My Comment on the NYT Free Will Article
By Daniel Miessler on October 21st, 2011: Tagged as Free Will
There was a recent article on the New York Times regarding free will. I posted it here earlier and I just finished posting a comment in the thread. It follows below:
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The author succeeds in bringing life back to the debate, but he doesn’t make any new progress. The issue, as a few commenters have touched on, is much simpler than it appears from all this handwaving.
Quite simply, somebody explain how a choice can be free if one doesn’t control the inputs to the choice. I capture this in a semi-formal argument here: http://danielmiessler.com/arguments/free_will/two_lever_argument/
Some, like Dennett, agree that we don’t have the free will described in that argument but say it doesn’t matter because we can do things like choose menu items at a restaurant, or dodge spears in the jungle. I agree, of course, and that’s all very nice, but it shouldn’t be confused with true choice.
I attempt to clearly define the difference between the two here: http://danielmiessler.com/blog/absolute-vs-practical-free-will
For those who don’t wish to follow links within comments (understandable, but regrettable) practical free will lets us make choices from within our confines of not controlling the inputs to our decisions. We don’t control our physical makeup, and we don’t have full control of our environment — hence, in order to show that we have TRUE choice we must show that we can choose OUTSIDE of those influences.
This to me requires one of two things: either 1) a completely new way of looking at how the universe works, or 2) the supernatural. I simply reject both until I see evidence, and I am stunned this isn’t the default and obvious position for anyone considering themselves to be skeptical and scientifically literate.
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A Comment from Science and Free Will | NYTimes.com
By Daniel Miessler on October 21st, 2011: Tagged as Free Will
Here’s what Gutting, commenters above, and many others are missing:Even if we assume (for the sake of argument or by actually accepting the premise) that 100% predictability is NOT inconsistent with free will, the key fact is that at no point in time is the individual able to alter the course leading to the pre-conditions that determine the decision or action in question.
Let’s say anyone who knows me well (and I myself) could predict with virtual certainty that, if I were handed a gun right now and given the option to shoot someone on the street, I would choose NOT to do so. That’s because of “the kind of person I am” (and the fact that I’m not in any altered/abnormal mental state), which some would argue means it’s still part of free will.
But “the kind of person I am” is not something over which I’ve ever had any control, and neither are any of the physical conditions (inside and outside my brain) immediately preceding and causing (determining) my decision. If you disagree, tell me at what point in time I could have asserted any control. We have the physical conditions existing immediately prior to (and causing) the decision, and those conditions were caused by the conditions immediately preceding that state, and so on all the way back to the twinkle in my father’s eye.
This commenter has it right, in my opinion. See my Two-lever argument.
Science and Free Will | NYTimes.com
By Daniel Miessler on October 21st, 2011: Tagged as Free Will
The experiments show that, prior to the moment of conscious choice, there are correlated brain events that allow scientists to predict, with 60 to 80 percent probability, what the choice will be. Of course this might mean that the choices are partially determined by the brain events but still ultimately free. But suppose later experiments predict our choices with 100 percent probability? How could a choice be free if a scientist could predict it with certainty?
But my wife might be 100 percent certain that, given a choice between chicken livers and strip steak for dinner, I will choose steak. Does that mean that my choice isn’t free? Couldn’t she be sure that I will freely choose steak?
Perhaps, though, what’s important about the experiments is not that choices are predictable but that they are caused. How could a choice that is caused be free? Wouldn’t that mean that something made it happen? On the other hand, how could a choice that was not caused be free? If a choice has no cause at all, it is simply a random event, something that just occurred out of the blue. Why say that a choice is mine if it doesn’t arise from something occurring in my mind (or brain)? And if a choice isn’t mine, how can we say I made it?
A great piece on one of my favorite topics.
Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will | Nature News
By Daniel Miessler on October 21st, 2011: Tagged as Free Will
The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes’s outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters1. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.
“The first thought we had was ‘we have to check if this is real’,” says Haynes. “We came up with more sanity checks than I’ve ever seen in any other study before.”
The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.
As humans, we like to think that our decisions are under our conscious control — that we have free will. Philosophers have debated that concept for centuries, and now Haynes and other experimental neuroscientists are raising a new challenge. They argue that consciousness of a decision may be a mere biochemical afterthought, with no influence whatsoever on a person’s actions. According to this logic, they say, free will is an illusion. “We feel we choose, but we don’t,” says Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London.
Dawkins on Free Will and Moral Responsibility
By Daniel Miessler on September 5th, 2011: Tagged as Free Will
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.
One Person Who “Gets” Free Will In the Exact Same Way That I Do is Sam Harris
By Daniel Miessler on August 27th, 2011: Tagged as Free Will
The problem is that no account of causality leaves room for free will — thoughts, moods, and desires of every sort simply spring into view — and move us, or fail to move us, for reasons that are, from a subjective point of view, perfectly inscrutable. Why did I use the term “inscrutable” in the previous sentence? I must confess that I do not know. Was I free to do otherwise? What could such a claim possibly mean? Why, after all, didn’t the word “opaque” come to mind? Well, it just didn’t — and now that it vies for a place on the page, I find that I am still partial to my original choice. Am I free with respect to this preference? Am I free to feel that “opaque” is the better word, when I just do not feel that it is the better word? Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.
There is a distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, of course, but it does nothing to support the common idea of free will (nor does it depend upon it). The former are associated with felt intentions (desires, goals, expectations, etc.) while the latter are not. All of the conventional distinctions we like to make between degrees of intent — from the bizarre neurological complaint of alien hand syndrome to the premeditated actions of a sniper — can be maintained: for they simply describe what else was arising in the mind at the time an action occurred. A voluntary action is accompanied by the felt intention to carry it out, while an involuntary action isn’t. Where our intentions themselves come from, however, and what determines their character in every instant, remains perfectly mysterious in subjective terms. Our sense of free will arises from a failure to appreciate this fact: we do not know what we will intend to do until the intention itself arises. To see this is to realize that you are not the author of your thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose. This insight does not make social and political freedom any less important, however. The freedom to do what one intends, and not to do otherwise, is no less valuable than it ever was.
While all of this can sound very abstract, it is important to realize that the question of free will is no mere curio of philosophy seminars. A belief in free will underwrites both the religious notion of “sin” and our enduring commitment to retributive justice. The Supreme Court has called free will a “universal and persistent” foundation for our system of law, distinct from “a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system” (United States v. Grayson, 1978). Any scientific developments that threatened our notion of free will would seem to put the ethics of punishing people for their bad behavior in question.
This is *precisely* what I argued in Absolute vs. Practical Free Will..
Free Will (And Why You Still Don’t Have It) : Sam Harris
By Daniel Miessler on June 8th, 2011: Tagged as Free Will | Philosophy
The problem with compatibilism, as I see it, is that it tends to ignore that people’s moral intuitions are driven by a deeper, metaphysical notion of free will. That is, the free will that people presume for themselves and readily attribute to others (whether or not this freedom is, in Dennett’s sense, “worth wanting”) is a freedom that slips the influence of impersonal, background causes. The moment you show that such causes are effective—as any detailed account of the neurophysiology of human thought and behavior would— proponents of free will can no longer locate a plausible hook upon which to hang their notions of moral responsibility. The neuroscientists Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen make this same point:
Most people’s view of the mind is implicitly dualist and libertarian and not materialist and compatibilist . . . [I]ntuitive free will is libertarian, not compatibilist. That is, it requires the rejection of determinism and an implicit commitment to some kind of magical mental causation . . . contrary to legal and philosophical orthodoxy, determinism really does threaten free will and responsibility as we intuitively understand them (Greene J & J. Cohen. 2004).
Another post by Sam Harris on free will–this one a response to his previous one that caused a wave of hate mail.
It’s stunning to me how forcefully people reject reality just because they dislike its appearance.
Morality Without “Free Will” : Sam Harris
By Daniel Miessler on June 8th, 2011: Tagged as Free Will | Philosophy
We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment. While we continually notice changes in our experience—in thought, mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are utterly unaware of the neural events that produce these changes. In fact, by merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are often more aware of your internal states and motivations than you are. And yet most of us still feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.
The problem is that no account of causality leaves room for free will—thoughts, moods, and desires of every sort simply spring into view—and move us, or fail to move us, for reasons that are, from a subjective point of view, perfectly inscrutable. Why did I use the term “inscrutable” in the previous sentence? I must confess that I do not know. Was I free to do otherwise? What could such a claim possibly mean? Why, after all, didn’t the word “opaque” come to mind? Well, it just didn’t—and now that it vies for a place on the page, I find that I am still partial to my original choice. Am I free with respect to this preference? Am I free to feel that “opaque” is the better word, when I just do not feel that it is the better word? Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.
The topic of free will is one of great interest to me, so it was pleasantly surprising to discover earlier this year, while reading The Moral Landscape that Sam Harris shares my views on the subject almost perfectly.
It’s important to note that I’ve been following him for many years now but without having heard anything about his position on this. So for his views to so tightly mesh with mine was both stunning as well as vindicating. I openly admit that I rest strongly in the realm of bias here at this point, as I don’t see how both of us–me a decently smart guy who’s read and thought a lot, and Sam Harris the neuroscientist with a philosophy degree from Stanford–can be wrong about this.
Or, to be more accurate, I don’t see how either of our arguments can be wrong, but both of us having come to the same conclusion (with countless others as well, of course) it just seems that much more unlikely.
If you have even a passing interest in this topic, I suggest you read this blog entry of his, which is actually a restatement of his section on free will in the book.
I look forward to comments.
Our Position on Free Will Shapes Our Politics
By Daniel Miessler on March 12th, 2011: Tagged as Free Will | Politics

Many believe the discussion of free will is pointless. This is usually because one believes it’s been settled (for the religious who believe God gave it to us) or because one believes it doesn’t matter (for the secular types who believe there is no practical benefit to having the discussion).
I will attempt to convince the second group that their position of apathy is incorrect.
The Concept of “Deserving”
It’s impossible to deserve anything unless there is free will. If there is no free will then nobody deserves praise for becoming rich after years of hard work. Similarly, nobody deserves to be looked down upon for failing to succeed in life.
It is nearly impossible to overstate how important this point is.
It’s true that even those who do believe in free will give room for difficult circumstances, but ultimately they believe that free will allows one to overcome (if they care enough to do so). This places blame and praise right back onto the individual in question.
Society respects the rich and looks down on the poor because we believe, quite simply, that people have the option to go against the grain of whatever life they’ve been handed. Those born into highly prosperous and educated families could end up squandering their good fortune away, and those born in urban welfare homes to single a single mom could end up going to Harvard.
If they choose to.
This belief has subtle but violent repercussions. It means that when that boy from the ghetto doesn’t make it out, he didn’t want it enough. It was his choice, and he didn’t put the work in.
This knight’s move constitutes nothing less than justification for looking down on those that don’t succeed. If you don’t think that’s significant, expand the concept out to groups of people, parts of town, and to entire nations.
The Link to Compassion
Imagine the local homeless person asking for a dollar on the street corner. I know countless deeply religious people who make it a rule to never give these people money. It is my belief that this is because they hold in their minds the conviction that this person chose to fail, and that they are basically refuse that will benefit from their monthly tithing through the church.
They don’t see someone who needs help; they see someone who has failed to help himself.
I, on the other hand, see a person who did not have advantages. Now, who do you think is more likely to be compassionate: the person who believes that he could have willed himself out of his situation, or the person who believes he was unfortunate and unable to escape?
That’s the key: compassion goes down the more you believe the person in the position deserves what they are experiencing. As such, those who believe in free will are naturally prone to be less compassionate.
Politics
This concept permeates the various political platforms. If you permit me the simplification, the right believes strongly in free will and therefore has far less sympathy for those who don’t achieve. The left believes far more in circumstances and variables, and therefore is more sympathetic to those who don’t succeed.
This translates directly to taxation as well. If you “deserve” your money, you shouldn’t have it taken from you. If you were lucky to get it then it should be spread to those who need it. Again, the sides on this debate fall right down the line of left and right.
Summary
No single question matters more in terms of human morality than that of whether not we have free will. To dodge this debate in the name of practicality is intellectual cowardice at this point in our civilization.
Put thought into and determine your position on this topic, and make the effort to ensure that your political views are consistent with it. ::