Free Will

There are two lay theories of human behavior. Either it's determined strictly by cause and effect, like clockwork - or we do whatever we want to do, regardless of cause and effect. (Or some combination of these two.) Most people believe in free will because they know that they evaluate choices and make decisions. They live it every day. People know they make choices because, for example, they like the way fattening food tastes. "No one can tell me what to eat, no sirree - I have free will."

There are two threads in this debate that I want to explore. The first is how we confound external force with cause and effect and allow that to create a misunderstanding of what cause and effect really is. The second thread is how "free" relates to randomness. Both of these have a lot to say about the nature of artificial intelligence.

When we are forced to do something, we say we don't have free will. We don't want to be shot so we give the mugger our money. That's not a free choice, right? Wrong. It is a choice based on expected outcome. If the mugger held our hand and forced it into our pockets to get the money, then that would be true cause and effect. But if he just stands there with the gun and orders us - then it's our free choice that less money is better than less life, and so we act on it. This is no different than eating those fries despite being warned - at that moment we value the taste over the slight possibility that this one french fry will be the one that kills us. If one of these is free will, then both are. So what would non-free will really look like?

Non-free will might be like when an odor triggers activation of a brain state that corresponds to "french fry" and a memory trace of pleasure. Amongst all the competing memory activations - including the ones about how much you weigh and the effects of overeating - the hypothalamus reacts most strongly to the pleasure of the taste memory and triggers the desire to taste it again (actually, this IS the desire to taste it again) which triggers arm and hand movements to get that fry into your mouth. Does that sound like cause and effect?

Most people react to this last analysis as, "but that's not what it feels like! I know what I want and I choose it - my brain doesn't make me do it." To that my response is: do you also choose what you want? Or is what you "want" some function of your genetic makeup and your experiences? Isn't this still cause and effect? (I'm purposefully ignoring the mystical argument that we are not our brains. That just moves the problem one step away without actually solving anything.)

After many years (yes, years) of puzzling over this, I find that I really cannot even comprehend an alternative. What else would "free" will be, if not acting to achieve your goals without external coercion? The only other thing would be randomness. Either you do something for a reason (and that reason being some function of things you learned in the past) or you do them randomly with no reason. I don't think we really want to equate freedom with randomness - there's no meaning in that. So, freedom must mean that we act to achieve our goals, however ill-conceived they may be. And we may choose specific goals, but they are based on what we like or what we want, neither of which are under our control.

We now know that, with quantum uncertainty, there really is no such thing as mechanical cause and effect the way we used to think of it, because micro-things happen according to a probability distribution instead of at some exact predictable time. So there is a randomness to everything, even if not normally perceivable. That randomness can play a part in what we end up liking (by history or genetics,) or which brain state wins the debate and triggers which action amongst the top contenders. But this only adds variety, it doesn't change the core idea of "free" will.

We do what we want when free from coercion. We contemplate options and decide which ones we like better. But we are not free to decide what we like.