The Two-Lever Argument Against Free Will

By Daniel Miessler on July 30th, 2010: Tagged as Free Will | Philosophy

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  • jasonpowell

    What I most enjoy thinking about when you write these articles is that you cannot control your writing them nor can your readers decide whether or not to believe them.

    • http://danielmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

      Indeed, but that’s no reason to stop.

  • http://danielmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

    Indeed. Luckily the value I'm adding is based on the truth of the
    content and not on my ability to control it being placed here.

    –
    Daniel R. Miessler
    W: http://danielmiessler.com
    E: daniel@danielmiessler.com
    P: 0x4048712D

    • Geonmaster

      Hye Dan, You have a new reader here. Blair’s the name. 1. If you have no control your claim of any truth is vacuous. If you know anything real and are not a deterministic biological automaton, then you should know that absolute truth cannot be finitely defined, at least not in boolean logical terms. 2. Who says, “consciousness–since it does not offer the ability to control the previous state of the universe or its laws–offers no escape either–despite strong instinctual feelings to the contrary.”???

      These are just an opinions. There are other ideas about the way the universe might operate. Even fantasy ideas like a Matrix-like world. Although unprovable to us, such thought experiments about alternative metaphysical origins to our universe prove that you cannot make such absolutist claims about the nature of consciousness.

      Besides, surely the instinctual feelings count for something. Furthermore, the transitions of state of the universe are fairly convincingly proven to be non-deterministic. They have no identifiable physical cause, and the various theorems derived from simple postulates due to experimental quantum mechanics bear this out (Kochen-Specker, EPR, Conway-Kochen, etc). Does it matter that we cannot build a model for free will out of such results? No. How could we? They are “no go” theorems. They can only tell us that the uncaused events that permeate our universe at almost every point in spacetime, are not physically causal. The “state transitions” are physical only in that we can compute the probabilities.

      Even if I’m a subscriber to strict physicalism, I still cannot prove that consciousness is a purely physical process. We now so little about metaphysics that the belief or axiom of physicalism (materialism or any variety) cannot be easily defended. So I find such pronouncements about the way things are re: free will,l or consciousness etc, to be extremely unhelpful. They betray a great prejudice in favour of scientific materialism.

      It’s hard to answer all your assertions in a blog comment, so I’d be happy to smooth out any incoherence in these comments at length elsewhere is possible.

      • http://danielmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

        I would say you should stop looking for a way to prove something is purely physical and instead look for evidence of why that is not the case. Physical laws are the default, i.e. atoms crashing into each other and reacting in prescribed ways. Given that this model doesn’t leave room for free will I ask you how you would create such room.

        As for our “feeling” of free will, or choice, being evidence of something, I don’t think you actually believe that. Many “feel” with absolute certainty that God exists, or that there are spirits in a haunted house. This is no different.

        The burden is on the believer in any of these things–including free will–to show why they are not simply illusions.

        • http://twitter.com/Glenn451 Glenn Davis

          “Furthermore, the transitions of state of the universe are fairly convincingly proven to be non-deterministic.”

          I think you missed this point. There’s no evidence on state changes (moment to moment shift) or how they come about. We don’t understand the dimensionality of time well enough to make a statement on free will with any conviction yet.

          It’s possible to construct a system in which we perceive the state changes happening one way, and they actually happen in the reverse order. This theoretical model would produce “remembered” past events, and an unknown future, when in reality it is what we perceive to be the future determining what we perceive as the past.

          It’s an interesting model that isn’t necessarily true, but allowed by physical laws. You are correct that the burden of proof lies with the person making the claim, but your blog post barely did anything except postulate a closed system that didn’t allow free will by definition of its collective parts. While that system may very well be how the universe works, it doesn’t prove it one way or another.

          On top of that, you show very little understanding of the role consciousness plays in all of this. The most important thing we have learned from quantum mechanics so far (at least from a free will perspective) is that an observed state is different than an unobserved one. If an observing consciousness can enact physical change, then the two-level argument needs to be scrapped and/or reexamined.

        • Mecanoworld

          i d say that quantum mechanics and thw Chaow mathematicw, leave a lot of room for free will.

          • http://danielmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

            A lack of predictability != the ability to influence outcomes.

          • Conni

            “A lack of predictability != the ability to influence outcomes. “

            No – just the lack of certainty to what effect the outcome is influenced. It will still be different from the result without your action, just not neccessarily in the way you wanted. Free will and our inability to predict results are two separate problems.

  • bob

    Why do you think there can't be other levers? For instance, a “current state” lever that would effect the state of the universe at the instant i make a choice? Your argument, if i'm understanding it, which i'm not, is based on your imposing arbitrary constraints on an open question. In other words you are influencing the universe prior to making a decision.

  • cooperati

    The simple boundary between the clockwork pre-deterministic style of understanding freewill and absolute choice is where you draw the line in the subject; If you are talking about the Universe, you are including all variables, and excluding none, whereas if you are talking about a person, you are talking about a finite system with finite variables, thus randomness decreases and predictability increases at some point.

    If you are talking about all variables, you can say the Universe is, or the Universe was. But if you are talking about Fred, you can say Fred was going to choose to pull the lever, and just as he placed his hand on it, a comet smote him from existence.

    The variables in Fred's case was every atom and photon that came into contact with Fred, but to us identified into large bulky systems we define as food, other people, and, ultimately, the comet. We eliminate, for the sake of practicality, every ton of atmosphere he used, the vector of his birth being perpendicular to his mother's pelvis, the fact that the comet existed untouched since the formation of the rest of the Universe, and all things our minds cannot encompass in all the variables than deny Fred's self-determinism, or the fact that Fred is a cog in the Universal process towards Inertia, where every reaction that could every have been had been, and all matter is cosmic oatmeal.

    Instead, we call the person Fred, and the lever such, and so the comet what it is, separate and apart from each other prior to the time they came into contact. Different systems that at different times were elsewhere, being differently, not Part-Of-The-Universe-Fred and Part-Of-the-Universe-Comet.

    Yes, random variables exist. In fact, random variables exist INFINITELY. They impede choice and free will, but do not destroy it. Alternatively, they also create choice and free will, defining for us what we can see as our options between left and right, pulling the lever and not, or even waiting for the comet to come get us because there is no point to a pre-determined Universe, or going outside and enjoying some fresh air.

    We are clockwork mechanisms, computers, organic though we may be, designed by darwinistic selection with random interlopers, such as physics, to guide and constrain and confound our evolution, and even our daily activities and nocturnal fantasies. We have a set number of choices in our lives, and none beyond what is handed to us from the time of our birth.

    It has been posited that since we cannot escape gravity, we do not have free choice.

    Whatever.

    :)

    -=T=-

  • ciao

    since consciousness is how we interpret the universe and we are reacting to things that have already happened, don't we in turn create the past configuration? We act in a universe of our own making and so act with free will. And precisely because the universe is random and we can not affect future states, we are free to do anything.

  • Eznight

    I’m sorry but I have to say that you are quite a contradiction. Since you are a determinist then why do you debate believers in God? According to you, it is ineluctable for those who believe in God not to believe in God since they have no free-will. So this begs the question of, why do you think you have the ability to change their minds? Are you now postulating that you have power over the universe?

    • Dark Star

      If the universe is deterministic then he has no choice but to argue and they have no choice either. You should really think these questions through :)

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=647581878 Jacob William Hancock

      At the beginning of our universe a chain of events was set forth that would ultimately lead to Daniel Miessler writing this article. And through writing it, he changes minds, because it was written in the stuff of the big bang that those minds would be changed when they met the logic that passes through him and others like him. So there is no contradiction, only a lot more variables than you are willing or able to contend with.

  • Andrew

    Many would do well to understand this – and then to understand that it is no impediment to a well enjoyed life either!

  • Ronaldanne

    the illusion of free will is good enough for me.

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  • http://twitter.com/thenicknelson Nick Nelson

    Good post Daniel; another way I like to think of it is: Imagine the universe was run again as a duplicate beside the original. You are given precisely the same genetics, upbringing, and world, with molecular accuracy. Would anything change? COULD anything change?

    So, the universe has to, and will, only turn out the way it turns out.

    (quantum style collapsible/alternate realities notwithstanding)

    • Catherine

      This also has me wondering what the implications of the lack of free will are to Hugh Everett’s “Many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics, since that theory hinged upon the humans’ “decisions” to do or not do to something.

  • http://twitter.com/WilliamJansen WilliamJansen

    Well-stated and credible argument. Now what do I do?

  • http://twitter.com/WilliamJansen WilliamJansen

    Well-stated and credible argument. Now what do I do?

    • spDuchamp

      If you are hungry, eat. If you are tired, sleep.

      • caribou

        Is that you, Suzuki Roshi?!

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  • http://www.facebook.com/justin.roffey Justin Roffey

    love the article, seeing everything conveyed in terms of science and leaving out the supernatural to me makes everything more beautiful

  • Ansaytor

    Interesting, however, I don’t know what ‘control over’ really means, and I’m not sure you do either. If you insert, ‘influence on’ in place of ‘control over’ then the outcomes are different. I think that is interesting.

  • A.E

    Your two lever argument is probably true, but most certainly incomplete. For example: there are multiple perfectly possible outcomes of most given states, and those outcomes are going to be distributed among those possible outcomes when the process is multiplied, as proven by quantum physics. The key here is to see that, when you introduce the concept of population, may it be a population of zebras or hydrogen nuclei, the actions of a individual proton is not as predetermined  as the behavior of a population of protons in a scientific experiment. The point being, there are always multiple possible outcomes of any given state, that do not in any way, brake the laws of physics. It doesn’t prove “free will”, but it falsifies your two-lever argument.

  • nothanks

    eeeeeeeeehhhhhhhh wrong. There is always choice. The concept of free will is not an infinite absolute. According to this argument there is no free will for anyone, with the possible exception of a divine creator. (please keep in mind I said POSSIBLE to prevent all of you atheists out there from getting off topic) Therefore according to beautifully written piece of drivel anything I do is only the outcome of a set of pre-existing conditions and I have no control whatsoever over my own actions. This kind of thinking is dangerous. When people give up personal responsibility for what they do you end up with stuff like concentration camps, hundreds of years of slavery, genocide, and a religious war older than recorded human history. Increasing happiness and reducing suffering? More like propagating one of the worst traits of human society. Go back and re-read this and try to understand it for the bullshit copout that it really is. What a jackass. This kind of idiot is what is holding back the rest of the human race. I hope that for yourself first and the rest of us you will go back and remove this post before anybody else sees it and gets taken in by it. I thought you liked to think for yourself. This is disgusting.

  • Glenn Sogge

    “Therefore, the arrow never hits the target.” ~ Zeno

  • JJ

    Daniel: There are so many flaws in your argument. All based in mental ignorance. The nature of the mind is to create the illusion of control. You attempt to do this by inventing a false dichotomy and then sitting back satisfied that you have justified your ignorance. This is the mind’s way of creating a sense of safety and control over its imagined experience.

    What you are missing: 1. You have no idea what the boundaries of “the universe” are. 2. You have no idea what “consciousness” is. 3. You have no idea what the “physical universe” is.

    You are basically arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. And so proud to have figured it out!. What a joke.

    • http://danielmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

      Please find and read books.

      • JJ

        Yes, exactly! Your silly arguments are only useful in the imaginary world of mental masturbations cataloged in books.

  • CarlM

    I’m astonished that I didn’t reply to this when you first posted it. We must have already had the discussion and I didn’t feel that I had anything further to add.

    For the record, I don’t know if there is free will or not (it would not surprise me if the answer depended on the definition of “free will”), but I find your argument against it to be somewhat lacking. You are simply ASSERTING that the laws of the universe do not allow consciousness to somehow make (free) choices. I have no idea HOW consciousness could do so, but I don’t think that simply asserting that it can’t is much of an argument that it can’t.

    In any case, if there is free will, I would answer your “simple question” with “at the moment I became a conscious creature”. This is certainly something that happened between the moment of my conception and now. I would argue that IF there is such a thing as free will, it is tied to consciousness, so the onset of consciousness seems to me to be an important dividing line.

    • http://danielmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

      Yes, and IF there is such a thing as a divine Christian creator who imbued us with free will then that is the moment we achieved it.

      I agree in both cases.

      • CarlM

        I’m not sure I understand your point. Are you suggesting that the belief in the existence of consciousness is equivalent somehow to the belief in a divine Christian creator? I’m not making any reference to the divine here. You asserted in your post that “Nothing changed” and I’m pointing out something that changed — not just ANY something, but something that seems to me to be clearly tied to the existence of (or at the very least the PERCEPTION of) free will. I have NO idea how consciousness and self-awareness arise from the molecules floating around in space, but there’s no question in my mind that they do arise. I can’t even imagine someone claiming that consciousness is an illusion (I’d have to hear their justification, but I’d almost certainly accuse them of making a semantic argument .. and you know how much I love semantic arguments). I can grasp the idea that free will may be an illusion and I can accept that this is more than a semantic argument. I understand that our perceptions of the world are limited and sometimes flawed. I understand that we are wired to preferentially perceive the world in certain ways and this forms the basis for many illusions (such as the optical illusions we are all familiar with). Just as with the emergence of consciousness (which I do not ascribe to the divine), I have no idea how free will might emerge (or even exist at all), but this does not change my opinion that in your argument here you are essentially assuming the conclusion (perhaps in a roundabout way).

        As I see it, your argument seems to be:

        (1) The laws of physics do not permit free will to exist. (2) Therefore, there is no such thing as free will.

        It seems to me that your step (1) needs some additional justification.

        • http://danielmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

          I can’t even imagine someone claiming that consciousness is an illusion (I’d have to hear their justification, but I’d almost certainly accuse them of making a semantic argument.

          I absolutely do not claim that consciousness is an illusion. I also don’t claim that divine experiences are an illusion either. People definitely perceive them and are affected by them. There is no doubt that consciousness is something, and that it’s real. We agree there.

          My problem is with jumping from that to consciousness somehow allowing us to act outside of known physics.

          I agree with you that physics MAY allow for consciousness to provide free will — somehow — but to me that is precisely the same as saying that magic MAY keep the planets in place. I cannot disprove either but both require a massive change in how we understand the universe today.

  • http://www.facebook.com/JamesCole78 James Cole

    But I think the difficulty most people have with this is in understanding that model of the universe, and in understanding how their “mental life” can be incorporated into such a model of the universe. I think the currently available ways for thinking about thinking fundamentally involve a concept of choice. We need better alternatives to these.

  • Richard

    By free will, most people are refering to exercising free will in the sense that it affects themselves, or other people directly -not neccessarily the entire universe. If I decide to exercise my will to punch you on the nose, for example, it will most certainly affect your nose and my fist, but not be of any consequence to the universe as a whole. Everybody understands that. So what point are you trying to make???

  • Edoblaauw1

    I wonder why you write this if you think its true, to make people depressive? To make people fatalistic? Or to just say the truth (according to you), to say the truth? What’s the joy in telling a ugly girl according to you that she’s ugly. A lot of people need the feeling of in control, because otherwise they aren’t. But you can’t do anything about writing this so I’m sorry, oh wait I’m not, i can’t do anything about this text myself. Yeeah! let’s get apathetic and not feel a single thing

  • dubbleplusgood

    “So let it be written, so let it be done.” “God’s plan” “The Creator of all things”

    The religious love saying these things, never once realizing free will cannot exist if any of them were true.

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  • http://www.marketmentat.com GT

    This seems to stem from the same conceit as Gates’ “640kB of RAM will always be enough” and Tom Watson’s “The world has a market for maybe five computers”: it takes the present state of knowledge as both fixed and complete.

    I am not a religious type – not by a very very VERY long shot: anyone who makes reference to some foreskin-mutilation pact between a goatherd and an Invisible Sky Wizard will get short shrift from me.

    That said, the constant requirements for science to back away from hubristic claims (usually involving EXTENDING the realm of things that are possible) makes it clear that the amount of stuff we don’t know we don’t know (Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”) may well be larger than the stuff we think we know AND the stuff we know we don’t know.

    Think of a tesseract – the projection in R3 of a four-dimensional hypercube; there is a non-zero probability that the whole of R4 as we experience it, is simply the projection of a many-dimensioned hypersurface, only some of which is experienced directly by us – there may have been no evolutionary net benefit to developing sensitivities to dimensions other than R3 (and weak 4th); just as a flatbed scanner cannot scan depth.

    That does not mean that everything other than R4 is unimportant; the fact that at some stage the process of evolution decided ‘R5+’ were not important, does not make it so – by severely penalising attributes that are counterproductive in R4, evolution may be choosing a series of suboptima… dooming evolution to choosing successive local maxima that are conditioned on R3-survivability at the expense of a (perhaps costly) multi-generational planned trip towards a higher-performance stable manifold.

    A real world example suffices: reductions in US military spending will not occur until they are unavoidable, whereas a much higher productive medium-run maximand could be had by diverting one-thousandth of US military expenditure into advanced nano-assembly and AI research.

    It’s calculus of variations and optimal control all the way down… but it takes place under conditions of grave uncertainty and with constraints that we don’t fully understand.

  • farmpuma

    I walk into my house/room and turn on the air conditioner. I have chosen to make my local part of the universe colder, because I wanted it to be colder.

    • http://danielmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

      Excellent input. You should publish this.

      Oh, one more thing…did you read the article?

      • JJ

        Daniel: Good to hear you reveal your rationale for coming up with this nonsense. I hope it works out for you.

        And people should know that you attempt to block commenters who disagree with you, like me. Sorry, that didn’t work out for you.

        • http://danielmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

          Who’s blocking commenters? Not me.

          Go read the comments that are all over the site and ask yourself if I’m the censoring type.

        • CarlM

          As someone who usually only posts on Daniel’s blog when I disagree with him, I will attest that he does not block commenters who disagree with him. I’d also point out that your earlier post is here (together with your reply to his reply). That seems to argue against your point here (of course THIS post of yours is here too).

          That said, JJ, you might take that big chip off your shoulder. I don’t know what’s got you so antagonistic, but you might discover that arguments that contain unnecessarily insulting language are taken much less seriously than arguments that are otherwise equivalent but are politely phrased. There is such a thing as respectful disagreement. (You can look for example at my various posts on this thread.)

      • CarlM

        Daniel, his comment is not as simplistic as you imply. We base our science on empirical data. Of course this leads us astray sometimes, but he’s providing a bit of empirical data:

        He wanted his house/room colder, and he made the choice to turn on the air conditioner.

        The argument is about to whether he had a choice to make that choice. I think it’s fair to define free will as the ability to make choices that you WANT to make. Certainly, if it is defined this way, then he has provided empirical evidence of it’s existence (let’s call it one data point). Probably if it is defined in this way, you’d not even argue about whether it exists.

        The argument you would make (which you didn’t explicitly make anywhere on this page and you’re assuming that all participants in this discussion are aware of the arguments against free will) is that while it’s true that you can make decisions that you WANT to make, it is also true that you can’t choose what decisions you WANT to make. They are the consequence of the state of the universe (your past history, your body make-up, your environment). So you would say that he WANTED the room to be colder because he knows that he is more comfortable in a colder room (based on his personal preferences built from a lifetime of experience). You’d say that he had no more choice to WANT the room to be colder than a tree has about probing the soil with its roots in search of water.

        It may be that he simply chooses to define free will as the ability to make choices that he WANTS to make. If so, then his example is a good one.

  • Bertrand Russell

    At what point did every molecule of your being stop being 100% outside of your control? At what point between you not existing and you being an adult did your decision-making process inject itself in the middle of natural, causal interactions that were taking place before you were born? The answer is never.

    Bald Man Fallacy, the Fallacy of the Heap and the Sorites Fallacy

    • http://danielmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

      This is not a heap fallacy because this is not predicated on the ambiguous label used for something, like “tall” or “heap”, which are blurry.

      This is instead based on the very simple concept of things happening outside of ones control, and it being up to the believer to show how they’re getting around that.

      • Betrand Russell

        Oops…you’re right! Wrong Fallacy. Okay, but there’s definitely a fallacy of composition. We are NOT molecules/atoms! We CAN be free when are parts are not free. Plus, 98 percent of the atoms in the body are replaced yearly. Case closed! Okay, maybe not, but please watch Daniel Dennet give lecture on Free Will at Caltech http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrCZYDm5D8M&t=25m20s to see how evolution is the answer to understanding free will, not physics.

  • Ludwig Wittgenstein

    “Both parts are logically and practically flawed, partly from abuse of language that led some 20th-century philosophers to call free will a “pseudo-problem,” and partly from claims to knowledge that are based on faulty evidence. We shall consider the evidence and show how to detect and correct errors in the reasoning.”

    informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html

  • Duchamp

    We have some sense that a choice is made in an instant and the history encoded in our brains, the psychological biases, and physiological affects all appear quite hidden to us from moment to moment, hence the emergent appearance of free will.

    While I do not have free will at the cusp of a hypothetical transition from one state of the universe to the next, I am able to observe to a limited degree the effects of actions (both external actions and internal reflection) and there is a feedback loop that conditions future actions. We are also able to infer and make reasonable assumptions of consequences, but again, that interpretation would be coloured by all our baises and influences that have been out of our control and perhaps not perceptible. All these interconnected moments of tight external and internal feedback loops flow to make a very rich experience that seems a lot like the free will, without ever “escaping” from the interconnected causal reality in which we exist.

    I see no problem at all in the illusion of free will, and somewhat paradoxically, it feels empowering to understand it as an illusion… but then that’s my bias.

  • Kimball

    Hell Yeah!

  • Philosophical Zombie

    Hard determinism actually turns out to be a form of compatibilism. Therefore, even you must believe some human actions are free!

    www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/koonsj/papers/Compatibilism.pdf

  • Ashwin Mohan

    elegant, simple and sobering. Thanks


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