Free Will and the Soul
Before you start to read, please realize what this isn’t. It’s not an attempt to get people to accept the idea of the soul. It’s not an attempt to square religious thought with modern ideas. (If anything, I think we should study what the ancients meant by “soul” as distinct from “spirit”.) It’s not some sort of dogma that I claim to be theologically correct.
What you see here started as an email that I wrote describing my point of view. I have heavily modified it as my thoughts, priorities, and means of expression have changed. It’s really there just to relate my thought process.
Free Will: Too Abstract To Study?
I believe that it makes sense to believe that we have free will. That may seem a little stupid, because (a) I admit that I could be wrong and (b) I don’t even have a precise definition for what “free will” means.
Let’s tackle the second part first: Is it reasonable to talk about something when you’re not sure that you know what it means?
Undoubtedly yes. Philosopher of Science Sir Karl Popper used to start the semester by telling his students, “Observe!” They, of course, said, “Observe what?” Popper was showing them that you have to know a little something about whatever it is you’re observing before you can start to observe it. His point was directed against the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle. They wanted to eliminate metaphysics — technically, to say that synthetic a priori statements were literally nonsense, just meaningless strings of grammatically correct text — and to show that only empirical information had meaning. But for all their development of formal languages to encode information, they could only capture information about things that people already understood. Saying “The apple on the table is red” only carries information if you already know something about apples, tables, and the color red.
free will is
no less available
to intuition
than apples
or tables.
Though I know nothing of pomology, I can easily identify an apple. Similarly with a table. Similarly with free will. Though abstract, free will is no less available to intuition than apples or tables. We use it more often than either of the two objects; it is more directly related to our sense of self; it is open to analysis and reason.
To see how, we have to look at it. Let’s start by talking about what it’s not.
Toward An Intuition Of Free Will
Free will seems to be related to self-determination.
You can know everything about what (say) a rock will do if you know its initial conditions, external inputs, and the laws of physics. Same with roulette balls. Same with traditional computers, no matter how complex. (And maybe the same is true for quantum computers, because they are predictable in a stochastic sense, but I don’t know enough to speak intelligently about them.) We appear to be different from these things because we don’t think of our life’s path being precisely determined from the moment of our conception. We think that we have some level of control over what we do, regardless of external forces, physics, and initial conditions. So physical determinism doesn’t seem particularly “free” in the way free will is free.
Pure randomness, on the other hand, seems not to be free because it isn’t determined at all. An electron doesn’t seem to choose what it does, and when I choose to do something I don’t think that I do it randomly. As Daniel Dennett has pointed out, determinism is necessary for freedom.
Having said that, note something interesting: we probably can’t tell the difference between self-determination and purely random behavior. An outside observer might ascribe the self-determined cause to be “random with such-and-such a probability distribution”. Because we can’t measure the cause (it’s internal to the person or self-determined object), we can’t make predictions by looking from the outside in. Unpredictable events appear random.
We’ve been working with intuitions about what self-determination and free will aren’t, but we still haven’t said what it is. Based on the discussion so far, I’ll suggest this definition: “Self-determination is the power of an object to have causes for its behavior in itself; i.e., its power to behave in a manner that is not fully random, not fully determined by the laws of physics, and not fully based on a combination of only those two factors.”
It’s possible that no object has this property. We might be just like the computer or the roulette ball; we might be fooled into thinking there’s more to freedom than this. But since we can conceive of the notion of self-determination — many people can’t help but think of ourselves as having it — it’s reasonable to posit its existence and explore what we might think the world would look like if it existed.
Toward a Definition of the Soul
If we imagine for a moment that self-determining objects exist, we might classify these objects as “souls”. For a soul to matter to us, it must have at least these two properties: the power of self-determination, and the power to affect physical objects.
in some sense,
physical.
It appears that souls are not the same things as our bodies, because our bodies are made of matter and are therefore (as far as we know) completely subject to physical laws. So the soul might be a form of energy or some different substance altogether that we can call “spirit”. Who knows? People don’t know what Dark Energy is, either, but they talk about it because of its effects. We can do the same.
And the effects are what’s important important here. A lot of people think that a soul is spiritual, by which they mean that it has no relation to matter at all. That can’t be right, because the soul, if it exists, must be the self-determining part of us, and we contain matter. If my soul were self-determining, but it couldn’t make me choose right instead of wrong, then it wouldn’t be a part of me. It would be something else. Souls must be, in some sense, physical.
Possible Mechanisms for the Soul’s Action
Although I say that the soul must be able to affect matter, it doesn’t appear to be very strong, because we don’t see it acting outside of our bodies much, if at all.
But we also know that, in chaotic or near-chaotic nonlinear systems, very small fluctuations in initial conditions can cause very large changes in results. This is the so-called “butterfly effect”.
Therefore, the soul could cause very small physical fluctuations in the brain and still have a very large overall impact on the body.”
The brain is a near-chaotic system. Therefore, the soul could cause very small physical fluctuations in the brain and still have a very large overall impact on the body.
Of course, if the soul only weakly affects matter, then its effects might be overwhelmed by drugs, electric shocks, hormonal imbalances, or perhaps even simple conditioning. Some souls might be “weak”, which means that they would be overwhelmed more quickly, while a “strong” soul could overcome the effects of these disharmonies more readily. Maybe people could train their souls well, thereby gaining better self-control than those who don’t.
But here’s the bottom line: if there’s a soul, it would not be fully determined by the physical environment in which it’s found (otherwise it wouldn’t fit the purpose for which we’ve defined it), but it would have an effect on physical systems around it. The brain, being made of matter, follows deterministic physical laws; one physical law it must follow is the law that governs the interaction of the soul with matter.
I wonder whether we would be able to measure the effect of the soul. As discussed earlier, because the cause of action comes from the soul, we wouldn’t see any causes from the outside. An effect that has no apparent cause will appear to be random, whether it’s actually random or not.
As a side note: what keeps “my” soul attached to my body? I have no idea. Maybe souls are a substance that can be located in space, like matter or energy, and has an affinity for particular matter. Maybe, if we look hard enough, we could sometimes see the effect of the soul outside of the brain. I hear there’s a professor emeritus at Princeton who is studying this kind of thing, although I doubt he’d put it in my terms. Perhaps someone with a very powerful soul — the size of a mustard seed, perhaps (remember E=mc2!) — might even be able to move mountains.
But Should We Believe In It?
All this is nice but strictly non-scientific. It may be possible — given the nature of what I’ve described, I doubt that it could be disproved, though that is not a good feature of the hypothesis — but who cares? Why believe in it if there’s no evidence for it?
My answer has the flavor of Pascal’s Wager, but without (I think) its major flaws. I’d like to consider this statement, which I’ll call J: “I have the property of self-determination.” (Equivalent formulations are “I have free will” and “I have a soul.”) Let’s consider four possible states of the world:
- J is false, and I disbelieve J.
- J is false, and I believe J.
- J is true, and I disbelieve J.
- J is true, and I believe J.
If the first situation is true, then I am correct; however, my belief was imposed on me by the laws of physics and the state of matter at the Big Bang, just as were the Pope’s, Muhammad Atta’s, and that wacky lady with the crystals and incense who lives down the streets. By luck, my atoms happen to be configured in a way that makes me believe, correctly, that I’m not self-determined.
If the second situation is true, then I am not correct; however, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just like the wacky crystal lady: I’m wrong, but it’s just the way my atoms are configured.
If the third situation is true, I have chosen my belief poorly. This is a terrible outcome: I have an amazing talent for self-determination, but I don’t even know it. I even have it in my power to believe otherwise, and I’m not taking advantage of it.
If the fourth situation is true, then I am correct, and know it, and it’s because of my own choice.
I think that this set of conditions implies that it’s always reasonable to believe in free will. If I’m wrong, then I can’t help it, and if I’m right, then thank God that’s what I chose to believe in! Even if there’s evidence that would otherwise convince me that I should believe that I’m fully determined physically, that I have no self-determination at all, I shouldn’t care — self-determination is always a safe bet.
Note that I don’t have to necessarily reject any physically deterministic theory itself — I just have to reject the notion that it fully determines my actions.
So I believe that I’m self-determined, and therefore I believe in the soul, whatever it might be. You can argue with me all day long, but if I’m wrong then that’s just how my atoms are configured, and if I’m right then you’re losing out on the greatest part of being human.
Miscellaneous tidbits
If the above is right then we would expect to see some people gaining control of their souls outside of the Christian religion. This explanation of the soul is philosophical and physical, not theological, and therefore I don’t see any reason to expect Christians to have a lock on soul activity.
Gaining self-control means making the body do what you want it to, even when it would do otherwise if left to its own physically deterministic devices (i.e., if there were no soul). Therefore what Catholics call “mortification of the flesh” and ascetic practices in general would in fact help one temper one’s soul.
My argument in no way requires the soul to be immortal, or even for there to be a God.
That said, in the Christian religion it seems to be the fact of self-determination that makes Man “created in God’s image”. God is free, and therefore His actions are self-determined. Christ’s dual will — human and divine — are explained by the existence of Christ’s human soul, which has some effect, and His divine Will, which has infinitely more when He chooses to exercise it.
The action of the Holy Spirit may be direct influence on our souls, or it may be an influence on our bodies, nudging us in the direction It wants us to go. I don’t have any ideas about which.
This view of the soul as self-deterministic also helps explain how God can have foreknowledge of our actions, while our actions remain free. Our actions are fixed, because our souls determine them; therefore God can see them at any given point in time.
Compare that to our own assessment of our actions: we can look back on our own past actions and see that they were free, even though from our later perspective they are fixed.
You Got All The Way Down Here?
Anyone still reading? Drop me a line to let me know. :)