can overcome the tendency to discount time by exerting will power, but they can only do it a few times a day. Our rationality is limited by our ability to exercise willpower, which is based on a measurable physical energy source—partly replenished by consuming glucose. The toll decision fatigue takes on people is shown by the declining performances on real-life judicial issues, resulting in a change from 70% to 10% favorable decisions between the beginning and end of the day.

Ego depletion and free will

Why is there resistance to recognizing that decisions become harder the more of them you make? While decision fatigue comports with the introspection that we can make ourselves do some things, it conflicts with our intuition that we can always do what we want. Ego-depletion phenomena present yet another breakdown of the concept of compatibilist free will.

Next essay in series: Implications for the structure of government, welfare economics, and even psychotherapy.

16.0 The supposedly hard problem of consciousness and the nonexistence of sense data: Is your dog a conscious being?

Of dogs and cows

Are dogs conscious? My guess, you think so: that’s why they’re termed “sentient.” We assume that dogs see the world much as we do, despite being receptive to different information; they experience the same conscious data of sense as we experience. You, nevertheless, might be prepared to concede the ultimate unfathomability of the question, but if not, consider a related question: when did consciousness first arise in the course of organic evolution?

The reason the questions are obscure deserves scrutiny. I think I know you’re conscious because you say you know what I’m saying when I mention “consciousness” or “experience,” but the limits of my knowledge of consciousness are telling: I will never find some physical structure to explain it. This isn’t due to lack of empirical research or of theoretical ingenuity. To explain an observation, you must describe it, and the language used for describing conscious experience is the same language used for describing the object the experience refers to. The most I can do to describe the experienced “brownness” is achieved by referring to its cause. When I see a brown cow, I can only describe the raw experience as “brown”: the color that ordinarily gives rise to the experience. Thus, I necessarily omit from the description exactly what I want to explain: the qualitative character of the “brown” experience.

Apparent self-evidence

If qualitative consciousness existed, it would be utterly inexplicable; yet, the evidence of direct experience seems self-evidently to support its own existence. This seemingly immediate awareness of our raw mental states seems to be just what it is like to be ourselves. (Thomas Nagel.) Regardless of the apparent indubitability of the intuition that we have raw experiential states, this intuition remains nothing more than belief, and beliefs are subject to illusions that mislead us systematically.

One reason you might resist the conclusion that qualitative experience is illusory is that wholesale distortion of reality regarding objects of seemingly immediate awareness seems implausible just because of our intimate connection with our own experience, but scientific developments can render seemingly unrelated philosophical positions plausible. The work of neurologists, such as Oliver Sacks, should caution against the prejudice that some experiences are so basic they resist radical distortion and fabrication. An example Sacks describes is a brain-damaged patient who mistook his wife for a hat. Neuroscientists conclude that cognitive functions are assemblies of modules, making it less startling that beliefs can be so radically wrong.

There’s also a conceptual reason for the reluctance of philosophers and scientists to reject the intuition of raw sense experience: lack of clarity about how to characterize the prewired belief responsible for the illusion. The intuition seems too complex and sophisticated to accommodate innate belief; philosophers trying to nail down the precise content of the belief that qualia exist have had recourse to thought experiments remote from actual experience, and nobody seems to have characterized the essence of qualia. My suggestion: the illusion of qualitative awareness is the belief that when we perceive or imagine objects we have independently real experiences characterizable only by the terms used to describe the external object itself. Qualia are inherently ineffable contents of perception or imagination.

The illusion’s evolution

This definition suggests an evolutionary explanation for the illusion of qualitative experience. Thought doesn’t depend on the illusion of consciousness, as one can easily conceive of an intelligent being without illusory beliefs about the nature of the thinking process, but the illusion of consciousness might have encouraged the development of thinking. Perhaps human ancestors evolved the innate belief that they have experiences with properties corresponding to those of their referents because this belief encouraged them to make mental models of the world—encouraged them to engage in the offline thinking unique for our species. Objectified conscious experience could encourage mental-model making by generalizing the prior insight that you can predict one external object by manipulating a similar external object. Our ancestors would then need only substitute internal objects for external ones.

Bypassing “sense data” in the theory of knowledge

According to one longstanding theory in epistemology, sense data are our only basis for knowing the external world. This doctrine, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to skepticism about the external world’s existence: sense data, supposedly our window to the world, became an insuperable barrier to cognition, for if all our knowledge is nothing but construction from sense data, our sense data are all we know. We can’t get out of our own minds.

The reason the sense data theory leads to skeptical conclusions goes back to ineffability. If we know the world by sense data, you can draw conclusions about the world only through analogy, that is, by forming a relationship between two descriptions. Ineffable sense data have nothing in common with a world of things, except their names—such as “brownness.”

Two illusions

This account of raw experience as an adaptive illusion brings clarity to the argument that free will is illusory. The sense of free will, I concluded, is the misperception that experienced deciding causes behavior. But “experience” doesn’t exist. Compatibilist free will is incoherent because it assumes the causal efficacy of unreal raw experience. 

See also the overlapping 16.1. The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem.

10.1.2. Reflexive prediction, determinism, and the impossibility of free will

 6th in free-will series

Will you—or won’t you—take an M & M candy in the next minute after it’s placed in front of you? In this thought experiment, we assume that I’m able to predict your action with absolute accuracy based on physics. I inform you that I predict you’ll take the candy, but you’re a rebellious sort, and just to prove you’re no automaton, you decide on defiance. Your proneness to disconfirm predictions deliberately seems to render impossible any prediction of your choice, provided you’re informed of it in advance. But remember I can predict your choice. 

    At least one of the following assumptions concerning the physical possibilities must be false to remove the contradiction:

    1. That it’s physically possible that you be informed of a deterministic prediction when you’re indifferent to the alternatives

  

    2. That it’s physically possible to predict your behavior precisely

  

    3. That it’s physically possible for you to defy the prediction

A.   Because you don't want to defy it

B.   Because you won't be able to defy it despite wanting to

The possibility of conveying a precise prediction (No. 1)

It might be claimed that physics precludes that you could ever be informed of a determinate prediction when you’re indifferent to the alternatives, since you’ll be moved to falsify it. But if perfect prediction is possible, conveying its substance should be easy: no barriers are apparent.

The possibility of predicting precisely (No. 2)

We may try denying the second assumption, that precise prediction of your behavior is possible. It might be said that human organisms aren’t the kind of systems that can be predicted precisely. But again, one must wonder why not. Organisms are but clumps of matter; they can be described as systems in biological terms, but otherwise they are no less subject to purely physical description than other purely physical systems. No specific barrier limits prediction of biological systems when they’re conceived as physical systems.

The possibility of defying the prediction: You won’t want to defy it (No. 3A)

The possibility of defying the prediction must be questioned. Perhaps you won’t choose to be negative, your character and personality notwithstanding. But the truth of the prediction doesn’t affect any of the things that we use to attribute a reactant tendency to infer what you want to do; its truth affords no cause for bringing other motives into play. A true prediction confronts you no differently from a false prediction: whether the prediction happens to be true or false has in itself no bearing on how it’s received.

The possibility of defying the prediction: You can’t defy the prediction despite wanting to (No. 3B)

Having excluded the other possibilities, we should conclude that you will confirm the prediction despite not wanting to confirm it. This result is due to your taking of the candy being a physical act, which must conform to physical prediction, whereas having an attitude of wanting is identified by psychological criteria and does not necessarily conform to any specific physical criteria.

A note on quantum indeterminacy

Although the ground is well traveled by others, I should say a couple of words about quantum mechanics in its bearing on whether absolutely true predictions really are physically possible. First, the relevant macroscopic states are essentially deterministic.  Second, quantum uncertainty doesn’t explain why in the thought experiment you would want determinately according to your character, for which expectation I argue.

Conclusion

The thought experiment serves as an “intuition pump” (Daniel Dennett) concerning the incongruence between mentalistic and physical concepts. Compatibilism is the doctrine that the world can be deterministic despite your ability to exercise “volition.” Compatibilism thus implies that in describing our “wants” we describe a real cause of our behavior.

Mental concepts, such as "wanting," refer only fictitiously. They serve fallibly to enhance foresight about our behavior and that of other people. Fatally for compatibilism, the thought experiment accentuates that fallibility.

10.1.1. Another refutation of compatibilism: Newcomb’s paradox shows that free will is entirely illusory

 5th in free-will series.

Hard determinists (such as I)—maintaining that genuine free will is illusory—typically concede that genuine volition exists but claim the sense of free will concerns thoroughgoing agent autonomy: origination. (See T. Honderich, A theory of determinism (1998).) Previous essays defended hard determinism by reducing origination to the illusory sense of free will, consisting of the misperception that experienced deciding causes action. In this essay, I attack the illusion of free will at its home base: volition. It is not even the case, I contend, that our behavior is under voluntary control.

Newcomb’s paradox is incoherent

My starting point is the well-known problem in philosophical decision theory called Newcomb’s Paradox. I don’t claim to be a serious student of decision theory; my purpose is to turn the paradox to a different purpose—different but not entirely novel. Others have argued that the denial of free will is inherent in the paradox’s assumptions, but I take the argument a step further by contending that in relevant part the assumptions are true.

In the form I’ll use, Newcomb’s Paradox concerns a game organized by a faultless Predictor. The game’s set-up consists of two boxes, one transparent and the other opaque. Predictor places a thousand dollars in the transparent box but places an amount in the opaque box that’s contingent on the prediction. Chooser is to pick either the opaque box or both boxes. When Predictor knows Chooser will pick the opaque box, it places a million dollars in it, but if Predictor knows Chooser will pick both boxes, it leaves the opaque box empty. Chooser’s best outcome would be to pick both boxes when it contains a million dollars, but the infallible Predictor then will have left the opaque box empty, since being infallible, it has predicted the choice. But the Predictor goes exclusively with its prediction and makes no changes after Chooser's actual choice, and following this line of thinking, Chooser should pick both boxes. If Predictor put the million in the opaque box, then Chooser gets $1,000,000 + $1,000 = $1,001,000. But since Predictor is always right, it would have predicted that Chooser would choose both boxes, so Chooser is stuck with only a thousand.

Both sides have advocates because valid principles seem to support either decision. Supporting the both-box choice is the principle that we should choose based on the consequences of our choices, that is, based on what they cause. The maxim holding that correlation isn’t necessarily causation expresses this principle. We should choose both boxes because what's done is done. The other principle is that we can rely on lawful regularities when they—as opposed to relations of mere correlation—underpin our choice. Since the Predictor always rewards the choice of the opaque box with $1,000,000 and punishes the choice of both boxes by awarding only $1,000, we should choose the opaque box. The two valid principles lead to contradictory solutions because the puzzle itself contains contradictory assumptions: if you can choose something besides what the Predictor prophesies, the Predictor isn’t infallible, since Predictor then can be wrong. If you focus on the assumption that Predictor is infallible, you pick the opaque box. If you focus on the causal consequences of your ability to choose, you choose both boxes.

Re-evaluating volition

Commentators haven’t widely recognized the incoherence of Newcomb’s paradox because (as tacit compatibilists) they don’t see how a precise prediction derived without considering Chooser’s volition could be perfect: why can’t Chooser contravene a determinate prediction in willful pursuit of its self-interest? The problem is evident if Predictor were to announce beforehand that it predicts Chooser will pick the opaque box: what’s to stop Chooser from refuting Predictor by picking both boxes—netting a $1,000 increase in payoff? Predictor’s infallibility might be said to stop Chooser, but the question is how could Predictor be infallible (or how could the universe be suitably deterministic) when Chooser may want to thwart the prediction, if informed. What’s the outcome when Chooser—as seems entirely possible—wants to pick contrary to prediction? The answer must be that Chooser fails to pick what it wants. If Predictor forecasts the opaque box and Chooser wills the both-box choice, Chooser can’t act according to its will. It will have to act as if in a hypnotic trance when hypnotic suggestion conflicts with volition. (Post-hypnotic suggestion may be a useful model for hard determinism.) 

The weakness of this solution to Newcomb’s paradox is abruptness. Why should choice suddenly become impossible when prediction is complete yet occur when prediction is almost complete? The paradox should force us to reconsider the general proposition that genuine volition exists, and Libet’s findings provide a basis for re-evaluation. If we will our behavior, how do we know we do, given that we find out that we carried out a willful act only after our brains transmit the effective impulse? I’ve been calling that impulse the “decision,” but Chooser frames the decision after the act. Our predecision intentions comport with our actions only because of the formers' abstractness and vagueness, and strict volition is an illusion caused by our flawed perception of mental temporality. The conclusion holding that perfect-prediction’s logical possibility precludes choice is a dispositive claim against compatibilism, which—to deny any contradiction between free will and determinism—analyzes free will as volition. Our acts aren’t truly voluntary. 

Changed on July 2, 2012, 11 a.m.: Clarified that Predictor announces prediction in second-to-last paragraph. (See discussion with Joseph.)

I elaborate on the logic of the second-to-last paragraph in 10.1.2 Reflexive prediction, determinism, and the impossibility of free will

10.3 The what, how, and why of "free will": A metaphysical digression—Part 3. Why "free will"?

Another set of questions concerns the purpose of the sense of free will—how did it enhance biological adaptation? Metaphysicians who agree free will is illusion divide on whether the illusion is necessary, and a popular view holds that if they truly came to believe determinism, humans would have no reason to act. This view is espoused by some deterministic free-will deniers, not only antideterminist "libertarians," but as you'd expect, the libertarians express the strongest views; one libertarian social psychologist claims to have demonstrated experimentally that college-student subjects cheat more on tests after they're induced to disbelieve in free will. Simply put, his theory is that if we deny our behavioral origination we have less drive to behave responsibly. If this psychological claim is true, the semblance of a motivational push to do the right thing is adaptive, and bearing ultimate responsibility for deeds supplies the evolutionary pressure favoring the free-will experience. But the assumption that perceived free will is adaptive doesn't explain how this perception motivates. Phenomenally, it seems to explain motivation it purports to provide—because the appearance that free will motivates results inexorably from the free-will experience itself: when you experience your behavior as deriving from the perception that your mental states immediately cause acts, you will reasonably conclude that subtracting this (nonexistent) push undermines motivation and responsibility.

The present theory better explains apparent natural selection for this form of purely mental causation. When decision produces action, the actor's nervous system must register that the decision—the actual decision, not the experience of deciding—caused the act, to enable the actor to distinguish voluntary acts from involuntary movements. Coupling a sense of deciding with the decision, by placing the phenomenal deciding experience where the actor relates it to what follows, conveys this information. The "free will," then, is a byproduct of other evolutionary design choices.

What about the finding that free will is more conducive to honesty than determinism? Consider the mental operations of a subject induced to believe determinism is true in a psychology experiment. The subject can't rid himself of free will or even weaken its grip by another "freely willed" act! Whether it's possible to experience oneself in a purely deterministic fashion is itself a debate; Buddhism, for example, seeks to promote this loss of sense of free will (along with other baggage), but the transformation is a long-term project, not the intellectual recognition that determinism is true. The subjects' thoughts elicited by the faux-determinist propaganda delivered in the experimental condition are futile for overcoming the subjects' sense they have free will. At most, the subjects can negate specific attitudes they attribute to their supposed free will: I eschewed cheating because free will made me feel I'm the originator of my acts. Having learned I'm not the originator, I have no continuing reason to abstain from dishonest practices I previously shunned, when my ersatz sense of origination suckered me. Therefore, I should disregard the apparent demands of the autonomous will by behaving less honestly. Subjects can suppress only specific impulses and inhibitions they had previously justified by libertarianism; the subject hopes to avoid being a free-will sucker, despite continuing to experience the false sense of free will. The subject now "freely wills" the new behavior, while willfully suppressing what had once been "freely willed."

Neither the societal effects of disillusion with libertariansm nor the individual effects are apt to be straightforward.

10.2. The what, how, and why of "free will": A metaphysical digression—Part 2. How "free will"?

New data could conceivably disprove Libet’s results, but the correction would mean nothing metaphysically because at the end of the day, Libet’s contribution was conceptual. Libet solved the mind-body problem en passant; his data forced him to grasp the distinction between the deciding experience and deciding itself, but the data themselves are metaphysically otiose. For metaphysics, Libet’s experimental results serve only as scaffolding for distinguishing deciding from decision and showing that temporal associations in the experience of deciding explain why we feel we exercise mentalistic control. The perception of deciding to act, distinct from the fact of acting, both explains the impression that we have free will and demonstrates free will’s untenability. The objective temporal ordering doesn’t bear on these distinctions and explanations—as long as the experience is that the act of will preceded or coincided with the act of deciding.

Libet (somewhat unknowingly) showed how human experience creates a predilection for a misplaced, impossible, perceived causal relation, and connections experienced create the causal illusion; real temporal relations are irrelevant. Simplicity recommends this explanation of phenomenal free will, and the explanation displays exactly why free will is illusion: sensations don’t cause physical events. Holding that experience interacts with the physical world, Descartes was the only important metaphysician to disagree, and every metaphysician today holds that two substances essentially different can’t interact. Physical laws govern physical events and leave no room for entry of purely mental causes.

A possible source of confusion about these arguments is metaphysicians’ acceptance of one class of mental causes, beliefs and desires. In response—perceiving willful efficacy differs from attributing beliefs and desires, in that nothing in the concept of “belief” and “desire” identify them as phenomenal experience. While belief and desire aren't experiences—available for association with other experiences—the error of considering beliefs experiential, held even by metaphysicians until the 20th century, may have generalized from free will to nonexperiental mental entities like belief and desire, causing the naive error that beliefs and desires are experiential.

Finally, since (if) sensations are brain events, one might contend that associating experienced decisions with actual action results in no anomalous causation. First, nothing in the experience of deciding points to the under-strata, and conditioning usually can target only phenomena. Second, if the objection holds, it’s at the expense of the mind-brain-identity theory’s credibility, in its insistence on a direct relationship between phenomenology and physics.

Next essay: Why free will?

10.1. The what, how, and why of "free will": A metaphysical digression—Part 1. What is "free will"?

The Libet experiments can reinvigorate the free-will debate—now deadlocked and dull—if applied to clarify concepts, not merely refute opponents. In the current standoff, almost every philosopher and scientist rejects libertarian free will, the doctrine that willful acts produce physically unpredictable outcomes, but the scholarly majority wants its physicalism and its free will too. This compatibilist maneuver to have both turns the question of free will’s existence into a jejune debate about words; but unfortunately, free will’s inherent ineffability condemns determinists to rejecting what they can’t define. These essays fill the gap.

Compatibilists equate the exercise of free will with voluntary behavior, as when I move my arm because that’s what I want to do. According to the desiccated compatibilist definitions, free will is comprised of the ability to behave voluntarily, notwithstanding that volition is cortical matter physically causing chemical events. Although it’s hard to describe an alternative, this position seems obviously wrong; a science fiction story can quickly show why. Imagine an intelligent species that directly experienced the causal path between brain and arm, as we might experience the causal connection between pain and object causing injury. Such beings would perform the action voluntarily, but would this tempt anyone to call it “free”? Unfortunately, the answer is affirmative. While the thought experiment can allude to the distinction between voluntary and freely willed behavior, a compatibilist would answer the question, “Yes, that is an example of free will.”

Determinists can concede that volition is one meaning of free will but insist on another meaning, origination, the sense that you are your behavior’s source. Although origination separates determinists from libertarians—by the lights of both—compatibilists circumvent the issue by limiting the manifestation of free will to voluntary behavior. That they’ve gotten the better of the argument, despite their evasiveness, must be admitted, because origination is nebulous, unsuited for creating a clear counterpoint to volition. Free will, the agent’s contribution to the event, the umpf we give an act seemingly making it occur, seems ineffable except by the vaguest allusion. Intuitively, we feel we will freely in a sense distinct from mere volition—most everyone thinks they know this other free will—but unsupported mass intuitions truly deserve little respect.

My trick defines the experience of free will by its cause instead of its experiential quality, much as the ineffable red patch observable in your mind’s eye can be defined as the physical reception of an object reflecting certain long light waves. With a difference. If we define the free-will experience by its cause—as we can define the sensation red by its external cause—then, if the definition posits a demonstrably nonexistent entity, it undermines the doctrine of free will, including its compatibilist version.

Recall that Libet found that subjects perceived the act of deciding, the initiating event of the free-will experience, later than the actual decision—this demonstrated neurologically. Determinists see that misplacement of the subjective experience of deciding disposes of libertarian free will. But who believes in libertarian free will? Since they haven’t described the experience of free will, these scholars haven’t refuted compatibilism.

My small contribution is to articulate a definition of free will:

Free will is the (mis)perception that experienced deciding causes behavior.

This project relies on Fritz Heider’s classic psychological experiments as much as on Libet’s neurological studies. Heider showed that despite the abstractness of the concept of cause, temporal precedence and spatial contiguity produce the direct, noninferential perception of causality. (An animated demonstration lets you experience the direct perception of causality.) This sense of a causal connection, resulting from associating perceived decision with act, is the sense of free will.

Attributing the free-will experience to a unique cause frees determinists from the vexation of defining it experientally, since it explains the experience by an invalidating mechanism: if the experience of deciding regularly precedes an act, it will seem its cause. Determinists, therefore, can demonstrate a sense of free will distinct from voluntary control.

Next part: How free will?

10.0. Free Will and Legal Intent: Consequences of a Myth's Demise

Husband hates wife; in a state of nature he would kill her. Only his cowardice deters him. One evening, cleaning his gun, he accidentally shoots and kills her. Can husband now be punished for any crime?

Depending on the degree of care he took to avoid mishap, the offense is ordinarily negligent homicide or manslaughter. We want to know whether he can be blamed for more. Do his unconscious intentions bear on his culpability?

The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud provides a simple illustration of the workings of unconscious motivation. Freud didn't want to return a library book quite yet. He knew that without even forming an intention to delay the return, he could trust his unconscious mind to cause him to forget. Of course, that's how it worked out.

It's surprising that psychoanalysis has so little affected the legal concepts of negligence and intent in either criminal or civil law. Freud taught and clinically supported the thesis that nothing in psychology is accidental: even slips of the tongue having meaning. The most interesting expressions of unconscious motives for psychoanalysis are those symbolically representing some wish, but as with Freud and his library book, accidents can realize unconscious wishes directly.

Many psychologists lack Freud's confidence that all behavior is psychologically determined, but findings in cognitive psychology in recent decades have required a thorough rethinking of the origination of behavior. Today's consensus accepts that all cognition (distinguished from its products) is unconscious. Although the Freudian question of motivated negligence hasn't been directly raised, cognition's unconscious nature invites study of the driving unconscious intentions.

The final blow to a purely conscious approach comes not from philosophy but experimental science, which has proven that consciousness has no direct relationship to the acts conscious thoughts seem to cause. Whereas Freud's theories should prompt questions regarding the involuntariness of apparently negligent acts, these experimental results make the apparently intentional acts less so, directly refuting the theory that behavior is freely willed.

What's implied for law by the undermining of concepts of both negligence and willfulness? Benjamin Libet's 1980's scientific work presents the rare instance when a single scientific finding resolves a philosophical question, as Libet's work rules out simplistic theories of free will, while simplistic theories were the only ones credible. Libet and others have replicated that the decision to act arises in the brain before the subject experiences the conscious act of deciding. If free will consists of conscious decisions causing the designated act, then we clearly don't have it, since real causes occur before, not after, the events they cause. The perception–or rather illusion–that the conscious decision causes the resulting behavior is the basis of the universal naïve belief in free will (although I haven't seen the literature expressly drawing this conclusion).

Ironically, Libet was a fervent believer in the existence of free will and proposed a process for its realization in light of his findings. A subject making the conscious "decision" retains the ability to veto the unconsciously engendered act. Libet's theory is free will's last gasp, unsuccessful because the veto is itself an act, with the same unconscious prehistory, thus arising with the same independence from consciousness and bearing the same involuntary character as the original act. The most coherent interpretation at present is that the veto is as little "free" as the act. (See Velleman, David (2000) The Possibility of Practical Reason. Oxford University Press.)

The nonexistence of free will and the intentionality of some unconscious behavior carries both apparent and real implications for law's evolution: 1) directly undermining criminal law's nonrebuttable presumption that voluntary acts are freely determined by the actor; 2) undermining the moral basis for punishment, insofar as it depends on the actor being the originator of acts; and 3) flattening the distinction between negligent and intentional mens rea and negligence and intentional torts.

Commentators commonly cite criminal law's presumption of free will as a potential casualty of discovering it doesn't exist, but the presumption's only legal function is to impose responsibility on all actors for voluntary acts. The demise of one theory doesn't fell an institution. Without logical contradiction, a person without free will can be under legal compulsion to obey.

But is the person responsible; does the unraveling of the explanation regarding why a person can be punished for his voluntary acts undermine the moral basis for criminal punishment? It vitiates the retributionist justification for punishment as desert, a result that is less radical than a crisis of justification but greater than a reshuffling of theories. Desert's demise is a welcomed enlightenment, but some consequences are less benign. Deterrence takes up the justificatory slack from retribution, but from a moral standpoint, deterrence isn't quite up to the job because of its inability to define the set of punishable persons. To rely completely on a deterrence theory turns criminal punishment into a form of social engineering, with no limits but expediency. Such punishment meted out amorally is vulnerable to purely pragmatic enlargement of the set of people who can be incarcerated or otherwise punished. The antipunitive intellectual progress of repudiating free will, paradoxically, fosters punishing more citizens.

Eliminating the conventional rationale for punishment also augurs a certain leveling of the distinction between negligent and intentional torts. Since the premise that voluntary acts are products of free will no longer distinguishes these categories morally, the distinction loses functionality. The recent research even disposes of pragmatic justifications for restricting punishment to intentional acts, as the unconscious has proven more intelligent than most had believed, hence deterrable.

That rehabilitation today is a joke—psychiatric and drug referrals, veiled punishment—contribute to free will's paradoxically punitive death throes: an old ideology crumbles without new institutions arising.

Next in the free will series: What is free will?