I work in a biology department and I know my colleagues would disapprove of me indulging in ‘philosophical speculation’ about something that cannot be scientifically tested. They have a point, but for a theoretician, the bar has to be set lower. My question is could a theory, in principle, be tested? For that the problem has to be posed in concretely defined terms and we need at least one prediction, that if it could be tested, would settle the matter.
Meanwhile, whether or not we have free will, has been a popular topic in philosophy since ancient times and the study of it has ramified into a really impressive tree of scholarly traditions (and schisms) all arguing with one another or dismissing one another as misguided. Such is the method of philosophy that definitive conclusions are extremely rare; instead we see a proliferation of approaches and contradictory viewpoints. Philosophers would defend this state of affairs by pointing to the extreme difficulty of the topic and the complicated nature of anything we can draw from it: there cannot be a simple singular answer.
But precise singular answers are what science seeks. As usual with these very hard conceptual problems, the breakthroughs come from finding the right way to pose the question. As scientists we find it best to break the problem into smaller parts, but must be careful to avoid substitution bias: as Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman says “when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution” (Kahneman, 2011).
Let us first make the distinction between objective free will and the experience we have of it. The former is a (hypothetical) property of any causal system; the latter is a property of human consciousness (i.e. what it feels like to do things in the world and believe you are the free and wilful agent of those actions). It is possible that objective free will exists and also that our experience of it is an illusion created by the mind. Unfortunately it is all too easy to think of free will as belonging to a little inner being (homunculus) that is the ‘real me’, when this is nothing but an internal model of the self created by the mind to enable us - as a whole - to respond to both internal and external situations. Such subjective perception is within the scope of careful scientific enquiry (see Ellia et al, 2021), but not the matter at hand here.
(CC BY-SA 3.0 by Jennifer Garcia)
One common argument against free will refers to the lack of conscious intention found in Libet’s famous experiment and the subsequent FMRI experiments reinforcing its findings. Even if the conclusion is that action is initiated before conscious awareness, that only means that the will does not arise from the conscious mind in every case. If it arises from unconscious brain activity, or even bodily (from the peripheral nervous system), it still must arise from the organism that is the person, which therefore must possess a ‘will’. Those who reject free will on the grounds that “my brain made me do it” are just denying that their brain is an indivisible part of them. They are falling into the fallacy of the homunculus.
Information and causation
This leads me straight to the first (and often neglected) big question about free will - what is the X to which we might attribute it? A person may claim that they did not have free will in some choice because they were genetically programmed to behave a particular way “my genes made me do it”. But those genes are theirs - they embody them in every cell, so they want us to believe that they are not their body - surely another homunculus fallacy. The whatlifeis.info website emphasises the diachronic nature of a person - all the material is regularly replaced, so what makes us who we are is the information that is embodied, not the stuff we are made from. This information is the source not only for making us what we are, but also for the formation of all our actions (even our thoughts). In general, the X will always be a pattern in matter/energy that amounts to the information it embodies by being assembled as that particular pattern. That’s what physical things are.
Whilst some philosophers contemplate metaphysical possibilities which are not physical possibilities, as scientists we will confine ourselves to physical reality. In that, everything that happens does so because a physical force is constrained in its action by information embodied by a configuration of matter in space and time. This is the foundation of efficient cause - the origin of all happenings in the universe. The freedom of free will is freedom from the chain of cause and effect that can be traced from you and I all the way back to the big bang. We are thinking of causal freedom. A system that is free in this sense has its own private source of cause, i.e. free will requires agent causation. This leads directly to the organisational approach to biology of Varela, Maturana, Rashevski, Rosen and Louie, Noble, Hofmeyr, Montévil, Mossio and Kauffman (not an exhaustive list by any means!).
The only kinds of things that are even candidates for agent causation are systems that are closed to efficient causation (clef). With those, any effort to trace back to an original cause gets trapped in an endless loop: the chain has no beginning or end. The only things we know of with such a peculiar property are living systems. Agreeing with John Von Neumann’s presumption and in a forthcoming paper (with BioSystems) I argue (more precisely) that clef systems need to embody accompanying information to provide formal cause and they have to protect it from internal efficient causes. Living systems do have this additional information and do protect it using coding that translates back and forth between formal and efficient causes (I am talking of DNA, RNA and the ribosome-based translation system). The closure of efficient causation ensures that the source of (at least some) causes lies within the system itself. It also ensures that the system is a whole and separate entity: as Immanuel Kant recognised and Stuart Kauffman elaborates, this is critical to agency. A causal boundary between inside and outside is only possible for a clef system. It is at this boundary that cause and effect are transformed into stimulus and response. The organisational approach to biology therefore shows us that living systems alone are capable of agency in the physical world (See Farnsworth 2018).
More philosophy
Some may say, we have only identified a proximal cause within the system itself. True, a living system, especially its defining information, is a copy of at least one parent so most or all its behaviours are inherited: “my ancestors made me do it”. Trace this back through generations, through evolution into deep time, and we see the origin of our actions (we are organisms too) in the first living cell, before which there was only the non-living, causally open systems leading back to the big bang. What a person chooses to do in any circumstances is at least partly determined by their biological inheritance. But causal freedom is not all or nothing (philosophers argue over whether ‘source freedom’, as they call it, is possible even in principle). All living systems are causally free, only to the extent that their actions depend on internal information. The degree to which we are free from exogenous cause depends on how much internal, proximal, causation we embody, which is a matter of organisational complexity. But crucially, the resulting inherited capabilities, constraints and motives are ours - they are embodied information correctly attributed to us as individuals. Their consequences are the responsibility of the individual, whatever the explanation for their accumulation (including social influences).
What then of will? Wilfulness implies intention and that can be recast as seeking a goal, for which we need a goal defined in a space of possibilities. In “Can a robot have free will” (Farnsworth, 2017), I argued that in its most elementary form, this is the set-point of a homeostatic control loop, of which there are a great many in every living cell. As life evolved, organisms with increasing orders of hierarchically nested control loops developed. This enabled first homeostasis of organisationally closed systems; then perception-action systems; then action selection systems; then cognitive systems and finally, memory supporting a model of the self able to anticipate and evaluate actions and consequences (Farnsworth, 2018). From that we get the homunculus impression.
Organisms and the rest of the universe
In general, organisms are self-informed dynamic patterns (information) but are also within and a part of the whole universe. They have the properties of autonomy derived from their internalised information. That information gives them a goal and the autonomy to pursue it, but they are ultimately a part of the whole (and every cell in your body and mine is one of a continuous line stretching back to the first cell ever to live). In this way, life is not separate from the universe, instead, it is the greatest known elaboration of the information structure of the universe.
Objective free will is a proper subject for science if a mechanism-based explanation is acceptable and if we are willing to give up the idea that we are little beings (homunculae) that supervise the behaviour of our brains. A scientific account of free will may leave some philosophers cold, but I expect it to play a practical role in deciding the important ethical issues of the future. There are going to be a lot of those.
References
Ellia, Francesco, et al. 2021. Consciousness and the fallacy of misplaced objectivity. Neuroscience of Consciousness 2021.2: niab032. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niab032
Kahneman D. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar: Straus and Giroux, 2011 (quoted from Ellia et al. 2021).
Von Neumann, J., Burks, A., 1966. Theory of self-reproducing automata. Illinois Uni- versity Press, Chicago, IL.,USA.
Farnsworth, K.D. (2017). Can a Robot Have Free Will? Entropy. 19, 237; http://doi:10.3390/e19050237
Farnsworth, K.D. (2018). How organisms gained causal independence and how to quantify it. Biology. https://doi.org/10.3390/biology7030038
