The Necessity of Free Will

Eric Hanson, ArtAsiaPacific Magazine, Mar/Apr 2013

by Thomas Scarborough

I propose to solve the problem of free will.

The problem is, quite simply, the view that we live in a world where causality reigns supreme. If causality reigns supreme, then there can be no free will. And if we admit quantum indeterminacy to the picture, neither is indeterminacy free will.

I propose that the problem rests on an ancient conceptual dichotomy: the things-relations distinction. I propose, too, that this distinction is illusory. Aristotle called it the features-dispositions distinction. Wittgenstein called it the objects-arrangements distinction. We find it, too, in language (the nouns-verbs distinction), and in maths (variables-operators).

The alternative is obvious: there is no such distinction, but rather a fusion of things.  The philosopher Mel Thompson describes our world as ‘a seamless web of causality that goes forwards and backward in time and outwards in space’. ‘Seamless’, if we take it to mean exactly that, implies that there are no seams; there is no separation between things; therefore there is no relation between them.

Our reality has been variously described as an undifferentiated stream of experience, a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions, a swirling cloud without determinate shape. To make sense of this, then, we need to separate it into sounds and sights, surfaces and motions—which is individual things. We take aspects of a seamless whole, and we isolate them from the whole. Once done, we are able to trace relations between them.

With this, we have the basis of causality.  But in a seamless reality, where there is a fusion of things, all things cause all things. Even the language which we speak has an urge towards such fusion. There is an ‘evil’, wrote the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon, in defining natural and material things.  ‘Definitions themselves consist of words, and those words beget others’.  Ultimately, our words reach into everything.

In the midst of an undifferentiated expanse, therefore, we create things, and we create causes. We isolate causes from the seamless whole—and with them, effects. But these causes must always strip something off.  This is why our thinking in terms of causality—which is supremely embodied in the modern scientific method—must bring about unwanted side effects of all kinds, through stripped-off relations.

When we say that A causes B we are, as it were, placing our drawing compass on the seamless web of causality and demarcating a circle in the midst of it: 'A'.  Outside of this circle lies the entire, seamless universe, and this knows no 'things'—until we create them in its midst. And when we create them, we create the intractable problem as to what a relation actually is.  A property?  An attribute?

Someone might object. Even if we have no things, no objects, no features (and so on) with which to create causality, we still have a reality which is bound by the laws of the universe. There is therefore some kind of something which is not free. Yet every scientific law is about A causes B. Whatever is out there, it has nothing in common with such a scheme—that we can know of anyway.

One more step is required to prove free will. Every cause that I identify is a creation of my own mind, in that it is freely chosen.  I am free to create it—which is, to demarcate the circle with the drawing compass. When I say that A caused B, I omit C, D, E, and every other possible cause, with the exception of what I want to create.  This is a choice without any kind of necessity.

I fire a shot at a clay pigeon. I choose the cause, and with the cause I choose the effect, and the pigeon shatters in the sky.  Now I see a nearby church bell.   I choose the cause, and I choose the effect, and an entire village awakes from its slumbers on a drowsy afternoon.   In this lies free will.  Cause and effect might seem iron clad—yet it is itself freely chosen.

But did I not cause my causes to be created?  Are not the causes and effects we invent themselves caused in some way?  This possibility is excluded.  We would need to readmit A’s and B’s to our scheme before we could claim cause.

David Bohm wrote that quantum theory is ‘the dropping of the notion of analysis of the world into relatively autonomous parts, separately existent but in interaction’.  In fact, this applies in every sphere.  Causality is illusory.  Not only that, but to say that any such illusion is caused is to admit causality through the back door.  There is no back door.