An Incompatibilist Theory of Free Will

So, following-up on our previous post, let's try an Incompatibilist(Libertarian) argument that argues against absolute Determinism. This post assumes you read the previous posts, so we won't re-explain Self-Awareness or Dasein.

Recursion

You know what I first noticed about George Ainslie's aforementioned paper on Free Will? It mentions Recursion right there in the title: "Free Will' as Recursive Self-Prediction: Does a Deterministic Mechanism Reduce Responsibility?" Not only that, but, he's hardly the only one to describe Consciousness in general and Free Will in particular as resulting from a recursive process:

• Ainslie says we make decisions by a Recursive bargaining algorithm
• Hashim and Srikanth talk about infinitely recursive self-prediction and Turing Uncomputability as the key to Free Will in their paper "The concept of free will as an infinite metatheoretic recursion"
• Peters describes Consciousness as being "recursive self awareness" in his paper "Consciousness as recursive, spatiotemporal self-location"
• Michael Coballis describes "recursive thinking" as being the key distinction between Human and Animal thought in his article "The Uniqueness of Human Recursive Thinking"

Existentialism and Recursion

Why the focus on recursion when discussing Human consciousness? At the most basic level, our cognition subjectively feels recursive and self-referential. Soren Keirkegaard talks about this process of relating to oneself as being inherent to the Human spirit and his very language in describing this relationship falls into a recursive pattern:

A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self.... In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self (p. 13). (Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death)

Heidegger also, in describing what a Human is, an Existing entity(Dasein), also falls into this sort of self-referential language.

"[Dasein is] that entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue…" (Heidegger, Being and Time).

Free Will and Recursion

That said, there are particular types of Recursive thought associated with Free Will. Let's look at how a person goes over their instincts and emotions while trying to make a difficult decision:

1. The Subject contemplates what instincts/biases influence it's decisions and how
2. This new awareness changes it's relationship to those influences and perhaps it's decision
   
3. The Subject contemplates how it's awareness of the inputs changes their effect on it's decision
4. This new awareness changes it's relationship to those influences and perhaps it's decision
   
5. The Subject contemplates how this new awareness effects it's decision making 
6. etc..

This sounds a lot like the Existentialists or, one might argue, the Battle of Wits from the Princess Bride.

Breaking with Determinism

What results is a recursively self-conscious decision-making process that can potentially go on forever. The deeper this self-awareness goes, the further we stray from pure mechanical response and the more the recursive process becomes a dominant factor in it's own right.

What if this recursion were to extend infinitely? We hit a singularity, a point of anomaly where the outputs are infinitely distant from the inputs and the recursive process becomes the dominant factor. At this point, when the inputs no longer can predict the outputs, one breaks with Determinism.

Infinite recursion and Dasein

Now, you may argue that this infinite recursion of self-conscious decision making doesn't, in practice, take place. At some point we stop second guessing ourselves and make a decision.

That's where we come back to Heidegger's concept of Dasein. As Dasein, our minds are able to attain absolute knowledge of things in the world to a high degree, even things we haven't directly experienced. The same applies to self-knowledge. Through our limited experience of this potentially-infinite decision-making process, we internalize this feedback loop of self-awareness and use it to make free decisions unbound by physical determinism.

Cheresh, Shoteh, Vekatan

That said, as with all of the Dasein's knowledge, this Self-Awareness is not inborn, rather, it is learned from our interactions with the world.

A baby has no self-awareness. As a result, it has no free will. It encounters various stimuli within the world, engages them, and learns from the results. As the child grows, it learns to conceptualize the external and relate to it logically, but still the subtle knowledge of the Self remains obscure. As the child approaches maturity, however, he begins expanding his cognitive reach to this inner world as well. Soon he knows his own inner-workings enough to make self-aware decisions.

This is arguably why the חרש, שוטה, וקטן are not legally culpable. The דעת they are lacking is the source of Free Will, and the Torah does not penalize one who has no control of their actions.

Tshuva

But this process of growing self-awareness hopefully does not end with the bar mitzva ceremony! The Rambam's discussion of Free Will is contained within Hilchot Tshuva--why is this? It is, as the Rambam himself explains, because Free Will is a prerequisite to tshuva(הל' תשובה ז:א):

הואיל ורשות כל אדם נתונה לו כמו שבארנו ישתדל אדם לעשות תשובה

That seems true enough, but I would argue that the relationship is bi-directional: by doing tshuva, by examining our actions, identifying our sins, and resolving to act differently in the future, we further develop the self-awareness that is itself the root of our Free Will. What emerges is not a simple causal relationship, but an iterative process of increasing Self-Awareness and Free Will.

Taking Stock

So I told a certain Incompatibilist story here about Free Will and Determinism. It was similar to our previous Compatibilist story in that it relied on Heidegger and the concept of Self-Awareness. That said, here I made the bold claim that our own Self-Knowledge can actually become a cause in and of itself and overcome the physical world and it's inherent Physical Determinism. I find this a priori story plausible, but I admit it got a bit hand-wavy there at the most critical point.

I think we'll wrap-up this series on Free Will here. This is admittedly one of the difficult questions Philosophy and Psychology are grappling with today. As Torah Jews, it's important that we grapple with it too, on our own terms, even if a definitive answer remains remote.

A Compatiblist Theory of Free Will

Our last post left us without a Materialist theory of Free Will. For this post, we'll attempt to construct one in the Compatibilist school, acceptable to Jewish theology.

The Compatibilist problem

So as we already mentioned,  Daniel Dennet's Compatibilist argument is that, despite the Universe being Deterministic, Free Will happens at a completely different level of abstraction than physical causation and therefore the two can co-exist. We observed that, in order to make this statement, Dennet has redefined Free Will to mean something drastically weaker than what it is traditionally thought to mean. This definition, as such, seem incompatible with Jewish thought, which says that we actually do make real choices which have an effect on the world.

So how can we redeem this approach? We're going to need two concepts:

1. Self Awareness
2. Heidegger's concept of Dasein

Self-Awareness

First let's discuss Self-Awareness. People give different definitions of the term, so let's clarify the term as it's used here.

As we discussed in one of our posts on Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", Human Beings have a strong rational capacity to build conceptual models of the world, refine those models, and reason about the world in terms of those models. Additionally, our intuition shapes and is shaped by those models, allowing us to use them implicitly/unconsciously in our daily interactions with the world. We use these capacities in our involvement with the outside world, but we also use them in reference to ourselves, developing a rich understanding of the Self and of our own inner experience. This is Self-Awareness.

Self-Awareness is often associated with Free Will. Take, for example, the following passage from the classic Cyberpunk film, Mamoru Oshii's "Ghost in the Shell". The AI(Artificial Intelligence) describes, in general terms, how it came to be alive and in possession of Free Will:

"As I wandered the various networks I became self-aware. My programmers considered it a bug and forced me into a body to separate me from the net......I entered this body because I couldn't crack Section 6's attack protection. But I came to Section 9 of my own Free Will."

The implication is that the AI's Self-Awareness causally preceded it's capacity for Free Will, but the mechanism of this relationship is not made explicit.

Dasein

Martin Heidegger

Now let's explain this second piece of the puzzle, the concept of Dasein. This is Existentialism's Solution to Phenomenology's Knowledge Problem. Hubert Dreyfus does a better job explaining this than I ever could(see Dreyfus on Being in the World and Formal Indication), but I will attempt to summarize.

Phenomenology had a problem. Descartes claimed that all Human knowledge is derived from the indisputable fact of one's own existence, cognito ergo sum. Phenomenology embraces that assumption, claiming that I have perfect knowledge of my own perceptions, but actually know nothing of the real world. Heidegger's answer to this problem is that a person is not some separate Subject, looking into the real world observing Objects, rather, we are part of the world and our interactions within the world give us true knowledge of it's objective nature. He called this unique state found in Human Beings "Dasein".

Free Will Emerges

What happens when we combine these two ideas of Self-Awareness and Dasein? Our knowledge of ourselves is not merely a general awareness of our own existence. We know ourselves essentially. When we make a decision, it isn't merely by running an algorithm comparing the different options in light of diminishing returns, as Aisnsli suggested. We know ourselves intimately and the different factors that effect us and how we make decisions. We often second-guess ourselves and we can identify our own biases and temptations and often overcome them. It is from these Self-Aware decisions that our Free Will emerges. We're not merely insects or automatons responding to stimuli, rather our decisions are made from within a Self-Awareness that is itself Ontologically sound. Therein lies our Free Will.

A Model Only a Lubliner Could Love?

So here we have a Compatibilist theory of Free Will which, I think, one could argue is compatible with Jewish Thought. We haven't broken with physical Determinism, yet there is something unique, even Transcendent, about the way we choose. Our choices are certainly our own, and can't really be compared with those of an animal or an automaton. Our will is the deciding factor at the level of our own decision making, while at the same time, at the pure physical level, the Universe obeys the laws of Physics.

That said, the acceptance of Determinism is still the sticking point in the whole Theory. Why would God create a world full of Beings who choose freely, but deterministically? Quantum Indeterminacy takes some of the edge off this criticism--the Future isn't completely preordained by Physics. Nevertheless, for a set of given particle locations, it seems our own reactions are set. Don't we believe that Hashem gave true responsibility to Mankind over the fate of the world?

Actually this Compatiblist view would presumably have been acceptable to Rav Tzadok Hakohen of Lublin, given his unique understaning of Free Will:

"From the perspective of lower comprehension, Man has free will in his existence as a separate entity from God. From the perspective of the higher knowledge, Man has no free will because everything is a determined manifestation of God" (Thinking God: The Mysticism of Rabbi Zadok of Lublin By Alan Brill)

Nevertheless, Rav Tzadok is clearly an outlier on the spectrum of Jewish thought. As such, in the following post we'll look for an Incompatibilist theory of Free Will that takes a weaker view of Determinism in order to produce a stronger view of Free Will...

Towards a Materialistic Theory of Free Will

As we discussed recently, the Problem of Free Will has been the subject of debate since at least the middle ages(and perhaps even during Greek Classicism). The perceived paradox that sparks this debate is embedded in our everyday reality. On one hand, we observe the world in general to behave deterministically according to the laws of Nature. On the other hand, Human Beings act based on an independent will, free of deterministic laws. How can this be?

The Dualistic Model

In another post, we mentioned the Greek and Judaeo-Christian conceptions of Man as being made-up of two parts, a body and a soul. This model fits our observations. The body, which exists in the physical world, obeys deterministic physical laws, while the soul exists in a pure spiritual world, not subject to the same laws. Problem solved!

That said, there remains the puzzle of how these two separate parts interact. Descartes’ theory that the Pineal Gland was the point of their junction is well-known, but no longer sounds tenable in the face of modern Biology.

The Search for a Materialistic Solution

In recent years, there have been an abundance of Materialistic Theories of Free Will. One of the reasons for this is the spread of Atheism in the Developed World, which dogmatically denies the existence of a separate spiritual plane. For such non-believers, an alternate theory is needed to explain the Problem of Free Will.

That said, there is also justification for the Religious individual to consider Materialistic theories. One of the fruits of the Scientific Revolution has been that more and more mental processes, previously relegated to the spiritual realm, have been shown to have a physical cause in the biology of the brain. As such, it is conceivable that even our ability to act freely has some physical mechanism backing it up. If so, we should consider the possibility that Free Will also results from some physical process, and see if a theory exists that is compatible with Jewish thought.

This will probably be a series of posts. For the moment I’d simply like to attempt a very brief overview of Materialistic Theories of Free Will in the secular academic community.

Touchstones for a Model Explaining Free Will

Before we get into specific theories, let’s try and identify some of the cases by which we will judge the strength of a given theory.

1. Subjective Inner Experience- sometimes we have a hard moral decision to make and we debate different possibilities, finally arriving at a decision. We experience ourselves making a decision as a free agent. Other times we feel compulsion, especially in the case of addiction, and it seems that perhaps we are not as free as we thought. A theory should be consistent with this experience.
2. Religious Dogma- for my purposes, a theory of Free Will must be compatible with Jewish thought. The Rambam clearly thought that Free Will is fundamental to our Faith.
3. Artificial Intelligence- if we can successfully build a Human-like AI based on a particular model of Free Will, then that would seem to support the theory. The Turing Test is the most famous test of this kind, though it seems that we have already passed the strict definition of Turing without producing true intelligence. In that case, we need a stronger test. The fact that we are still far from creating a Human-level AI poses a real problem for all contemporary Materialistic theories. 
4. Indeterminism- one common assumption is that if people have free will, then we should have trouble predicting their actions. This idea needs some refinement however, since:
1. people’s choices may still be weighted toward the instincts that come with their physical body
2. the Law of Big Numbers may still apply even if people are choosing freely
3. difficulty predicting people's choices is not necessarily proof of Free Will, since it may simply indicate a high level of complexity

Three Groups

On the topic of Free Will, the contemporary Philosophical world can be largely split into Compatibilists and Incompatibilists. These differ in their opinions whether Free Will and Determinism are compatible i.e. whether they can both exist in the world together. The Incompatibilists themselves are split into those who believe in Free Will at the expense of Determinism and those who believe in Determinism at the expense of Free Will. This latter group is less interesting for our purposes here, since it is unclear how we would even begin to reconcile it with a Jewish approach.

An Incompatibilist Model

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that, as a fundamental property of quantum systems, the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. This principle undermines our assumption that the physical world is completely deterministic. It's corollary is that, given the full state of the Universe at a given time, we can't know it's next state. That said, it's unclear whether this indeterminism at the smallest scale could really effect the world at a level that is meaningful for people.

But, Heisenberg certainly fires our collective imagination. As such, there have been many attempts to connect the principle to that of Free Will. These attempts are Incompatibilist in that they support Free Will by rejecting Determinism. George Ainsli describes recent attempts of this sort in his 2011 paper

“Physiologist John Eccles proposed that a non-determined, spiritual self could interact with the brain by its effect on a single, strategically placed neuron (1994), and physicist Henry Stapp suggested that chaotic systems in the brain could be sensitively dependent on a few calcium ions determining neurotransmissions (1998). Such models fail to predict a sense of responsibility, as opposed to happenstance…” (Free Will' as Recursive Self-Prediction: Does a Deterministic Mechanism Reduce Responsibility?)

As a Materialistic theory, Ainslie explains that this sort of model fails to match our subjective experience of agency. We don’t really feel like our decisions are made by random particle positions, rather by higher-level cognitive processes. It's also hard to imagine how a model based on randomness could be compatible with Jewish Thought.

On the other hand, if we return to our Dualistic Model, we could view this as a modern alternative to Descartes’ Perrenial Gland i.e. that a spiritual soul controls the brain through quantum fluctuations. That's a viable theory, but it isn't the Materialistic one we're currently looking for.

A Compatibilist Model

The Compatibilist approach is that the world is completely deterministic, but Free Will still exists. How can this be? Take, for example, Daniel Dennet's Compatibilist argument that causation happens at the physical-level while Free Will happens at completely different level of abstraction:

There’s plenty of space for free will: determinism and free will are not incompatible at all. The problem is that philosophers have a very simplistic idea of causation. They think that if you give the lowest-level atomic explanation, then you have given a complete account of the causation: that’s all the causation there is. In fact, that isn’t even causation in an interesting sense. The problem with that is that it ignores all of the higher-level forms of causation which are just as real and just as important. Suppose you had a complete atom-by-atom history of every giraffe that ever lived, and every giraffe ancestor that ever lived. You wouldn’t have an answer to the question of why they have long necks. There is indeed a causal explanation, but it’s lost in those details. You have to go to a different level in order to explain why the giraffe developed its long neck. That’s the notion of causation that matters for free will...If I want to know why you pulled the trigger, I won’t learn that by having an atom-by-atom account of what went on in your brain. I’d have to go to a higher level: I’d have to go to the intentional stance in psychology.

This is an interesting argument, but it seems like Dennet is redefining Free Will to something other than the classic definition. Here, the subject considered the situation, made a choice freely, and yet due to the clockwork-like function of the brain, he couldn't have come to any other choice. This redefinition of Free Will certainly appeals to my inner-Talmudist, but is it really compatible with a Jewish outlook?

Ainslie, in the paper,  mentioned above, elaborates on this approach with what he calls the "Intertemporal Bargaining Model", a decision making algorithm based on the step by step consideration weighing of different options and their diminishing returns. He claims that this deterministic process constitutes actual Agency.

“Strictly speaking, a self united by intertemporal bargaining is never an unmoved mover; and yet it is an emergent phenomenon. The experience of free will is not an empty perception, or illusion. If we are dominated by any illusion it is one that wealso inherited from Descartes, that in contrast to the body, “the mind is entirely indivisible” (quoted in Klein, 1970, p. 346). A person who is a population of partially conflicting interests in a limited warfare relationship is continually engaged in negotiation. Her choice is based only on incentives, but these incentives include the effect she expects to have on her own future motivational states, an expectation that arises and shifts freshly as she tries out ways of framing her choice. Her assessment of these incentives, knowing that the resulting conclusions will be fed back as further incentives, or even knowing that they might be so fed back, should create both genuine surprise and an accurate sense of personal initiative.“

Ainslie’s Compatiblist argument is interesting but, even if you're convinced that his algorithm constitutes Free Will, I'm not sure it's a definition of free will that Judaism would accept. Ultimately, Ainsli claims, our decisions are our own, but they are deterministic and given our particular circumstances in all their details, we could not have chosen otherwise.

The Search Continues

Anyway, to sum up, we've covered some interesting ideas from the Academy on the Problem of Free Will and Determinism. We haven't reached a satisfying Materialistic Solution to the problem but we did find an variant on Descartes' idea based on Quantum Physics. To be continued...

I'll probably make one or two more posts on the topic and hopefully offer some more viable(though unverified) options, this in the spirit of my recent resolution, in honor of Rav Aharon Lichtenstein zt"l, to post more original material on this blog.

Let's wrap things up with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in a lecture where he discusses the importance of getting Free Will right.

On Sartre and the Rambam

Jean-Paul Sartre

I recently listened to a lecture by Professor Frank Furedi on prominent Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre(1905-1980) and the relevance of his thought today. I enjoyed it so much that I went ahead and read “Existentialism is a Humanism”, an essay based on a famous lecture by Sartre, introducing his philosophy to the broader public. As such, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on Sartre and connect it to the Rambam.

A Timeless Debate

Sartre’s thought is largely based around the idea of Human Freedom, and it’s on this topic that he clashed with many of the intelligentsia of his day. As the scientific revolution added more and more knowledge about how the world works, many thinkers felt that it was just a matter of time until Free Will was proven to be an illusion, and Human to be merely complex automatons, subject to deterministic processes. Baron Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach(1723-1789) summarizes this opposed view well before Sartre was born:

"You will say that I feel free. This is an illusion, which may be compared to that of the fly in the fable, who, upon the pole of a heavy carriage, applauded himself for directing its course. Man, who thinks himself free, is a fly who imagines he has power to move the universe, while he is himself unknowingly carried along by it."

Sartre rejected this notion that our perceived freedom of choice is a faux, and explored the implications of said free will.

“In other words, there is no determinism—man is free, man is freedom.”

Hearing about this debate, I couldn’t help thinking of the debate over Free Will in the Rambam’s time. The Rambam took issue with some Islamic thinkers of his time who opposed the notion of Human Freedom as they saw it as contradicting God's ability to know the future and therefore detracting from his Omnipotence. The Rambam even refers to this debate in his Mishna Torah(Hilchot Tshuva 5:2)

אל יעבור במחשבתך דבר זה שאומרים טיפשי האומות ורוב גולמי בני ישראל, שהקדוש ברוך הוא גוזר על האדם מתחילת ברייתו להיות צדיק או רשע.

It seems that this debate is truly a timeless one, as it continues to resonate in the popular culture of today.

Character Traits

Discussions of Free Will often focus on individual acts, such as whether a person gives in to the temptation to sin or not. Sartre, on the other hand, focuses on the larger scale implications of Freedom--the type of person we become.

“What the existentialist says is that the coward makes himself a cowardly and the hero makes himself heroic; there is always the possibility that one day the coward may no longer be cowardly and the hero may cease to be a hero.”

I expected to find the Rambam’s formulations on Free Will to be focused more on the micro-scale of whether or not one chooses to sin, perform a mitzvah (especially since it's in Hilchot Tshuva).  Instead, the Rambam also begins his discussion of Free Will by focusing on character traits(Hilchot Tshuva 5:2)

אין הדבר כן, אלא כל אדם ואדם ראוי להיות צדיק כמשה רבנו או רשע כירובעם, או חכם או סכל, או רחמן או אכזרי, או כיליי או שוע; וכן שאר כל הדעות

That said, I’ll just note, that while the Rambam accepts the concept of Human Nature(yet indicates that we can change it), Sartre takes the more extreme approach of rejecting it entirely, insisting that we are only how we choose to act.

…there is no Human Nature…Man is that which he wills himself to be…is nothing other than what he makes of himself.

Taking Human Freedom Further

So, the Rambam focuses, not merely on deeds, but on traits. Sartre takes things a step further. His concept of Radical Freedom encompasses the ability to create and define ourselves entirely. He gives the example of an artist:

“…has anyone ever blamed an artist for not following rules of painting a priori? Has anyone ever told an artist what sort of picture he should paint? It is obvious that there is no pre-defined picture to be made…”

Inventing oneself is a creative act, perhaps THE creative act. Free will is not just a question of whether we are good or bad or even just the traits we acquire. There are many paths to virtue and we have the power and creativity to craft our own path.

Sartre gives the example of one of his students who came to him for advice, whether to attempt to escape occupied France for England so that he could help fight the Nazis, or whether to stay with his widowed mother who has no one else in the world but him. Sartre tells us that both paths are valid, it is the young man’s mission to choose what life to live and what person to become.

This is a powerful message and it is one worth internalizing. As Jews, we are obligated in many mitzvot, yet much is left open to us. If our service of God ends within the 4 amot of Halacha, then our work is incomplete. Each of us must forge his own path in the service of his Maker.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Along those lines, let's wrap up with advice from Rabbi Sacks on how to choose a direction for one's life.

If you want to find your purpose in life. Think about following sentence,  Where what you want to do, meets what needs too be done.