An Argument for Free Will

Igor Balla December 31, 2011

Introduction

The problem of free will versus determinism has been a dicult issue in philosophy for a very long time. Moreover, it is the kind of philosophical issue that everyone has an opinion about. The ideas in this paper grew out of many discussions the author had with dierent people regarding this probem. A priori, I had the belief that free will is but an illusion, not unlike the illusion of randomness. However, after much meditation and discussion, I have come to the conclusion that free will is much more than an illusion. It is a consequence of the nature of concious beings, and our inherent inability to predict ourselves. We will argue that the validity of predictions about ourselves are unknowable to us. Thus, regardless of whether or not the nature of the universe is deterministic or indeterministic, we eectively have free will and should never be convinced otherwise. Let us suppose, temporarily, that the universe can be modeled by a universal Turing machine M . Then the state of the universe at any given time step is encoded as a sequence of bits on a tape, and there is a well dened set of rules that determine how to go from one state of the tape to the next state, after one time step. One might then conclude that the universe, which includes all of us, is deterministic. In some sense, I agree with this conclusion. However, one might also be tempted to argue that, as a consequence, free will cannot exist. This I do not agree with and I believe it is a fallacy. The issue is that free will should not be interpreted as an objective property of this universe. It is a subjective property, relative to an individual. This philosophy is known as compatibilism [1], and the usual argument here is that a very specic kind of free will exists in a deterministic world. We argue for this position using the framework of predictions, as is explained in the following section. Even if you were to learn the whole set of rules that govern M , this would not mean you would be able to record enough information about the 1

state of the machine at any given time, to be able to infer the next state. In fact, I will argue that no individual can learn enough information about himself to predict his own future actions. This does not, however, rule out the possibility of somebody else predicting your actions. However, once you are made aware of this prediction, the validity of the prediction becomes unknowable to you. Thus, the prediction becomes a vacuous statement, as soon as you are made aware of it. In this way, an agent who believes that he or she has free will, should never be convinced otherwise.

A Model for Predictions

The approach we are going to take to free will is that of prediction. As the previous conversation suggested, the only way in which your free will can be inhibited, is if you are made aware of some prediction about your future. Otherwise, you would not have any reason to believe that you do not have free will. The assumption that the universe is deterministic, does not, by itself imply anything regarding us. If we are to be pragmatic in our philosophy, we must look at how such a claim could inuence our lives. The only way this could happen is through predictions. As such, we develop a very specic model of prediction below, and argue that this model is general enough to capture the notion of prediction, as far as it is relavent to the question of free will. Let us consider the following scenario. We have an agent A, who exists for all times t with 0 t 1. This may be a man, a woman, or maybe some other concious and intelligent being who believes that he has free will. Also note that the time scale being considered is arbitrary. Given a statement P about the world, let v(P ) denote the validity (truth value) of the statement P occurs at time 1. In view of this denition, it makes sense to call any such statement, a prediction. Suppose that A is made aware of a prediction P at time 0. A should believe he has free will if A can invalidate P upon hearing it. The aim of telling P to A, is to undermine his free will. We shall argue that only a specic kind of prediction P is necessary to undermine As free will. Moreover, we also argue that these kinds of predictions are quite rare, so that A should not ever be convinced that he does not have free will. Observe that this model of prediction is quite general. Firstly, if a prediction is made, but A is never made aware of it, then A does not gain any new information and thus should continue believing that he has free will. Otherwise A is made aware of a prediction, which happens at some time s,

and the prediction itself must be in regards to some time t. If t s, then A can verify whether or not the prediction holds right when he is made aware of it. This cannot undermine As free will, as it does not claim anything about As future. Otherwise t > s, and in this case we may set time 0 to be s and time 1 to be t. We call a prediction P well-dened (relative to A) if A knows at time 0, that A can unambiguously verify v(P ) at time 1. For example, let P = A will be at a store.. Then P is well-dened if and only if A knows at time 0, if he will be able to unambigously verify whether or not A is at a store at time 1. Indeed, suppose that A is standing with exactly 1 foot in the store and 1 foot outside the store at time 1. In this case, it may not be clear to A at time 1, whether or not P occured, so that P may not be well-dened. A prediction that is not well-dened relative to A, should not be relevant in discussing As free will. If A himself does not know how to judge whether or not P will occur, then A should ask for a more well-dened prediction. Now let P be a prediction. We say that P is surprising if it is well-dened and A believes at time 0 that he can choose to have P or P at time 1. Moreover, we shall assume without loss of generality that As beliefs do not change for all times t with 0 t < 1. Suppose, on the contrary, that As beliefs change. Then we may consider the biggest t < 1 such that t is the last time As beliefs change and then we can set time 0 to be this t, so that we are back to the original situation. Thus, we have that P is surprising if and only if it is well-dened and A believes at time t that he can choose to have P or P at time 1, for all t with 0 t < 1. We will argue that only surprising predictions can undermine As free will. To that end, suppose P is not surprising. Then if it is not well-dened, we have from the previous argument that A should not consider this relevant to his free will. Otherwise, P is well-dened, so we must have that A does not believe at time t that he can choose to have P or P at time 1, for all t with 0 t < 1. In other words, the statement P occurs at time 1 is not something A believes he has control over in the rst place. For example, we might have P = A will travel to Jupiter at twice the speed of light. or P = A will have a heart attack. Such predictions could certainly be made, and they may or may not be valid. However, such predictions should not undermine As free will, because even if v(P ) = true and A veries this at time 1, A never believed he had a choice between P or P in the rst place. Now suppose we have a surprising prediction P . In this case, A believes for all t with 0 t < 1 that A can choose P or P at time 1. Thus A believes he can choose to act in such a way as to make P occur at time 1. This does not mean A necessarily will act this way. However, the shear 3

possibility that he can do this implies that A should believe he has free will. If A acts in such a way as to make P occur at time 1, then this should not undermine As free will because as far as he knows, he chose P , even though he was aware that he could potentialy have chosen P . On the other hand, if A tries make P occur at time 1 and succeeds, then v(P ) = f alse and so A should have no reason to feel that his free will was inhibited. The previous analysis leaves only one case to consider: Suppose A tries to make P occur at time 1, but ends up failing, even though A believed he had the choice to make P occur. In this case, A should feel that his free will has been inhibited. However, we will argue that such a situation is actually quite rare, as it would require that many of As beliefs about his world be shaken between time 0 and time 1. Let us assume that the universe behaves according to physical laws or at the very least, statistical laws and that A is aware of these laws. Moreover, let us assume that As beliefs are based on previous empirical observations about his world. Thus, by the central limit theorem, As beliefs should hold with high probability. If As beliefs about his world are shaken, then it must be that some of these laws fail. However, this must necessarily be a rare event. Thus surprising predictions that actually inhibit As free will are rare events, and otherwise A can continue to assume that he in fact has free will.

Randomness and an Oracle for Prediction

This author was, at one point, of the opinion that free will is nothing more than an illusion, just as randomness is only an illusion, induced by our own lack of information. To clarify this analogy, let us consider a hypothetical game of poker. In particular, suppose we are playing Texas hold em, and that there is a dealer. The dealer begins by shuing the cards. He then places 2 cards, face down, in front of each player. The common assumption is that the cards have been dealt at random, so that any combination of 2 cards has the same probability of being the cards placed in front of you. However, a more careful analysis reveals that in fact, you will receive 2 specic cards. Indeed, if you had perfect knowledge of the initial arrangement of the deck, and had watched the dealer perfectly as he shued, you would have been able to predict the exact 2 cards that were dealt to you and anyone else. Of course, having perfect knowledge of the arrangement of the deck and of the process by which the dealer shues is only theoretically possible, not practically possible. The players of this game have a lack of information, which is why it makes sense for them to make the assumption

that the cards are being dealt at random. They eectively have the illusion of randomness. In much the same way, whether or not the universe behaves according to a deterministic procedure, we clearly do not have enough information in most cases to be able to make a prediction. Thus we eectively have free will, just as the poker players eectively have randomness. We observe that this analogy actually breaks down upon closer inspection. Suppose that the dealer looks at the cards he gives you as he places them face down in front of you. Then he tells you what those cards are. At this point, your assumption that any combination of cards are equally likely is invalidated. In fact, there are only 2 specic cards that you can have, so the illusion of randomness is dispelled. Our argument from section 2, however, shows that free will is not quite so easy to dispel. To illustrate this point, suppose we have an oracle B, existing somewhere far away (perhaps Mars), that has a perfect model of our world on Earth, including ourselves in it, so that B can make correct predictions about us. Since B is by assumption omniscient, we have that B can make a correct prediction P about A at time 1. However, such a prediction becomes vacuous relative to A, once A is made aware of it. Indeed, if A was programmed to always do the opposite of any prediction he hears, then A will always try to invalidate Bs prediction upon hearing it. But what if B took As response to learning about P into account? In this case, B should know that v(P ) may change if A is made aware of P . Thus, in this case, B cannot always tell A a valid prediction without it becoming invalid in the process. Now this is not to say that A has to act against Bs prediction, but just the fact that he can, implies that A should believe he has free will. Observe that this approach and denition of free will, provides a solution to Newcombs paradox [2]. We have a game with two boxes B1 , B2 such that B1 contains 1, 000 dollars and B2 contains either 1, 000, 000 dollars or nothing. The player A must choose either B2 or B1 and B2 . The oracle B predicts the choice of A and if A decides to pick B2 , places 1, 000, 000 in B2 . Otherwise, it predicts A will choose B1 and B2 , and places nothing in B2 . Observe that once A is made aware of Bs actions, A can change his strategy. Indeed, A can invalidate Bs prediction, and this is exactly an application of As free will.

References
[1] McKenna, Michael, Compatibilism, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[2] Gardner, M. Newcombs Paradox. Ch. 13 in Knotted Doughnuts and Other Mathematical Entertainments. New York: W. H. Freeman, pp. 155-161, 1986.