Free Will

Or Cause and Effect?

This is a response to a forthright assertion by Dr Sam Harris that he has no free will, i.e. that he is a completely determined machine. The assertion was made in an interview with Lex Fieldman on the 21st of May 2021. It can be listened to during the second hour of the three-hour interview here: -

This is the way he put it:-

“I didn't make myself…I didn't make my genes, I'm exactly the machine I am right now through no fault of my own … I get no credit and I get no blame for the genetics and the environmental influences here, and yet those are the only things that could contrive to produce my next thought or impulse or moment of behaviour.”

I am sure Dr. Harris knows what he’s talking about and is sincere - but I am also sure he is wrong. In addition to his genes and his environment, there is a third factor that makes Sam Harris what he is: his free will.  Because, unless he is a different species to me and you and the rest of homo sapiens, or has some sort of brain damage, Sam plays it again only if he chooses to – he is not bound to play what Rick or the big kahuna or the big bang and its effects demand, because he freely chooses how his genes and environment affect his thoughts and actions. (Strictly speaking the “freely” is redundant - there is no such thing as an un-free choice).  Sam’s choices may not constitute the free will that Sam is convinced he doesn’t have; but what he has is real freedom to make real choices that contribute the most critical dimension to the machine that will produce his next thought or impulse or moment of behaviour – that could have been otherwise. Both that next thought and the alternative thought it could have been would have premises supplied by his genes and environment, it’s not as if Sam could choose to sing a Swahili secret fertility song; but at any given moment there are numerous possible thoughts that he could choose - in a manner I will get to. Sam disagrees:-

“There is no description of any conceptualisation of causes that precedes my conscious experience that sounds like what people think they have when they think they could have done otherwise, and that they really [are a] conscious agent [that] is really in charge, right?

Right. That is what my free will implies: that I could have thought and acted otherwise because I had conscious agency.  My free will doesn’t precede my conscious experiences - my capacity to choose precedes my conscious experiences, but my actual choices obviously occur once I’m conscious.  I wake up and automatically see, hear, taste, smell or feel sensations that are automatically integrated into percepts in my mind; then I choose to think conceptually (in a manner denied to non-human animals) - unless I don’t. Once I have chosen to think, I may choose to act as my thought A. directs, or redirect my thoughts and act as thought B. directs.

Sam explains why he thinks I have no such freedom:-

“Like, if you don't know what you're going to think next, right, and you can't help but think it, take those two premises on board, you don't know what it's going to be, [and] you can't stop it from coming, and … you can't stop yourself from fully living out its behavioural or emotional consequences.”

 I take Sam’s two premises X and Z, and insert a Y factor in between that makes all the difference – I will get to how that works. I obviously can’t know what I’m going to think next because if I knew it I would have already thought it. Sam presumes that because he can’t find any Y factor between that X state and his next thought, it must have been determined by“genetics and the environmental influences”. And those genetics and the environmental influences were presumably caused by preceding genetic and environmental influences, and those by a line of causes and effects that extends all the way back to the big bang.  How does Sam know this? He says that if my thought is not determined or random there’s nothing else it can be, but that’s just his assertion. Why can’t there be an observable Y factor that decides amongst all the genetics and environmental influences available to my mind? I submit that there is, but before I identify how the Y factor works, it is necessary to clarify how the law of cause and effect works.  

CAUSE AND EFFECT AND FREE WILL

Sam says:-

“If the laws of nature don’t strike most of us as incompatible with free will, that is because we have not imagined how human behavior would appear if all cause-and-effect relationships were understood. “
[Harris, Sam. Free Will (p. 11). Free Press. Kindle Edition.]

I disagree. Firstly, there is a common misconception about the law of cause and effect that has to be dispensed with. Using the classic billiard table to illustrate, a thrust from a cue causes the effect of a billiard ball rolling to hit another ball, which causes the effect of that ball rolling to hit another ball, which causes the effect of that ball rolling etcetera. The misconception is to think of this process as one motion causing another motion, as Dr. Leonard Peikoff explains:-

“Since the Renaissance, it has been common for philosophers to speak as though actions directly cause other actions, bypassing entities altogether. For example, the motion of one billiard ball striking a second is commonly said to be the cause of the motion of the second, the implication being that we can dispense with the balls; motions by themselves become the cause of other motions. This idea is senseless. Motions do not act, they are actions. It is entities which act - and cause. Speaking literally, it is not the motion of a billiard ball which produces effects, it is the billiard ball, the entity, which does so by a certain means. If one doubts this, one need merely substitute an egg or soap bubble with the same velocity for the billiard ball; The effect will be quite different.”
[Objectivism the Philosophy of Ayn Rand, by Leonard Peikoff (OPAR) p.16]

A valid law of cause and effect states that:-

“Cause and effect … is a universal law of reality. Every action has a cause (the cause is the nature of the entity which acts); and the same cause leads to the same effect. (The same entity, under the same circumstances, will perform the same action.).”   
[OPAR p15]

And when it comes to human action, it is a law of cause and effect that a human entity will act according to its nature, which includes its free will. 

It is the nature of the billiard ball, specifically its smooth spherical shape, in the context of being hit while on a flat surface, to roll in the direction of the thrust.  It is the nature of bears, specifically their instincts, to hibernate in the context of winter. It is the nature of human beings, specifically their automatic temperature control mechanisms, to perspire in the context of warm temperatures. And it is in the nature of human beings, specifically their free will, to make (free) choices (in a manner to be identified).

So, since human beings have free will, my freely chosen action, let’s say to wear a white Panama hat, is no more of a violation of cause-and-effect than a bear instinctively hibernating in winter, or a billiard ball rolling in the direction it was poked on a billiard table.  All three of us, me, the bear, and the ball, are acting, given our respective contexts, in accordance with our natures.  It just so happens, however, that one of us has a nature that includes free will. Consequently, my choice (in a manner I’m getting to) to wear my white Panama could have been different, I could have worn my black bowler or no hat at all. Doesn’t that make us humans unique? Didn’t we always know that we were? Just look around!

Our free will has a specific and unique nature. It doesn’t give us the capacity to think and do anything we want to. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t determined genetic and environmental factors in play. It doesn’t account for all the differences between Sam and me, our genes and environment also account for differences. It isn’t randomness. It isn’t mystical, or a phenomenon that can only be accepted by faith. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t antecedent premises that have to be in place before a particular thought and act could occur. It doesn’t mean that a “human agency must magically rise above the plane of physical causation,” it’s not magical and it doesn’t violate a valid law of cause and effect. In what sense, then, is free will free, and how does it operate?  

Our primary free choice, according to the Objectivist theory of free will as I understand and observe it, is to think or not.  More precisely, it is to focus the mind on reality, as it is manifested to us through our senses, as remembered from previous encounters with it, and as we have previously identified it conceptually.  At nearly every conscious moment, all humans except babies and the insane can choose to focus their minds or to let them drift in the direction that the most immediate stimuli pushes them, or to actively evade reality. This free will is not like a binary on/off switch, it is more like a focus-dial that we can turn to thoughtless drift, or ratchet up to relaxed focus, or all the way up to full focus, or all the way down to a state of evasion in which reality is blurred beyond the recognition of conceptual thought. It is our chosen level of focus that determines which external and internal experiences and premises come to bear and how thoroughly they are integrated and how logically connections and integrations and judgments and conclusions are made, i.e. how rational we choose to be. We don’t have to choose to be in full focus on all of reality all the time, in fact, that would be impossible – focus takes effort and energy, which has to be conserved if not needed.  So one of our downstream choices, once we’ve made the primary choice to focus, is to choose what aspect of reality we should focus on, at what degree of concentration, and at what level of abstraction. This is the way I think my free will works; you may have a different way of identifying it; but whatever way you recognize it, it is your human capacity of free will, i.e. your choice to focus your mind, that directs your thoughts, and consequently your actions, and consequently your life. And it is this sui generis phenomenon of human nature that is your great responsibility and your competitive advantage.

When I say our choice is to think, I’m talking about purposeful, conceptual, thought (in words or images), by focusing the mind sufficiently on relevant premises in order to induce knowledge and deduce applications. This can be done fleetingly or thoroughly, superficially or profoundly, accurately or erroneously, depending on the focus level we choose to activate. Fully focused thought is not a process that can accommodate contradictions or the blanking out of inconvenient facts, a mind has to go at least partially out of focus to do that, and every individual can choose to do that at any time, or to focus his or her mind. That is the hub of his or her free will - and that is the hub of rational thought too. Freedom and reason - neither can exist without the other. It is the chosen level of focus in the present that decides which premises come to bear on the subject at hand, and it is the chosen level of focus in the past that produced the billions of thoughts that made those premises that are now available for consideration in the present. So, I submit you, me and Sam have free will at every normal moment that we are awake, in the form of a choice to focus and think - and our thoughts and actions flow from there.  If we don’t choose to think, to that extent it is only our genes and environment that have agency. But a choice not to choose to focus and think is a (free) choice too.

DETERMINISM, FREE WILL, AND PROOF

I can’t prove to Sam that I have free will.  If I say, for instance, that it was my free will that led me to be an atheist rather than a Christian as I was brought up to be, Sam would always be able to surmise that my genetically endowered temperament led me to rebel against my parents’ convictions, or that the environment of my scientific education determined my atheism, or whatever. If I say I freely chose to wear my Panama, Sam will be able to surmise that the closer proximity of my Panama than my bowler or the brightness of the day determined that I wore it. By the same token, Sam can’t prove to me that he is determined (regardless of how passionate and interminable his assertions that he is), because no matter what chain of events he lays out to account for him being the machine he is that would decide to drink a glass of water, I could always surmise choices along the way that made him that machine, and surmise that if he had chosen differently, he would be a different machine, that chose a different career and drank only whisky.  

Neither can free will be proved by logical deduction, because free will has to be assumed in any proving process.  But whereas free will is self-evident, determinism is self-refuting. This is the way Leonard Peikoff explains the situation: -

“If man's consciousness were automatic, if it did react deterministically to outer or inner forces acting upon it, then, by definition, a man would have no choice in regard to his mental content; He would accept whatever he had to accept, whatever ideas the determining forces engendered in him. In such a case, one could not prescribe methods to guide a man’s thoughts or ask him to justify his ideas; the subject of epistemology would be inapplicable. One cannot ask a person to alter or justify the mentally inescapable, any more than, in physical terms, one can ask him to alter or justify his patellar reflex. In regard to the involuntary, there is no alternative but to submit - to do what one must, whatever it is.

The concept of “volition” is one of the roots of the concept of “validation” (and of its subdivisions, such as “proof”). The validation of ideas is necessary and possible only because man's consciousness is volitional. This applies to any idea including the advocacy of free will.  To ask for its proof is to presuppose the reality of free will.

Once again, we have reached a principle at the foundation of human knowledge, a principle that anticedes argument and proof. How, then do we know that man has volition? It is a self-evident fact, available to any act of introspection.”

[OPAR pp69-70]

While I can’t prove that Sam has free will, I can point out that his theory disqualifies itself from being considered true. His theory is that every idea that he has and that I have will be determined, e.g. his anti-free-will idea and my free-will idea. So our determined ideas can’t both be right. So determined ideas can’t make any claim to truth – they are just what we have no choice about believing. We can each present our case and try to convince the other by logical argument, but that presumes we are free to choose between them, if we are both determined to believe what we believe, the argument is just a determining link in the chain of events that is going to lock us into whatever we were destined to believe.

I know I have free will by introspective observation! (In a similar way to how I know I feel joy and sadness, want to run from snarling dogs and embarrassing scenes, feel pain and prefer the taste of mango to avocado, all of which are self-evident to me even though I have no way of proving those truths to others.  My free will is self-evident, and I know that my fellow human beings have free will too, because they are of the same species as me, and because free will is the only explanation for everything I know about that species.

Consider, for instance, the differences between the lives of determined life forms and free-willed humans. Animal behaviour and lifestyles don’t keep changing like human lifestyles and behaviour does: within lifetimes, between individuals, between cultures, and throughout history.  Other animals do what their parents did - change occurring only by natural selection across millions of years. There is nothing in the lives of any other life form that is comparable to the trials and errors, creations and destructions, stupidity and genius, chopping and changing, dark ages and renaissance, wasting and accumulations of values. Ockham’s razor if nothing else suggests that humans are not simply carrying out an inevitable script, but are engaged in a much less predictable process.  Non-human animals can’t be purposely self-destructive unless their sacrifice is needed for the survival of the colony or species, evolution keeps them on a life-sustaining path; only humans purposely follow suicidal paths that contradict what evolution would mandate as their survival path. Other species rarely get their pro-life course wrong, because they can’t choose to disregard their determined means of survival – humans get it wrong all the time because they can choose not to engage their primary means of survival.  But it is the fallibility of our method that is also our great advantage because it empowers us to consider an unlimited number of ideas, which we can judge as true or false, good or bad, helpful or harmful, in our minds, rather than waiting for evolution to find useful mutations by killing billions of individuals with harmful mutations across millions of years. That is how humans keep coming up with better and better ways of living, and why, when they make serious mistakes due to lack of knowledge or lack of focus, humans can reassess and correct a mistake before it destroys the whole species (so far at least). It is this volitional process of rational thought that is our great responsibility, and our glory.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF FREE WILL.    

Consider a simplified example of a free will choice. Let's say my best friend’s wife comes to my room and kisses me seductively. My thought might be any one of these: 1. I want to have sex with her. 2. She must be driven by sexual desire for me, a gentleman wouldn’t deny her. 3. She can’t be turned on by my sex appeal, I’ve never had that effect before.  4. I wonder why she wants to have sex with me, maybe she wants to punish her husband, so she will tell him, and I’ll lose my best friend. 5. Before I have sex with her, I’d better make sure she won’t tell her husband, so I won’t lose my friend. 6. Even if she doesn’t tell her husband, I’ll know I’m deceiving him, so our friendship will never be the same. That’s at least six thoughts that my genetically made hormones and the environmental circumstances could elicit, and it would be my level of focus that would direct which thought came to mind long enough to be acted on.  That, I submit, is a simplification of the way free will works.  I choose my level of focus, which determines whether I consider only selected facts, or more facts, or the full reality of the situation, which leads to my actions, that could have been otherwise if I had chosen to focus on a different level.

Sam would not accept that I would have any such (free) choice.  Whichever one of the six thoughts I acted on (due to the level of focus I chose), he would say it was the inevitable effect of the environmental stimulus on my genetically endowered response mechanisms. If it were choice 1, he would ascribe it to a determined: kiss + hormones = sex (and I would be off the hook – no blame or shame.) If it were choice 6, he would ascribe it to: kiss + conscience = abstinence (and I would gain no credit for my willpower – no choice being involved, just a determined reflex to a determined morality.)

Sadly, my choices are more mundane and more cluttered and complicated. Nevertheless, if I introspect, I discover my mind engaged in such processes. (You will too.) I notice, for instance, what happens when I crave a diet-braking chocolate.  I am aware on the periphery of my mind as I reach for the chocolate, that I can’t afford to go full focus, because full focus would include the realization that the momentary pleasure of the chocolate will be outweighed by the later despair at breaking my diet and staying fat – only by choosing to stay out of full focus can I indulge my vice.  (I have even caught myself eating faster in order to finish the chocolate before my focusing mind stops my eating pleasure and restores my anti-chocolate pledge.)  On the other hand, by focusing, I can resist the chocolate and enjoy the satisfaction of being loyal to my diet. If I were a Mafia boss, my evasions would be much more difficult to accommodate. For example, in order to maintain discipline and ward off competitors, I would have to react with indignant fury at any sign of dishonesty or disloyalty towards me, while acting dishonestly and disloyally to my underlings and prey – which would require a lot of no-go zones in my mind to evade around lest the contradictions involved mess with my game plan.  If I go into a daydream, let’s say on a bus, I am aware that I could find something to engage my mind in a more taxing thought process, such as solving a conundrum, or committing the shops I pass to memory, but I choose not to, while choosing not or go completely out of focus, lest I miss my stop - which happens. When I get off the bus and face the downtown traffic, I choose to go full focus - or not, in which case I risk getting run down. 

Armed with a valid understanding of cause and effect and free will, all of Sam’s examples of determinism turn into examples of free -will. E.g. he claims that because we are constrained by our grammar, and different cultures have different grammar, this demonstrates that our thinking is determined by this aspect of our environment. And it is true that some cultures help our quest for truth better than others. But different cultures with different grammar e nd up with the same facts (unless one of the alleged facts is a demonstrable mistake). There are no situations in which, say, the Greek culture establishes that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides, but the Egyptian grammar determines that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the cube of the other two sides. Because if they did, the Egyptian pyramids would keep falling down, until they corrected their demonstrably mistaken geometry and grammar to help them discover reality rather than distort it. The point being that our free will doesn’t give us the freedom to contradict reality and escape the consequences. As Sir Francis Bacon put it: nature to be commanded must be obeyed.

Sam’s example of different cultures reacting differently to the idea of eating dogs, was supposed to demonstrate that we are determined by our culture’s mores, but it does no such thing.  It demonstrates that we are influenced by our culture, but that if we choose to think about it we would realize that there are different ways that dogs can be valued (e.g. as pets, or sheep herders, or as food), and that by thinking further (thanks to free will) we can re-evaluate whether an initial reaction to one of those uses is valid. If, after thinking the issue through, you decide that eating dog is bad, you have endorsed your abhorrence of seeing dog on the menu.  If you decide it is a legitimate option, you will be able to change your abhorrence – not necessarily with the snap of your fingers, or a twitch of your nose, but to expect that would be a Bewitched conception of free will.

The above examples were delivered off-the-cuff in an interview, so let’s take one more from Sam’s book.

My choice to write [this book] was unquestionably the primary cause of its coming into being. Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.* Therefore, while it is true to say that a person would have done otherwise if he had chosen to do otherwise, this does not deliver the kind of free will that most people seem to cherish—because a person’s “choices” merely appear in his mind as though sprung from the void.^ From the perspective of your conscious awareness, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world. ~
[ Harris, Sam. Free Will (pp. 34-35). Free Press. Kindle Edition.]

So * You decided it and intended it and willed it to reach your goals, but it came out of the undecided un-intended, un-willed darkness? ^ So, you chose it, but it sprung from the void? ~ So, you chose it but have no more responsibility for it than you had for being born?

This is simply the fallacy of equivocation applied to the word “choice” (Sam equivocates on the word “volition“ in the same way).  A determined choice is a contradiction in terms. Either it is a determined determination or response or reflex or reaction - or it’s a chosen or decided or intended or willed or free choice.

FREE WILL, CHARACTER AND CULTURE

For living entities with consciousness, it is their primary means of identifying reality, which is their primary means of sustaining and propagating their lives. Animals gain a lot of knowledge by way of their senses, as mediated by inherited mechanisms of their bodies and instincts. One species has an additional attribute called reason – which operates by choice. This is the rational animal’s primary tool of survival.  The rational animal doesn’t have the claws or agility of a cat, the sense of smell and teeth of a dog, the instincts and mobility of a bird, the digestive system of a cow or the resilience of a sponge; so if it doesn’t choose to use reason it doesn’t have much going for it.

To be a reliable tool of cognition the human brain must be activated purposefully. When so activated it is the most potent mechanism on earth. But a human’s choice not to activate his or her brain purposefully and logically commits that human to a suicidal course. If that default persists, the only way the defaulter can survive is by parasitizing or praying on other rational animals who have chosen to use their reason in order to produce life-sustaining values. If none of the rational animals chose to use their reason, or if they were trapped in a situation where they were not able to act on their judgements, they wouldn’t stand a chance against the other better-armed and determined species, from viruses to vipers. 

To the extent that we human beings exercise our free will, and act accordingly, we become self-made men and women. Genes and environment set the parameters, within which we can make ourselves, but success or failure within those parameters is our responsibility, and the kind of person we make ourselves into is our achievement. Someone born with above average physical and mental capacities, in North America, to rich and devoted parents, can obviously achieve much more by focusing than someone born with below average physical and mental capacities, in Africa, to poor and negligent parents, can achieve by focusing just as well. But both will live the best life possible to them by focusing on their reality, and both achieve the same moral status by so doing, and both will destroy values and themselves by not focusing on reality or by evading it.

To the extent that we choose to make the effort to be in focus, reality comes to bear on our thoughts and actions, and we succeed in dealing with it as best as our genes and environment and prior choices will allow.  To the extent that we have been focused in the past, our concepts are likely to correspond to reality, and our stored knowledge is likely to be comprehensive and integrated. To the extent that we have been out of focus, our concepts are likely to be out of sync with reality, and our stored knowledge is likely to be compromised and disintegrated.  So past choices make it easier or harder to focus on reality in the present. Consequently, individuals develop patterns of thought and traits of behaviour – indeed they make up most of what we call a person’s character.  A person’s character is an indicator of his or her future choices and behaviour – but it doesn’t determine them.  A bad character can (with difficulty) focus rationally and virtuously and act accordingly.  And a man of good character can choose to go out of focus and commit an out-of-character bad deed. The fact that these are much less common than bad people doing bad things and good people doing good things is not a negation of free will, it is a confirmation of the fact that good (full focused) choices have long-range beneficial effects including making it easier to make good choices in the future, while bad choices make it harder to make good choices in the future.

Where a group of people share similar genes (as in a family or race), or a similar environment (as within a country, culture, or sub-culture) typical patterns of thought, or traits of behaviour, can be observed.  But these traits don’t determine the character of the individuals in the family or sub-culture, each member can freely choose whether to go out of focus and be swept along by the groupthink or focus on all the facts of reality to check whether the groupthink is true (in accordance to all the facts) or flawed (not in accordance to all the facts).  Every individual in a lynch mob can choose to go out of focus and be swept along, or focus his mind sufficiently to recognise his actions as murder, and to say no.  Every individual devoted to a team effort can choose to slack off and let the team down.  And every adult member of a political party, clan, subculture, or religion, can focus, examine, and decide that what his group stands for is what he finds to be true, and so to be rejoiced, or not true, and so to be rejected - or partly true and partly untrue.   

In any culture or subculture, there can be heroic or villainous individuals who buck cultural norms, for good or ill. These heroes and villains are rare because genes and environment are powerful influences that constrain potential villains from rebelling against virtuous cultures and restrain potential heroes from rebelling against villainous cultures.  But heroes (think Ayaan Hirsi Ali) and villains (think Jeffrey Edward Epstein) are not so rare that we can’t find examples on all levels of society if we look. The belief in determinism denies heroes and villains justice, and the rest of us too.  It denies heroes the acknowledgement of the virtues that produced their achievements, for which they should feel pride.  And it denies villains the blame for the vices that produced the destruction of values, for which they should feel ashamed.  And the belief in determinism denies the rest of us the justice that encourages the pro-human-life achievements that benefit us all and discourages the anti-human-life destruction of values that deprives us all.

FREE WILL: BLESSING OR CURSE?

Sam thinks that it’s a good thing that we don’t have free will because once we realise that we have no choice about what we think and do, we will have a much more tolerant society, and we won’t have to curse ourselves and feel guilty when we do the wrong thing. Sam is a neuroscientist and I am not, but I find it hard to accept that belief in determinism is the best way of relieving negative emotions about thoughts and actions of the past. But even if Sam is right about that, consider the cost!  For a start, if belief in determinism relieves us of guilt or regret for doing the wrong thing, it also relieves us of satisfaction and pride for doing the right thing. Which obliterates motivation to correct our erroneous thoughts and bad behaviour and build on our rational thoughts and good behaviour, because we don’t believe we have control over that, all we are left with is: what will be will be!  If we jettison free will, we jettison: regret and guilt, satisfaction and pride, motivation and morality, truth and justice, drama and adventure, values and dis-values and chosen loves, because in the final analysis determined entities choose nothing, everything is chosen for them, all they can hope for is the luck of the draw. If a wife asked: “Why did you marry me, darling?” The honest and complete answer of a determinist would have to be: “For the same reason I put my socks on this morning and did everything else: because my genes and environment determined that I did so.’’  Que sera sera!

Sam implies that everybody who thinks about it scientifically becomes a determinist, but I have yet to meet a determinist who acts as if he or she were determined - Sam certainly doesn’t. My guess is that people who act as if they were determined are in jails or asylums. Existentialists agree with me that we have free will, but agree with Sam that free will is a terrible thing. This sets them wailing that: life is hell and then we die. Many Christians agree with me that we have free will, but agree with Sam that it is an inexplicable phenomenon - a conundrum that they resolve by having faith that it is a miraculous gift of God. Some other Christians, such as Calvinists, believe in a determinist theory called predestination - the belief that all humans are stamped at birth for heaven or hell after they die. I’m sure Sam wouldn’t want to be associated with that horrible theory in any way, but it does accentuate what it would be like to think that our futures are all set in stone and there is not a damned thing we can do about it.  Muslims believe in predestination too: “Allah knows the future as well as the present and the past, all things are pre-destined, everything has been decreed and fixed from all eternity by the divine will, even to the final fate of every soul, Allah not only knows from eternity who will be saved, but sends whom he will astray, and guides whom he will.” Philosophers have argued back and forth on the issue since Plato - but all societies throughout history have tacitly presumed free will as the basis of their systems of justice. Some societies have tacitly presumed determinism in their tribalist or racist beliefs, e.g. the belief in the predetermined supremacy of their race or tribe, and that other races or tribes are determined to think and act differently. This racism (and other forms of epistemological apartheid such as between the sexes) is promoted explicitly and ruinously by postmodernism and woke.

Sam is consistent enough to carry his theory to its logical conclusions, e.g. that according to determinism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jeffrey Epstein, Abraham Lincoln, Adolph Hitler, Isaac Newton, and Pol Pot are morally equal, deserving of no more condemnation or praise than each other because none of them could have acted any differently than they did - they were just doing what they had to from the day they were born to the day they died. Sam insists that determinists would still want criminals jailed for everyone else’s safety - but that retributive justice would be unfair since none of us could help but do what we were determined to do. He says it’s okay to distinguish the acts of your legs walking to the store and your hands strangling the cat, as in a different category to the acts of your heart pumping blood and your stomach digesting food (my examples), as long as you remember that you had no more agency over the former than you did over the latter, your genes and environment determine both, they just used different routes to deliver their orders. (Sam sometimes confuses the issue by calling the former ”voluntary” and the latter involuntary, but he equivocates on ”voluntary” so that it can be determined.)

None of the above is to suggest that we should believe in free will because it is better for us that we do so. Good or bad, free will is either a fact of our human nature, or we are determined to believe what we believe (including belief in determinism) and to do what we do. However, according to Sam, there may soon be a way to settle the issue once and for all, with a device that measures brain waves.  He says that such a device could predict what he will do before he thinks to do it, which will prove that he is determined. But once again I must respectfully disagree with the sincere and intelligent doctor. That device won’t settle the issue, but it may well lend weight to my theory of the way free will works. Because the brain waves that the device measures may well be caused by the level of focus that has been chosen, which would determine how much data would come to bear at what degree of intensity, which could indicate what thought would result. Be that as it may, you and I don’t need to wait for that device to be invented to settle the issue, at least for ourselves. Each of us can verify free will for ourselves by focussing on what goes on in our minds, at the moment, over the last week, and over a lifetime. In other words, all we need to do is choose to think.

© John Dawson 2022