

Free Will

An Examination of Human Freedom

Copyright © Magnus Vinding 2012

Revised Edition with a New Afterword 2013, 2014

"We have to accept the subtle but closely woven evidence that man is not different in kind from other forms of life; that living matter is not different in kind from dead matter; and therefore that a man is an assembly of atoms that obeys natural laws of the same kind that a star does [...]

The atoms in the brain as much as those in the body constitute a mechanism, which ticks with the same orderly regularity, and abides by similar laws, as any other interlocking constellation of atoms. Men have uneasily pushed this thought out of their heads because they want to avoid the conflict with their rooted conviction that man is a free agent who follows only the promptings of his own free will. But we cannot hide this contradiction for ever."

– Jacob Bronowski (Bronowski, 1965, p. 8)
Table of Contents:

Introduction

Defining Free Will

Free Will and Determinism

Do We Have Free Will?

Benefits of Realizing the Truth

Conclusion

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

#  Introduction

Our ideas about our own freedom influence some of the most important things in our lives, from our political decisions and legal practices to our personal motivations, choices and actions. For instance, if we see people as unmoved movers who can act independently of prior causes, we will most likely reward and punish them in different ways than if we believe their actions to be entirely caused by prior causes beyond their own control. Likewise, if we perceive our own choices and actions to be independent of prior causes, our personal feelings of motivation will most likely be rather different compared to if we perceived our choices to be bound to fall out in one particular way no matter what we try to do. A lot is clearly at stake here.

Because so much is at stake, human freedom has become a subject of heated debate. This debate centers around many important and rather different questions that all relate to the apparent conflict between 1) that all our actions are governed by natural laws, and 2) that we freely can do what we want. These are questions like:

Can we make choices?

Can we be said to be free in any way if our actions are caused by prior causes beyond our own control?

Is there just one possible predetermined outcome of the universe?

Could we have acted differently than we did in a given situation?

Can we meaningfully reward and punish people for their actions?

Can there be any morality if we do not perceive ourselves and other people as unmoved movers?

These are all important questions, and the answers we give to them clearly have important implications.

The debate about human freedom, or free will, is not only heated but also confused, and in more than one way. First, people often fail to distinguish between what is true about human freedom and what we ought to believe about it. Second, the most used terms in the debate, such as 'free will' and 'responsibility', are rarely clearly defined, and as a result, people who discuss human freedom often mean different things by the same terms, apparently without being aware of it. Third, it is often overlooked that the debate about human freedom centers around many different questions, and that these are questions on many different levels, for instance societal, neurobiological and subatomic levels, and these levels are often confused in meaningless ways.

These points of confusion have made the debate about human freedom a profoundly confused one, and made human freedom seem like an issue that no one knows anything about, and something we cannot even hope to make any final conclusions about with our present knowledge of the world.

The goal of this book is, polemically expressed, to get beyond all this confusion and solve the problem of free will once and for all. Expressed in more formal terms, the goal is to make an examination of human freedom that arrives at some final and unequivocal answers to the most important questions about it, including the six questions posed above. This may seem ambitious, but it really isn't. All it requires is that we get beyond the aforementioned points of confusion.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part, which consists of the first three chapters, has the purpose of clarifying what is true about human freedom, while the second part, which is just the fourth chapter, is about what we ought to believe about human freedom. Thereby the confusion that comes from failing to distinguish between these two questions is avoided.

The first step taken toward clarifying what is true about human freedom is to clearly define different kinds of freedom. Thereby the second point of confusion – lack of clarity about the meaning of the most relevant terms – is avoided. This rather dry and formal step is taken in the first chapter, and it is not only required in order to avoid confusion about terminology, it is also necessary because the kinds of freedom that will be defined are ones that are relevant to examine whether we have or not in order to answer the most important questions regarding human freedom. So, in a sense, the purpose of the first chapter is to put forth the questions concerning human freedom that the first part of the book aims to answer: do we have these kinds of freedom or not?

These answers will not come right away, as the perhaps most perplexing and important question in the free will debate – "Is there just one possible outcome from the present state of the universe, or are there alternative possible outcomes?" – should be answered first, which it will be with the final answer we can ever get to it. Then comes the discussion about human freedom that aims to draw some final conclusions about it: about what kinds of freedom we have, and about what enables us to have these kinds of freedom.

Finally, the second part of the book, which focuses on what we ought to believe about our own freedom, argues that knowing the truth about human freedom will be beneficial for us in every way, and that we therefore just ought to believe, or rather know, the truth about our own freedom.
Part I

What Is True about Human Freedom?

#  Defining Free Will

The purpose of this chapter is to take the first step toward a clear discussion about human freedom: to define different kinds of freedom. This is a rather dry and formal step, but it is a necessary one since there must be clarity about the meaning of these freedoms in order to discuss and conclude whether we have them or not.

I shall here define three different kinds of freedom: free will, self-chosen will and freedom of action. It is important to note that there is no right definition of free will, and that one can define any kind of freedom in any way one would like. The kinds of freedom I define here are, however, not merely randomly defined. First, the definitions all relate, at least to some degree, to what we usually understand by human freedom. Second, the definitions are all rather meaningful, in the sense that all the definitions relate to the literal meaning of the terms they are denoted by, such as 'free will' and 'freedom of action'. Third, and most importantly, the kinds of freedom defined here are all kinds of freedom relevant to discuss and answer whether we have or not in order to achieve the goal of this first part of the book: to answer the most important questions concerning the truth about human freedom.

In order to define free will in a meaningful way, in a way that has something to do with freedom of will, it might help to first define the terms 'freedom' and 'will' individually:

Freedom:

Being free means not being dependent or not being limited.

Will:

Synonymous with desire and intention.

Based on these definitions, freedom of will, or free will, can meaningfully be defined in the following way:

Free will:

The ability to choose one's own intentions independently of prior causes.

Again, it should be noted that free will can be defined in any way one would like, and that I have defined it in this way because it is relevant to discuss and settle whether we have free will in this sense, and because this definition is well in line with what people often mean and understand by 'free will'.

The second kind of freedom, or ability, that will be defined here is self-chosen will:

Self-chosen will:

The ability to choose one's own intentions.

It is worth noting that this definition is almost identical to the definition of free will above, the only difference being that the choosing of one's own intentions need not be independent of prior causes in order for one to have self-chosen will.

Though the definition of free will above is well in line with what people often understand by free will – basically that one has free will if one is an unmoved mover or self-caused cause – it does not cover all the things that people understand by free will. For instance, when we say things like: "I did it out of my own free will!" we do not usually mean free will as defined above. What we seem to mean is rather that we did what we did out of our own intention, or will. In this case, the will is already in place, and the freedom exhibited therefore lies in being able to do – to act – as one intends. This freedom, or ability, will therefore here be called freedom of action rather than 'freedom of will' or anything else:

Freedom of action:

The ability, or freedom, to do what one intends.

It is worth noting that this is a freedom that all intentional beings by definition want to have, because if one wants to do or acquire anything, one would obviously also want to have the ability to be able to do or get it.

#  Free Will and Determinism

Free will is not always defined in the way I defined it above. Another common definition of free will is that one has free will if one could have acted otherwise than one did.[1] This freedom, which really is a freedom of action if anything, has nothing to do with the freedom of action defined above – to be able to act according to one's intentions. Instead, this freedom, if one insists that it is a freedom, is rather the freedom from being totally predetermined by prior causes to act in one certain way. Do we have this freedom, or is there just one possible outcome of the universe? The final answer that we can ever get to this question, which really is a question of physics, will be shown in this chapter.

The idea of being totally predetermined by prior causes seems disturbing to many people, not least because we usually feel the exact opposite way about our own actions, and it is to some degree understandable that many people do not feel motivated to do anything if they are certain that there is just one way events can unfold. There is, however, no reason to be certain about that at all, since we do not know whether the universe is bound to fall out in one particular way, and, as we shall now see, it cannot possibly be known.

There is much confusion about determinism and indeterminism, and this confusion often arises from our confusing epistemological facts with ontological facts – confusing what is known and can be known about the world with the way the world is. In order to get beyond this confusion, it might be helpful to define some relevant terms, both ontological and epistemological ones. The ontological terms, the terms that relate to the way the world is, are the following:

Determinism:

The state of the universe is determined by its prior states.

Indeterminism:

The state of the universe is not determined by its prior states.

Predeterminism:

There is one possible outcome from the present state of the universe.[2]

It is important to note that according to these definitions of determinism and indeterminism, these two can actually coexist, even though they mean the exact opposite thing. According to these definitions, the universe could both be deterministic and indeterministic to some degree – if it is determined to be the way it is by prior causes to some degree, though not entirely. It is also worth noting that what I have defined as predeterminism is not a different third thing, but a subset of determinism – a special case of total determinism.

The other terms relevant to define are the epistemological ones, which relate to what we know and can know about the world:

Determinable:

If something is determinable, it means that it is possible to determine it – that it can be known.

Indeterminable:

If something is indeterminable, it means that it is impossible to determine it – that it cannot be known.

As can be seen, there is a crucial difference between the ontological and the epistemological terms, and the earlier mentioned confusion arises when it is concluded that some events are indeterministic because their outcomes are indeterminable. This is a fallacy, since it does not follow from the fact that we cannot determine the outcome of a given event that the outcome of such an event is not completely determined by prior causes. It may be that some events happen without being caused by a prior cause, but it can never be known for certain whether that is the case, since there might always be some underlying cause that cannot be observed. On the other hand, it can never be proven that every event has a cause, since it cannot logically be excluded that some events happen without a prior cause, or at least without a fully deterministic cause, even though it may be against our common intuition. In sum, it is not possible to tell whether the world is deterministic or indeterministic based on our inability to determine causes of events.

How would it be possible to tell whether the outcome of the universe is predetermined or not? What could we do in order to find out whether the universe can fall out in different ways from the same initial conditions? As we shall now see, we cannot do anything to know that.

The hope would be if we could make the universe have the exact same state as it once had, a state from which we know the outcome, and then observe whether the outcome from this state would be the same again. This is, however, not only practically impossible, but also impossible in principle, because even if we could rewind the universe back to one of its previous states, the state we would get to would not be exactly the same as the one we had originally if we are to conserve any information about the outcome, since such information did not exist in the state originally. So the information about the outcome must either be deleted, or we will have a different state, and hence we can never test whether the outcome of two exactly identical states of the world must be exactly the same.

The impossibility of carrying out the exact same experiment twice does not, however, prevent us from gaining knowledge of causes, since such knowledge can be gained by making observations of the outcomes of roughly identical conditions, which is what we usually do when we gain knowledge of causes. For instance, if we hit an object and hear a funny sound, we can hit it again in order to know whether hitting the object caused the sound or not, even though we cannot hit the object in the exact same way again. If the sound comes every time, we will conclude that hitting the object is the cause of the sound, and if it does not, we will conclude that it was a coincidence that we heard a sound in the first instance. This procedure for gaining knowledge actually presupposes determinism, at least to some degree, since events must have causes in order for us to determine any causes of events. And we have indeed gained tremendous knowledge of causes and effects in the universe at this point. We for instance know how the Earth will move in the solar system far into the future to a great degree of certainty based on the present state of the solar system. Therefore, we also know that determinism is true, at least to some degree; that the present state of the universe has been determined by its prior states, and that it determines its future states, at least to some degree.

By observing the universe we have discovered that it unfolds according to certain laws, and knowledge of these laws has enabled us to make accurate predictions about future states of the universe. One might ask whether it would be possible to predict the outcome of the entire universe to total accuracy based on such laws, and thereby find out whether the universe can only fall out in one particular way from its present state. If we could determine the outcome of the entire universe down to the smallest detail in advance, that would surely strongly suggest that its outcome is predetermined. This is also impossible to do, however, again in principle, since the amount of information it takes to represent the state of the entire universe to complete precision obviously must be as great as the amount of information in the entire universe. Therefore, an accurate representation of the entire universe cannot be contained in a part of the universe, which any human-made model of the universe is bound to be, and therefore we will never be able to determine the exact outcome of the entire universe in advance.

The best we can do is to make simplifying models of the world that can be used to predict the outcome of a part of the universe, and therefore the last remaining hope for finding out whether the outcome of the universe is predetermined would be to look at a part of the universe and see whether it is possible to predict its outcome to total accuracy. This is also impossible, however, since any model of just a part of the universe is unable to give us completely accurate predictions too. This is, among other reasons, because the state of the simplest, smallest and most fundamental things in the universe we yet know of – elementary particles – is impossible to know exactly. It is impossible to know both where an elementary particle is and where it is going at the same time, and the more we know about the one thing, the less we can know about the other. This uncertainty, known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, is not one that better measurement techniques or scientific breakthroughs can eliminate, but an unavoidable one, since the nature of the world at the quantum level makes it impossible to know both things experimentally. Consequently, it is not possible to predict the exact position of any particle at any time – it is indeterminable, which does not mean that it is necessarily indeterministic, although it might be.

The uncertainty principle reveals something important about the limits of knowledge in general, namely that every description and prediction of the state of anything in the universe is bound to have some degree of uncertainty in it. This uncertainty becomes less significant the larger the scale of description becomes, and at the macroscopic scale, it becomes insignificant, which is why it is possible to determine the position of the earth relative to the sun far into the future with great certainty, though always with some uncertainty.

Uncertainty about the specific state of the universe at any given time is not the only obstacle to knowing how even a limited part of the universe will fall out, however. For even if we knew every single position and movement of every particle in just a small part of the universe – for instance, a small system of a few atoms – and if all these were governed by the simple, deterministic laws of classical mechanics, it would still not be possible to predict the outcome of this small system exactly. This is because such a system would be a chaotic system that would be too complex for its outcome to be determined exactly; the outcome of such a system can at best be approximated by simulation. This exemplifies well the fact that indeterminability does not imply indeterminism, and that even a fully deterministic world is unpredictable.

No matter what, a model of a small part of the universe will only ever be an approximation, even if the uncertainty principle and the indeterminability of the outcomes of complex systems are disregarded. This is because a model of a part of the universe disregards the fact that nothing in the universe exists entirely independently of, and uninfluenced by, the rest of the universe. This means that we would have to model the entire universe exactly if we want to determine the exact outcome of a part of the universe, but, as mentioned above, it is impossible to make an exact model of the entire universe, since such a model cannot be contained in a part of the universe. So we are bound to make models of small parts of the universe that disregard certain factors outside the small parts we are modeling, and these factors do impact the exact outcome of the part we are modeling. Also for this reason will a model, and knowledge in general, of the state of anything in the universe always be an approximation.

That a model of the world is an approximation – an idealized simplification – is not a bad thing, however. In fact, that is exactly what makes a model useful. Only with a model that disregards vast amounts of information about what it is modeling is it possible to make qualified predictions about how the universe will fall out in advance – for instance, how the weather will be, and how much medicine that will be life-saving rather than lethal.

It is impossible to determine outcomes of events in the universe to total accuracy due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the lack of exact determinability of outcomes of complex systems, the fact that the amount of information in a complete model of the universe cannot be contained in a part of the universe, and the fact that nothing in the universe exists entirely independently of the rest of the universe. Thereby our last hope of being able to say whether the universe is predetermined or not is destroyed.

The conclusion we can make, then, is that we can never know whether the outcome of the world is totally predetermined or not – whether there is one or infinitely many possible outcomes from the present state of the universe, and there is therefore no reason to be sure that the outcome of the universe is predetermined. All we know for sure is that the universe is deterministic to some degree, and therefore not totally indeterministic, but to what degree exactly can never be known, and this is the final answer that we can ever get to the question of whether predeterminism is true or not – whether "god" plays dice or not. This is therefore also the final answer to the question about whether we have free will in this other sense: we can safely conclude that we can never know whether we could have acted differently in any given situation.

#  Do We Have Free Will?

Now that the question about determinism has been settled and worries about it should be calmed, we can return to the kinds of freedom defined in the first chapter: free will, self-chosen will and freedom of action, and discuss and answer whether we have these kinds of freedom.

In the first chapter, we defined free will as the ability to choose one's own intentions independently of prior causes. So the question is whether we have free will in this sense, and the answer is "no". A choice cannot possibly be independent of prior causes for the reason that a choice, by definition, is based on, and therefore at least partly caused by, beliefs and intentions. If a choice is not caused by an intention, it cannot meaningfully be called a choice. The same conclusion is also obvious in light of what a choice is in physical terms, namely the result of complex physical processes that take place in our brain, which implies that our choices must be caused by prior physical causes, given that complex physical processes do not spontaneously emerge from nothing.[3] That our choices are the result of physical mechanism is not to say that our choices are caused in any simple way, however. They clearly are not. As neuroscientist Mikkel Vinding has noted, the process of human decision-making cannot meaningfully be compared to a billiard ball that hits another billiard ball as it often is, but rather with millions of billiard balls hitting millions of billiard balls.[4]

Contrary to our intuitions, we humans are not ultimately independent individuals – we are not some entity apart from our brain who is controlling our brain and body, as we often seem to express it. The brain just regulates itself in response to inputs through complex physical processes, and some of these processes give rise to – or perhaps rather are – an illusive experience of being a non-physical self-entity. This is not to say that we are victims of the physical processes of the universe, but rather that we are a part of the physical unfolding of the universe, and that our choices and actions are a part of the physical processes taking place in the universe. We surely do make choices and act based on our beliefs and intentions, but our choices and actions are always caused by ultimately unchosen prior causes, and this remains true whether they are influenced by an itself uncaused quantum event or entirely caused by an infinite causal chain. Again, a choice is the result of complex physical processes – it is not a quantum fluctuation.

Simply stated, a choice cannot possibly be uncaused by prior causes, and we can therefore not possibly have free will as defined in the first chapter.[5]

The second kind of freedom we defined was self-chosen will. This was defined as the ability to choose one's own intentions. Do we have this ability?

There is no doubt that we can choose to follow some intentions over others – for instance, to follow the want for quitting smoking rather than the want for a cigarette. We can, however, not ultimately choose our own intentions, again since a choice, by definition, always is based on an intention, which means that it is logically impossible to ultimately choose one's own intentions, as that would result in an infinite regress. This also underscores the point that it is impossible to have free will as defined above, since that also requires this impossible ability to ultimately choose one's own intentions.

But where do intentions come from, then, if they cannot ultimately have been chosen? Our natural intentions clearly evolved and are hard-wired in our brain. Our natural desires for social relationships, food, sex and social status have had adaptive functions, and no one chooses to have these natural desires, which in a crude sense can be traced back to our DNA. These natural human desires are, however, not so hard-wired that they cannot be overridden by other desires or intentions, as ascetics who deny many of our natural desires exemplify. Yet such a choice to not follow some natural desires would still be based on an intention which itself could not ultimately be chosen. Generally stated, all intentions must be unintended ultimately, and must be caused by prior causes that ultimately are not chosen.

We do have a great degree of freedom of intention, however, in that we are not determined by our DNA to have a fixed set of intentions or desires that we are bound to follow, as almost all other animals are. On the contrary, we can – in fact in some sense because of our DNA, which can be said to code for our large and highly adaptive brain – consider and reflect on our wants, and based on this we can choose the best among them, which gives us a uniquely broad range of possible intentions.

So we cannot ultimately choose our own intentions, but neither are we bound by our DNA to follow a narrowly fixed set of intentions, and there is surely a freedom in not being bound.

The last freedom we defined was freedom of action, the ability, or freedom, to do what one intends. As mentioned, every intentional being wants to have this ability by definition, and there is no doubt that we do have this freedom, at least to some degree. For instance, we can have the intention to move our hands and then do it, or intend to say something and then say it. We therefore surely can act as we intend to some degree, and we therefore can be said to have freedom of action to some degree.

What gives us this freedom – what enables us to do what we intend, and to have intentions in the first place – is basically our unique human structure and function. It is in our large human brain that our intentions and ability to make decisions based on these intentions reside, and it is this advanced brain and the rest of our body with its unique features: fine motor hands, upright walk, vocal folds etc., that makes us able to do what we intend and able to have such a wide range of expression. It is what enables us to do the uniquely human actions we do, such as driving a car, building space rockets, writing poetry and reflecting over choices and actions. Our freedom of action can therefore also be traced back to our DNA (still in a crude sense) since our biological traits, wherein the capacity to develop all these unique abilities resides, basically are a result of our DNA.[6]

That the freedom we have, both our freedom of intention and freedom of action, ultimately can be traced back to our DNA makes it obvious that this freedom evolved over the course of the evolution of our species. From our worm-like ancestors who were able to find food and reproduce, to modern humans who can consider their own actions and estimate their consequences before carrying them out, greater and greater degrees of freedom – i.e. expanded ranges of possible actions – have evolved. The greater degrees of freedom of action that we have gained as a species over time have, however, not only been an immediate product of biological evolution. The greatest leap in our freedom of action has arguably happened in modern times, in the last hundreds of years, where no significant changes have taken place in our DNA. This recent increase in freedom of action – the emergence of computers, the Internet and democracy – is therefore not the product of recent biological evolution, but instead the product of cultural evolution. However, cultural evolution is of course also in some sense the product of our DNA, since our potential to evolve culturally ultimately also is the product of our DNA in some sense.[7] It is due to our biological mechanism that we have been able to create and develop culture, and it is to a large extent this, our social and cultural nature, that has enabled us to continually increase our freedom throughout the history of our species.

The increase in our freedom that we have developed culturally has obviously not come about by breaking any fundamental laws or limits. On the contrary, the freedom we have gained has to a great degree come about because we got to know natural boundaries and the lawful ways in which the world works. Such knowledge has enabled us to develop new ways of life, to be more in control of things than ever before, and to do more of the things we intend to do. We will obviously never be able to do physically impossible actions, such as levitating or jumping to the moon, since natural constrains make this impossible. However, by studying how the world works we have been able to make machines that can get us off the ground and fly us all the way to the moon. In this way, by acquiring knowledge about the workings of the world, we have expanded our own freedom and done the apparently impossible. And our freedom of action can continue to evolve in that way. For example, traveling to the moon or mars might one day be something that we can do at will as a result of scientific and technological breakthroughs. Such breakthroughs can continue to make us even better able to do the things we want, as they have in the past thousands of years. Likewise, our freedom to do as we intend can also continue to increase by means of societal changes. The degrees of social freedom we have – freedom of speech and freedom from coercion in general – can continue to increase in all parts of the world, as they have done in many parts of the world in the past. So our freedom is not constant; it has been, is, and hopefully will be, evolving continually.

In light of these observations, it is undeniable that we can be said to be free, and this freedom lies in our ability to do as we intend and in our ability to learn from our environment and adapt our actions – and even our intentions – to it. Our freedom does not lie in being independent of prior causes, which we are not. We can willfully cause things to happen, but we are ourselves caused to cause these things to happen. All our actions and intentions are caused by prior causes that have ultimately not been chosen and which ultimately are beyond our own control. In fact, if our actions were completely independent of prior causes, we could not have freedom of action, since our actions then obviously could not be caused by our intentions either. Neither can our freedom of action be a product of, or in any way increased by, uncaused causes involved in our actions. On the contrary, the degree to which we can act as we intend only decreases the more indeterministic the world is, because the less deterministic the world is, the less determinable it is, since there then are fewer causes we can determine outcomes based on, and being able to do as intended depends on determinability: we can only control something to fall out in a given intended way if we have a certain knowledge about how things will unfold in effect of some action.

A good example of this is a soccer player with a great ball control who can make a soccer ball do what he intends it to do. If the ball is round and the ground he plays on is flat, he can control the ball and make it do as he intends because the future movement of the ball in response to his own actions on it is determinable. However, if the ball becomes deformed and the playing ground he is playing on gets bumpy, the soccer player will not be able to control the ball, at least not as well, because he can no longer precisely predict how the ball moves when he kicks it or when it hits the ground – it is indeterminable for him, which diminishes his control.

As this example exemplifies, the more indeterminable the world is, the less we can control anything, and since greater indeterminism only implies greater indeterminability – greater unpredictability – it follows that the more indeterministic the world is, the more limited our ability to do as we intend is. This is not to say that uncaused causes do not play a role when we, say, make a decision – as we saw in the second chapter, we can never exclude whether the world is indeterministic to some small degree – but just that such indeterministic events cannot be the source of our ability to act as we intend, but only an obstacle to it. Only deterministic aspects of the world can be the source of this ability.

That we are not ultimately self-caused causes is not only obvious from the physical facts about the origins of our choices and actions, but also from the point of view of our direct experience. We, as the subject of our experience, actually do not feel like we are the ultimate and primary source of our own intentions and actions. From the perspective of our direct experience, thoughts and intentions are not consciously created and chosen. Instead, they just appear in our conscious experience seemingly out of nowhere, and therefore they seemingly do so without being caused, which is no doubt why we commonly perceive our thoughts and intentions to be independent of prior causes.[8] So even at the level of our direct experience, it actually does not feel like our thoughts and actions are caused by ourselves, the subject of our experience.[9]

Furthermore, if we pay attention to ourselves in yet in another way, it is in fact not difficult to notice that our thoughts and actions are not at all uncaused. If we observe our own mind and actions in relation to external stimuli and our circumstances in general, it is easy to notice that apparently uncaused feelings, thoughts and actions indeed are caused by prior causes. For instance, that one's humming of a song is caused by someone else humming that song earlier, that one's ideas are inspired by other people's ideas, or that one's grumpiness is due to lack of sleep or food.

To sum up the conclusions: We do not have free will as defined in the first chapter, because choices and intentions are physical processes caused by prior causes, and also for the reason that it is logically impossible to have free will in this sense, since a choice by definition is based on an intention, and our intentions can therefore not ultimately be chosen. For the same reason, we do not ultimately have self-chosen will either, but we can reflect on our intentions and choose some intentions over others, which gives us a unique freedom of intention. Likewise, all our actions are caused by prior causes that ultimately are not chosen. We are not self-caused causes, and even our direct experience attests to this. What we do have, however, at least to some degree, is the freedom that we by definition want to have, namely freedom of action – the ability to do as we intend – and this is a freedom we can continue to expand.

The uniquely human freedom that we have, the freedom that we humans have which no other animal has, is clearly a product of our unique biological traits and the cultural evolution that these traits have made possible. It could not come from indeterminism at the fundamental level of the universe, since the constituent parts of all animals, including us humans, obey the exact same fundamental laws, and because indeterminism only limits our ability to do as we intend. The unique freedom that we have therefore does not arise because we are independent of prior causes, but rather for the opposite reason: because we are a special causal mechanism that is caused in a special way, which enables us to act according to our own intentions. It is basically the human mechanism – our body, including our large brain – which gives us our unique freedom, and which allows us to increase our freedom through social collaboration. It is what gives us such a wide range of possibilities, and what enables us to take our future in our own hands.
Part II

What Should We Believe about Human Freedom?

#  Benefits of Realizing the Truth

Following the first part, which dealt exclusively with what is true about human freedom, this second part is about what we ought to believe about human freedom. I will here argue that realizing the truth about our own freedom will benefit us greatly, and that this therefore is what we ought to believe about it: the truth.

The chapter is divided into two sections. The first one is about the perhaps hottest topic in the debate over human freedom, namely our practice of reward and punishment in light of the fact that we are causally functioning beings, while the second section aims to relieve the remaining fears there could be of realizing the truth about human freedom.

Reward and Punishment

The perhaps most common fear of realizing the truth about human freedom is that people cannot meaningfully be punished or rewarded for their actions if they are not unmoved movers, and that there therefore could be no meaningful practice of justice if we realized that we indeed are not unmoved movers.[10] As we shall now see, this fear is unjustified. What we should feel in light of realizing that we are causal beings is not fear, but rather hope, since knowing that, and how, we are caused to act actually enables us to improve our practice of reward and punishment.

The first thing we should be clear about in order to say whether it makes sense to reward and punish people is what the ultimate goal of rewarding and punishing is. I would argue that what ultimately matters is the well-being of conscious beings – that conscious beings are as free from suffering and as flourishing as possible, and that this therefore should be, in a truly normative sense, the ultimate goal of our actions (I defend and elaborate on this controversial claim in my book Moral Truths: The Foundation of Ethics). And this, I would argue, should therefore also be the ultimate goal of rewarding and punishing people, and of our practice of justice in general.

Presently, our practice of justice seems to be driven mainly by an intuitive sense of justice rather than the goal of minimizing suffering and maximizing well-being. This intuitive sense of justice is a retributive one – people should be punished because they in a deep sense deserve to be punished for their actions. While this retributive intuition has enabled us to live in large social groups without an organized justice system, it does not, and never did, guide us to do what maximizes our well-being, one reason being that it is blind to unnecessary suffering, and hence our natural urge to punish and take revenge on other people for their bad actions clearly should not be the supreme driving force behind our practice of justice.[11]

It would be better, I maintain, if our practice of justice were guided by the goal of maximizing well-being, and realizing that we are caused to act by causes beyond our own control only helps us to realize this. It makes it clear that the foundation of our present practice of justice makes no sense, and thereby it helps us realize that we must base it on a better foundation. Crudely put: that our practice of justice should have the goal of maximizing our collective well-being rather than maximizing vengeance. In this way, realizing the truth about our own freedom seems like a shortcut toward putting our practice of justice on the right foundation. That the goal of our practice of justice should be to minimize harm and maximize happiness and safety holds true, I would argue, no matter what is true about the causes of our actions. Realizing that we are caused to act by causes that are ultimately beyond our own control just helps us realize it. It causes our sense of retributive justice to crack, which allows the light of ethical clarity to shine in.

Basing our practice of justice on the goal of harm minimization would amount to a fundamental change in our approach to justice. It would force us to think more in terms of the consequences of what we do and can do in our practice of justice, and thereby it would give our knowledge, rather than our primitive intuitions, a central role in our practice of justice. For it is only by basing our actions on knowledge and reasonable beliefs that we can aim our actions toward good outcomes in a qualified way.

Once we put our practice of justice on the right foundations, we can begin, starting from where we are now, to gradually optimize this practice on every level based on what we know about how to best prevent crime, and continue to do this, of course in reasonable and careful steps, as we acquire new knowledge and come up with new good ideas about it. This will lead us away from a more or less vengeance-based practice of justice toward one where we punish and rehabilitate people to the extent that has the best consequences according to our best estimates. Hopefully this is the future of justice.

Were we to change our practice of justice in this direction now, as we indeed should, we would surely still both punish and incarcerate people in some way, since punishing people who have committed crime undeniably does deter other people from committing crime, and since incarceration of certain individuals, such as murderous psychopaths, is the best way we know of to prevent them from killing and terrorizing other people. In these ways, our practice of justice will not be fundamentally different from what it presently is, but it will, however, still be different, and better, in many ways. Basing our practice of justice on the understanding that we are all caused to act by causes beyond our own control would, for instance, make us realize that the hard distinction we presently make in our practice of justice between a mentally ill person and a sane person does not make sense, and that a rigid conception of moral responsibility does not make sense either. There are of course good reasons to treat the mentally ill differently in our practice of justice. For instance, punishing them for the purpose of deterring other people from committing crime seems less necessary because our treatment of a mentally ill person does not constitute a general example for how most people should expect to be treated, and people who are mentally ill are also generally different in that they often need treatment rather than punishment, and they can often be helped in various ways. However, we should not be blind to the fact that people who are not diagnosed as mentally ill often have mental problems too, and can be helped as well. And, most crucially perhaps, unlike what seems implicitly supposed in most systems of justice today, it is true both in the case of "normal" people and those who suffer from mental illness that all actions are caused by causes that are ultimately not chosen. Once we appreciate this fact, we are forced to abandon the notion that mentally ill and mentally sane individuals are fundamentally different, a notion that causes much confusion in our practice of justice today.

A more knowledge-based practice of justice would also help us avoid the common biases that presently influence our practice of justice and cause various injustices. For instance, it has been documented that attractive people tend to get shorter sentences than unattractive people for the same crimes, and that black people tend to receive longer sentences compared to white people for the same crimes in the United States.[12] It must be possible to get beyond such unjust practices, and becoming aware of them seems a necessary first step.

Furthermore, such a consequentialist practice of justice would also be better than our present one in that it would focus more directly on crime-prevention, since it is forward-looking rather than backward-looking, as our present one is. This would be a huge improvement, since the purpose of our practice of justice after all is to prevent crime: to keep us from harming other beings. Or at least it should be.

Preventing crime before it happens would surely be the ideal thing to do, and in the case of serious crimes, this is often true even if it takes forced treatment of people. Just consider all the suffering that would be avoided if we could prevent just one major crime, such as a terrorist attack. It may sound totalitarian to forcefully treat people, but it really is not, since it would also benefit the people who would otherwise become criminals. It would give them more freedom and serve them better than if they were put in prison, as they would alternatively be. If, for instance, a person has murderous intentions that he cannot be talked out of, or a lack of self-control that would equally result in that he will commit murders, and if cognitive training or a medical or surgical treatment without side effects could cure him of this, then using this would not just serve the people who would otherwise have been killed, their relatives, friends and communities, but also the criminal himself – it would help him avoid ruining his own life too. If he is cured from his pathology, he can live a free and happy life rather than spending the rest of his life in prison for the safety of others. Clearly, the availability and use of such a treatment would benefit everyone and prevent much needless suffering, and this underscores both the need for a focus on consequences rather than retribution in our practice of justice, and the need for applying our knowledge in it, since we cannot provide such treatments otherwise. Having such a treatment and withholding it from someone for the reason that he has not yet done anything wrong, and insisting to wait and then punish him as he has deserved when he has committed a crime – which is to insist on a retributive justice – would be primitive and apathetic, as retribution always is. As the criminal justice systems around the world are.[13]

An analogous example from the real world may be helpful in order to see that a treatment of serious criminal tendencies without serious side effects ought to be used for everyone's sake if available:

A middle-aged man who lived together with his wife and stepchild began acting strangely: he gradually became more and more sexually obsessed, and began watching child pornography. He eventually also made sexual advances toward his own stepdaughter, which his wife discovered and reported, and the man was soon on his way to prison. He never got there, however, as he complained about a terrible headache, which landed him a hospital to get a brain scan. The brain scan revealed a large tumor in the man's orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is highly involved in decision-making and self-control. The tumor was removed, and the man's sexual desire came back to normal. A year later, the sexual obsession returned, and a new brain-scan revealed that a small part of the tumor had not been removed, and had started regrowing. The tumor was removed, and the man's sexual obsession disappeared again.[14]

This example underscores well some of the points made in the first part of the book: that our wants and decisions are physical processes that take place in our brain, and that our actions are determined by these processes, which we have not ultimately chosen ourselves. Second, the example perfectly shows, as argued above, that if a relatively safe treatment for grossly harmful behavior is available, it ought to be used. This point is easy to see in this case, since the harmful behavior is caused by an abnormality, but it is true no matter what in the brain is responsible for the criminal tendency, be it a tumor or a non-cancerous mechanism, since both of them ultimately are equally not chosen and equally undesirable.

Treating, educating and training people to not commit crime or cause harm will surely improve society immensely, but it is unfortunately unlikely to obliterate punishment completely, at least in the near future. Punishment is an effective way of deterring people from committing crime, so in order to prevent crime it therefore seems a necessary evil to exemplify that committing crime, especially intentionally, will have some kind of bad consequence.

The fact that our actions are caused by prior causes does, contrary to the common fear, not render reward and punishment meaningless. On the contrary, it is exactly what makes reward and punishment meaningful, since promises of reward and punishment are causes that have effects on our behavior. The same is true of admiration and condemnation, and opinions in general, of actions and intentions. We humans are social animals for which the opinion of other people has a huge impact on our behavior. Admiring and rewarding certain traits and abilities, such as altruism and self-sufficiency, therefore does promote these, and condemning and punishing people for their actions also impacts the way both they and other people behave. The recent demise of racism in the West is a good example of this. This demise has been due to cultural evolution – due to it no longer being socially acceptable to hate other people because of their ethnicity. And the fact that all racism and all other morally dysfunctional attitudes and actions that occur and ever have occurred have been caused by prior causes that ultimately were not chosen does not make such attitudes and actions less condemnable or less worth eradicating.

Understanding that we are caused to act by prior causes will not obliterate punishment, reward, condemnation, admiration or any other kind of healthy social attitude. A better understanding of ourselves and how we interact socially would indeed reveal the importance of these, and also reveal what we should be rewarded and punished for, and how, in order to bring about a more flourishing and just society. In this way, realizing the truth about our own freedom and having an understanding of how we function would in fact enable us to optimize our practice of reward and punishment rather than ruin it, which shows that the fear of realizing the truth about how we function and how free we are is misguided.

In fact, what we should fear and what would be dangerous would be not understanding our own freedom properly. Holding on to the intuitive idea that we are unmoved movers who can occasionally be the victim of physical causes that can excuse any action would be catastrophic. In the worst case, this could result in that criminals of all kinds could go free of all charges for the reason that they were caused to act as they did by external causes that were ultimately beyond their own control. As mentioned earlier, this is indeed always true: all our actions are caused by prior causes that ultimately are not chosen, but this is no reason not to punish people – unless one insists on a retributive justice, of course. Insisting on a retributive justice would indeed, if criminals could defend themselves by saying that their actions were caused by unchosen causes, result in that no one could get punished for anything, which would result in pure anarchy. This shows well why it is important to get beyond retributive justice and the dualism it is based upon: the idea that there is a physical body and someone who inhabits and controls this body, where this inhabitant is the one who can meaningfully be punished for his actions. Only by understanding the truth about our own freedom can such untrue and potentially harmful ideas be put out of influence.

It should be clear that a practice of justice based on bringing about the best outcomes, and informed by relevant knowledge about ourselves, would be better than one where we punish people purely based on intuition, which is basically the only thing we can do if we do not have or apply any knowledge about our own causal nature. A knowledge-based practice of justice would also be a more humane one, as it would be based on the understanding that we are all caused to act by ultimately unchosen prior causes. This understanding helps us look toward even the most murderous psychopath with compassion instead of blind hate, and to soberly treat him in the way which, according to our best estimate, brings about the best outcome: the least harm and the most safety, freedom and comfort in society. No illusions are needed in order for us to do this, quite the opposite.[15]

This practice of justice is probably not going to be implemented anywhere in the near future, although it successfully could be already now. It seems inevitable, however, that we eventually will change our practice of justice in this way when the fact that we function mechanistically is widespread and no longer controversial. The first step toward this practice of justice is to admit that we are not ultimately self-caused, unmoved movers, but mechanistically functioning beings. Not realizing this seems to be the main reason that our practice of justice has not gone beyond retribution and become consequensialist and knowledge-based. The illusion of free will, the illusion that we are unmoved movers, is therefore one that we have every, not just intellectual, but also moral reason and obligation to get beyond rather than remain in.

Relief for Common Fears of Realizing the Truth

A common fear of realizing the truth about our own freedom, of realizing that we are causally functioning beings who are caused to act by causes beyond our own control, is that this knowledge will dehumanize us and make our lives meaningless. This strikes me as a strange fear. Why do we have to believe ourselves to be more than a large-brained mammal who lives within the confines of natural law in order to live a kind and happy life? We don't. Contrary to this common fear, knowledge about how we function seems more likely to empower us to humanize ourselves. For instance, with knowledge about what the biological basis of compassion and love is, we will likely become able to increase these, and, similarly, knowing the underlying mechanisms of tribalism and hate, and how to effectively turn these down, will most likely enable us to effectively minimize these evils.

Moreover, knowledge about our own mechanism can also help us become more free by helping us increase our freedom of action in our daily lives, for instance by making us better at acting according to our deepest intentions rather than acting out of impulsive desires that we immediately regret. This is something we already know a good deal about, as we know that self-control can be improved, and we even know how, for instance by using one's non-dominant hand more, and it should beyond doubt be a high priority for us to train this skill. Just consider some of the problems the inability to act according to our deepest intentions and interests causes in this world: immense amounts of both economic and violent crime, debt, adultery, procrastination, obesity, smoking and all other kinds of addiction.

A similar upgrade to our freedom of action and well-being can also be gained by becoming aware of another related aspect of our own mechanism, namely how we tend to be under the influence of certain biases and illusions in our reasoning. Being aware of what we know about these biases and illusions would surely improve our decision-making greatly, and thereby help us navigate better toward our preferred ends, both individually and collectively, which reveals the enormous importance of educating ourselves about ourselves and our pitfalls.

Yet another way I think realizing the truth about our own mechanism is for the better – just to keep on attacking any remaining fear or opposition there could be of knowing our mechanistic nature – is that being aware of the fact that we are all caused to act by prior causes beyond our own control likely makes us more compassionate, understanding and generous toward other people, and few virtues could be more important to promote. To become aware, for instance, when other people are in need or behave badly, that their situation and actions are the product of prior causes that they have not chosen themselves, and which they therefore in no deep sense "deserve" to suffer further from.

Hence it seems to me that knowing our own mechanism, and just knowing that we are mechanistic, causal beings, is not only good, but urgently needed in this world today. The first step toward gaining such knowledge about ourselves and about how we flourish is to admit that there is such knowledge to be gained in the first place.

Another apparently common fear is that knowing that something is predetermined would make it boring or worthless. Yet such a fear is evidently wrong. For instance, seeing a movie or a taped sports game that one has never seen before and does not know the outcome of can be as exciting as anything, even though one knows that the outcome has already been entirely determined and recorded at the moment one watches it. What ultimately matters to us is not whether the events we observe, including our own actions, are caused by prior causes or not, or even whether they are totally predetermined or not, but just whether we and our fellow sentient beings are happy or not, and merely knowing that we are caused to act by prior causes, which is all we can know in relation to the question of determinism versus indeterminism, does not seem to diminish our happiness in any way.

The last common fear of realizing that we are not unmoved movers is that this realization will cause people to feel that there is no reason to make a difference and do good in the world, and thereby cause us to be fatalistic and give up all efforts to do any good. The reason that this fear is unjustified is first of all that the reasons we have to be good are real no matter whether the outcome of the universe is predetermined or not. Even if there is just one possible outcome of the universe from its present state, the guy who saves lives and helps other people is still doing more good in the world than the guy who does the exact opposite, and the difference between these two does matter, and so does our commitment to be like the former rather than the latter. Another reason why fatalistic attitudes should not follow from knowing that we are not unmoved movers is that it does not follow from the fact that our actions are caused by prior causes that there is only one possible outcome from the present state of the world. Again, we simply do not know whether there is just one or infinitely many possible outcomes from any given state of the world, and we can never know. What we do know, however, is that our intentions, choices and actions do influence the world, and that it therefore matters what they are. Therefore, doing whatever leads to the most flourishing world according to our best estimates is simply the only reasonable thing to do, no matter whether the outcome of the universe is predetermined or not.

Two misunderstandings seem to lie behind this fear of fatalism. The first is a failure to understand the distinction between the following two claims: 1) that we are not the ultimate cause of our own actions, which we of course are not, and 2) that our intentions, motivations and actions do not have a causal impact on the events in the world, which they do. The second misunderstanding is a failure to understand that our intentions and motivations are not something different from the causal unfolding of the universe, but indeed a part of it – a highly relevant part when it comes to our actions. So while we are not the ultimate causes of our own intentions, motivations and actions, our intentions and motivations are still influential causes of our actions, and they therefore do matter – they do make a difference in the world – and we therefore have every reason to have intentions and motivations to make the world a better place, and to act according to these. This final conclusion makes it seem rather unlikely that the truth about our own freedom would cause any moral anarchy or unhealthy psychological attitudes.[16]

On the contrary, this end conclusion, along with realizing the truth about human freedom in general, actually seems rather psychologically healthy and purifying. Knowing that we are caused to act by causes ultimately beyond our own control, and trying to act so as to maximize the well-being of conscious beings seems to discourage a state of mind where one is caught up in regret and shame over past experiences, and in blaming other people for their past actions, which is rarely a beneficial or rational state of mind. Instead, it seems promote a state of mind where one reasonably and calmly, and "unblamingly", learns from past experiences and acts based on this learning. For instance, when dealing with an annoying person, just to take an everyday example familiar to most of us, one would first of all know that this person is not an unmoved mover, but that he is caused to act by prior causes ultimately beyond his own control, which might make him seem less annoying and enable one to look toward him with compassion. The rational response would then be to either be a causal influence on this person, for instance by politely telling him that he is causing one annoyance, or to ignore him and not be bothered by him, which may in some cases be the best thing to do for one's own safety. The most common response, however, seems to be the irrational middle-way: to continue to get more and more annoyed and yet do nothing about it.

I have argued in this chapter that realizing the truth about our own freedom is unlikely to have the grave consequences commonly feared. On the contrary, realizing the fact that we are caused to act by prior causes beyond our own control, along with the fact that our intentions and actions have an impact in the world, will most likely be for the better. It will force us to get beyond primitive practices of punishment and to instead soberly punish for the only reason that punishment ultimately ought to be used: to minimize future harm and crime. If anything, the thing we have to fear is that we do not understand the most basic truths about human freedom, as it is exactly confusion about human freedom rather than an understanding of it that leads to belief in fatalism, dangerous ideas about reward and punishment and belief in human powerlessness – beliefs that are all as wrong as can be. The truth is that we can make a difference in this world and change it for the better, and nothing enables us to do this better than understanding ourselves and the world we live in. That is why we should realize the truth about human freedom.

#  Conclusion

I think this short examination has provided some clear conclusions about human freedom that allow us to answer the most important questions about it, such as the questions posed in the introduction:

Can we make choices?  
Yes, we both can and do make choices. We can consider different possible actions and pick one among them, and this process is a complex physical process that takes place in our brain. It is true that we are caused to make the choices we make by prior causes beyond our own control, but this does not mean that we do not make choices, nor that we have no good reason to make good choices, which we do, since our choices indeed do have an influence in the world.

Can we be said to be free in any way if our actions are caused by prior causes beyond our own control?  
Yes. We can be said to be free in the sense that we, at least to some degree, can act freely, as in unconstrained within a certain range of possible actions, according to our own intentions. This is the freedom we by definition want to have, and it is a freedom that we can increase, since the range of actions we can perform can be expanded. Furthermore, we can also be said to have a certain freedom of intention, as our intentions are not narrowly constrained by our genes. We are uniquely free in these ways, not because we are non-mechanistic and uncaused, but because of our mechanistic nature and the way we cause actions to happen.

Is there just one possible, predetermined outcome of the universe?  
We do not know whether there is just one or infinitely many possible outcomes from the present state of the universe, and, as made clear in the second chapter, we can never know. All we can say is that the state of the universe at least to some degree is caused to be the way it is by its prior states.

Could we have acted differently than we did in a given situation?  
We can never know whether we could have acted differently in any given situation, but if we had acted differently, it would still be due to causes that were ultimately beyond our own control. This does not imply that we have no reason to try our best to create a better world, however. We have every reason to do so, and no reason not to.

Can we meaningfully reward and punish people for their actions?  
Yes. Rewarding and punishing are practices that have an impact on the way we act, and it therefore makes sense to reward and punish people. Punishment, reward and any other kind of motivation is therefore not undermined by the knowledge that we are caused to act by ultimately unchosen causes, but in fact rather the opposite, since a better understanding of how we are caused to act will enable us to improve our practice of punishment and reward.

Can there be any morality if we do not perceive ourselves and other people as unmoved movers?  
Yes. We need not delude ourselves about what we are, nor about the causal origins of our actions, in order to create a better world. Quite the contrary.

I cannot see that there are any remaining unresolved problems related to the traditional problem of free will at this point. Sure, there is still much to be known about our intentions and choices – for instance, how these are formed at the level of the brain, and what the role of consciousness is in different kinds of decision-making, and studies will hopefully continue to reveal more about this. Such studies will, however, not change any of the conclusions made in this book. We know we cannot choose our own intentions, as that would require an infinite regress – i.e. it is logically impossible – and we know that every human choice and action is caused by ultimately unchosen prior causes, since that follows from the simple, undeniable fact that a choice is not a simple event but the product of complex physical processes. We do not need to know more in order to draw these final conclusions.

The debate over human freedom, or free will, seems unlikely ever to be settled, as people seem determined to keep on arguing about free will without clarifying what they are actually arguing about. I do, however, have the optimistic hope that this book has helped clear up some of the confusion and misunderstandings that surround the debate about human freedom. Most importantly, I hope it has made clear that we have every good reason to do the best we can to improve this world. This is our obligation: To use our unique freedom to create the best world we can.
Afterword

A criticism that seems tempting to level at this book is that it does not engage sufficiently in the contemporary debate over free will. This is indeed true, but I don't think this stands among the many faults of this book. The aim of this book was to draw some final conclusions about what is true about human freedom, including what is true about what we ought to believe about it, and it is quite obvious to me that focusing directly on this question itself is the superior approach in order to reach that end. In contrast, I think that a focus on the contemporary debate would only bring confusion, as it seems to me that most of the contemporary debate over free will is generally confused. This claim begs some justification and elaboration, and I should like to provide both here in this lengthy afterword.

What I will do in this afterword is to give some reflections on the contemporary debate over free will in order to show some of the various ways in which this debate is confused.

The Complete Confusion

I shall first of all like to focus on the most common points of confusion about the subject of free will. These points of confusion seem overlooked by many laymen as well as by many professional philosophers, and it is because people overlook these relatively simple points of confusion – not because human freedom is such a complex subject, but because of conceptual confusion – that human freedom looks like such a messy and difficult subject. When we get behind these points of confusion and see through them, which is easy once we are aware of them, it becomes easy to think clearly about the subject of human freedom, and to see the various ways in which people fail to do this.

Confusion due to Lack of Definition

The first and most obvious, yet also most missed point of confusion, is that the term 'free will' does not have any self-evident meaning. People mean vastly different things by the term 'free will', and while this is not necessarily a problem in itself, it is a problem that people are not aware of it, and that they speak as though what they understand by 'free will' must be what everybody else understands by it too.

Some people understand free will to be an ability to act independently of prior causes (this is not far from how free will was defined in this book), others think we have free will if we could have acted differently (this is what was dealt with in the second chapter), others again define it as the ability to act as they intend (what I defined as freedom of action), and yet others again, perhaps the vast majority of people, do not have a clear conception of what they take 'free will' to mean. When people then begin to discuss the subject of free will with each other without first clarifying what they mean by 'free will', they are bound to have a confused debate.

All this confusion could be easily avoided if we agreed upon a single conversational rule in discussions over the subject of free will: whenever you mention the term 'free will', you must clearly define what you mean. If we adopted this rule in the contemporary debate over free will, a lot of confusion would be cleared up rather quickly, as people would then begin to realize where many, if not most, and in some cases even all of their disagreements lie: in how they define free will. So simple, yet so missed.

Confusion due to Dualism

Another common point of confusion in the debate over free will is the failure to realize that there is not a dichotomy between 1) our intentions, motivations and choices, and 2) the physical world. The fact is that our intentions and choices are a part of the physical world. Many people seem to believe that there is a conflict between that all our actions are caused by physical causes, and that we can act according to our own intentions and make an impact in the world, probably because our intentions and choices do not subjectively feel like they are physical processes. That is exactly what they are, however, and there is therefore no conflict between saying that our brain is causing our actions, and that our intentions are causing them.

It is this point of confusion that questions like the following arise from: "If the outcome of the world is just determined by physical causes that are caused by other physical causes, then why do anything at all?" Because all our intentions, choices and actions also are physical processes that influence the world. So that, if any doubt remains at this point, is why we should intend, choose and do anything at all: because that is how we, as physical systems, impact the world. That is how we can impact the world for the better.

Confusion of Different Levels

Confusion of different levels was, like the confusion due to lack of definition, mentioned shortly in the introduction to this book. As I wrote, people often confuse questions on different levels, such as subatomic, neurobiological and societal levels, in rather meaningless ways. The following quote from physicist Michio Kaku is a good example of confusion of different levels:

"God" does play dice. Every time we look at an electron, it moves. There is uncertainty with regard to the position of the electron. So what does that mean for free will? It means, in some sense, we do have free will. No one can determine your future events given your past history.

(Kaku, 2011)

There are many points of confusion to be found in this short quote, and they are not just confusions of different levels, and it is worth taking a closer look at these points of confusion. First of all, Kaku makes the mistake of taking indeterminability to imply indeterminism, which it does not. As mentioned in the second chapter, the fact that we are unable to determine the outcome of certain events exactly does not mean that these events are not completely causally determined. Second, Kaku does not define free will, and we therefore get confusion due to lack of definition, since it is unclear precisely what he means by 'free will', and maybe he does not even have a clear conception of what he means by it himself. We can, however, based on some of the things Kaku mentions before he says what is quoted above, be reasonably sure that what he understands by free will is something that he thinks is morally important, and something that is relevant for our practice of guilt and punishment – he for instance talks about mass murderers and guilt in relation to a deterministic universe, and seems to suggest that indeterminism provides justification for our practice of guilt and blame. To think that free will in Kaku's sense has such relevance is a mistake, however, and a confusion of different levels, because no fact about the mechanics of matter on the subatomic level does in itself say anything at all about whether it makes sense to punish people or not. It simply has no relevance. Whether it makes sense to punish people ultimately comes down to the consequences of punishment, not whether we can determine the position of an electron or not, or even whether its movement is genuinely indeterministic or not. Using quantum mechanics to argue about any morally relevant kind of freedom is to make a category error.

Kaku also seems to insinuate that we have free will because it is impossible to determine what we are going to do in the future. (It is here worth noting that, as mentioned in the second chapter, our actions are unpredictable even if the universe is totally deterministic, so if Kaku thinks that we have free will because "no one can determine your future events given your past history," then we actually have free will in a totally deterministic universe according to him as well.) Here, Kaku is not alone, since many people, including other physicists, such as Stephen Wolfram and Jim Al-Khalili, also seem to consider free will to lie in unpredictability. This is, however, a strange notion of freedom, because according to this definition of free will, every other unpredictable system must also have free will: both trees, single-celled organisms and weather systems – in fact every system in the real world must have free will. It therefore seems that unpredictability hardly is the defining trait of any kind of relevant or valuable freedom.

This touches upon another confusion of different levels: confusing what might be indeterminism at the subatomic level with any kind of valuable and uniquely human freedom. As made clear in the third chapter, it is not the case that the valuable freedom we have, the freedom to do as we intend, is a product of indeterminism; as mentioned, indeterminism in fact only limits our ability to do as we intend. Again, the uniquely human freedom and abilities that we have and value, such as our abilities to plan for the future and be well-considered, do not lie in fundamental aspects of the matter we are made of, which is obvious from the fact that we are made of the same matter as flowers and jellyfish. Clearly, the freedom we have and cherish is a product of our biology, of our unique higher-order structure, and it is important to see that it is at this level and up that our cherished abilities arise. They do not arise from the lack of predictability of the motion of electrons.

Confusion about "Responsibility"

Another common point of confusion in the debate over free will is that the fact that we are caused to act by causes beyond our own control should imply that we cannot hold people accountable for their actions. In other words: that it means that people are not responsible for their actions. A lot of this confusion arises because people overlook that we use the word 'responsibility' in two distinct senses. What is often meant by the statement that we are not responsible for our own actions is that we are not the ultimate causes of our own actions, which we indeed are not. Yet this should not be conflated with the other sense of the word responsibility: that we can be held accountable for our actions. As can be seen, these are different senses of the same word, and the failure to see this distinction causes a lot of confusion, which is only understandable since the truth about responsibility in the one sense is exactly the opposite of the truth about the other: it is true that we are not responsible in this first sense, but that we are responsible in this second sense. We are not the ultimate causers of our own actions, but we can meaningfully be held accountable for our actions, since this brings about good consequences, and that is what matters in the end.

The Great Non Sequitur

This last point of confusion is widespread, and also dangerous. It is the belief that the fact that we are caused to act by prior causes ultimately beyond our own control implies that there is no reason to try to make a difference in the world. This must be considered the biggest non sequitur in the free will-debate, because it simply does not follow. To the contrary, our being part of the causal unfolding of the universe exactly gives us that we should do our best to have the best influence we can in the world. That it indeed is a non sequitur was made clear at greater length in the section 'Relief for Common Fears of Realizing the Truth' in the fourth chapter.

The Contemporary Debate

Now that some of the most common points of confusion in our thinking about the subject of free will have been pointed out, it seems appropriate to expose some more specific aspects of the contemporary debate over free will that cause confusion, such as the commonly used terminology and popular "positions."

Compatibilism versus Incompatibilism

Many philosophical debates about the subject of free will quickly become framed in such a way that they are about compatibilism versus incompatibilism. This, I think, is the first mistake, since these terms are worse than useless. What the terms refer to are two different "positions" regarding whether the existence of free will is compatible with determinism or not; compatibilism is the position that it is, while incompatibilism is the position that it is not. What should immediately be noticed is that we already here meet the first point of confusion: confusion due to lack of definition – twice actually. First of all, free will is not clearly defined in this context: compatibilists and incompatiblists do not agree what free will means. In fact, the disagreement between incompatibilists and compatibilists is a disagreement about definitions, not a disagreement about how the world is necessarily (although compatibilists of course can have disagreements with incompatiblists in addition to their disagreement about the definition of free will).

That the disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists is a disagreement about the definition of the term 'free will' seems widely missed, which is quite incredible, since this is obvious from the definition of what compatibilism and incompatibilism means: compatibilists think free will is compatible with determinism, and they therefore obviously hold free will to mean something compatible with determinism, while incompatibilists consider free will incompatible with determinism, and their definition of free will is therefore obviously not compatible with determinism.

The second point of confusion due to lack of definition in this context is that determinism is not clearly defined either. Determinism can be defined in many different ways; sometimes it is defined to mean that the universe only has one possible outcome from its present state (defined as predeterminism in this book), and in other instances determinism simply means that the future state of the universe is determined by its prior state to some extent (this is how determinism was defined in this book, and it does not necessarily imply predeterminism).

So what this reveals is that much of the debate over free will takes the form of being a debate between two positions that differ in their view of the compatibility of two different terms, but where not just one of these terms, but both of them, are ill-defined. As mentioned, I think this framing of the debate over free will into being about compatibilism versus incompatibilism is worse than useless. I do not see what the purpose is of fitting the debate into these narrow boxes, especially given how ill-defined they are. Why not just focus on the truth about human freedom rather than playing with these unnecessary and unclear positions?

Much confusion would be avoided if "compatibilists" and "incompatibilists" did not both insist on using this same term 'free will'. If compatibilists, for instance, used the term 'freedom of action' to refer to what they mean by free will – being able to act according to one's intentions – it would be obvious for everyone that this is not the kind of free will that incompatibilists talk about, and that most incompatibilists would agree that we do have that kind of freedom or ability (it is also true that most compatibilists agree with most incompatibilists about that we do not have the free will that the incompatibilists are talking about, which just shows what a circus the debate over human freedom is due to lack of clear definition). The term 'freedom of action' also seems a much better term for the kind of freedom that compatibilists usually refer to with the term 'free will', since they after all are referring to the freedom to act according to one's own intentions. And it should be noted that I am not the first one to point out that this freedom really is a freedom of action; Thomas Hobbes already pointed this out in the 17th century, and so did David Hume about a century later. It is a shame that this seems to have been, if not forgotten, then at least hidden by the insistence on referring to this freedom with the term 'free will', since this has only contributed to the ambiguousness of that term, and thereby added to the already ample confusion in the debate over free will.

Hard Determinism and Libertarianism

Probing further into the free will-debate, we meet two different kinds of incompatibilist positions: hard determinism, which holds that determinism is true and that free will is not compatible with determinism, and libertarianism, which holds that we do have free will and that determinism is false. Given that these positions agree about the definition of determinism, we here actually have a genuine disagreement over fundamental ontological matters – a disagreement about whether determinism is true or not. This is a peculiar question to have strong disagreements about, however, since we know the final answer that we will ever get concerning the truth of determinism: that the state of the world is caused to be the way it is by its prior state at least to some degree, but to what degree exactly can never be known.

The libertarian position has often been criticized with the argument that even if determinism is not true, we still do not have free will, since our actions then simply are the product of a combination of deterministic and indeterministic events that we still do not ultimately choose ourselves, a view referred to as hard incompatibilism. Libertarians do not necessarily accept that this argument shows that we do not have free will, and the reason, or at least a big part of it, should not surprise anyone at this point: they simply define free will differently. According to libertarians, such as Robert Nozick and Robert Kane, one has free will if one could have acted otherwise than one did, and if indeterminism is true, then it may be true that we could have "acted" differently than we did under the exact same circumstances, and that we thereby might have free will in this sense. It should be pointed out, though, that critics of libertarianism are rightly skeptical about the relevance of this kind of free will. First of all, the free will that libertarians endorse is, unlike what many libertarians seem to think, not an ethically relevant kind of freedom, and it does not have anything to do with the freedom of action that we by definition want. Second, the hard incompatibilist is right that no matter what is true about the degree to which the universe is deterministic, our actions are still caused by prior causes ultimately beyond our own control, which few of those who identify themselves as libertarians seem to want to acknowledge. And lastly, the fact that our actions are caused by causes ultimately beyond our own control does, if we truly appreciated, undermine our intuition of retributive justice, an intuition that libertarians generally seem to want to defend intellectually. So, as many have pointed out already, libertarians are simply on a failed mission.

Together with the want to defend retributive blame and punishment, what seems to be the main motivation for people who defend a libertarian notion of free will seems to be a fear of predeterminism, a fear of there being just one possible outcome from the present state of the universe, which would imply that we ultimately cannot do anything to cause a different outcome than the one possible. Libertarians and others with the same fear have artfully tried to make various models to help them overcome this fear, for instance so-called two-stage models that propose that our choices consist of an indeterministic stage of generation of possible actions, and then our non-random choice of one of them. (It should be noted, in relation to such models, that even if this is how our choices are made, our choice to choose one of these "alternative possibilities" will still be caused by prior causes that are ultimately completely beyond our own control. Nothing changes this fact, again because decision-making is the product of complex physical processes; it is not an uncaused event.) It is generally unclear what the purpose of such models is. Are they a hypotheses we should test? They do not seem to be. Generally, these models most of all seem like an attempt to make the world fit our preconceived intuitions, which most of all resembles pseudoscience.

Fortunately, there is plenty of relief available to the libertarians and other people who have this fear, and it does not involve any unscientific models – neither two-stage, three-stage, nor any other number of stages. The source of this relief is the simple earlier-mentioned fact that we can never know whether there is just one or infinitely many possible outcomes from the present state of the universe. This simple fact gives us all the relief we could ask for, because it reveals that there is no reason to be sure that there is just one possible outcome from the present state of the universe. And, to repeat an important point, we are then left with the conclusion that the only reasonable thing to do is to try to make the best impact we can in the world, which is true no matter whether there is just one possible outcome from the present state of the universe or not, since our actions still have consequences and therefore still matter even in a fully deterministic universe.

Some, especially libertarians, might want to object to the claim that we can never know whether determinism is true or not, and even claim that we in fact now know, or at least have good reasons to believe, that indeterminism is true. Here is neuroscientist Peter Tse expressing something along those lines: "Henceforth, I will accept the weight of evidence from modern physics, and assume ontological indeterminism to be the case." (Tse, 2013, p. 244). Making this assumption is, however, to take a position on an unanswerable question.Again, rather than making strong claims about this question, we should stick to what we in fact know, namely that we do not know.

John Searle

Someone who does not get lost in fruitless discussions over positions when it comes to free will is the philosopher John Searle. In his dealing with the problem of free will, Searle has instead taken a step back and thought deeply about what the nature of the problem is. This has led him to consider the problem of free will a hard and serious one – and a special one too:

The special problem of free will is that we cannot get on with our lives without presupposing free will. Whenever we are in a decision-making situation, or indeed, in any situation that calls for voluntary action, we have to presuppose our own freedom.

(Searle, 2007, p. 11)

It is important to note that what Searle means by free will is that our actions are not "sufficiently caused" by preceding causes – this is what Searle claims that we must presuppose in order to make a voluntary action (Searle, 2001, p. 496). So has Searle pointed out a real problem for us here?

First of all, what Searle thinks we need to presuppose is already provided to a relevant degree by the fact that we do not know whether our actions are completely predetermined – it at least gives us that there is no reason to suppose that they are, and it allows us to make the hypothetical supposition that they are not, if this is indeed necessary for us in order to get on with our lives. This is then the next question: is it true that we need to make this supposition in order to make any decision or voluntary action? The short answer is "no". There is no conflict between 1) that we act according to our own will and 2) that we believe what we are going to do or decide is "sufficiently causally" determined. As mentioned earlier, even in a fully deterministic universe, the reasons we have to do good are still real, and our motivations and choices still make an impact in the world, and they are still necessary in order for us to carry out certain actions. For example, we rarely end up baking a bread without having chosen to do so first.

What is crucial when it comes to our decisions is our experience of having an array of possible courses of action that we can choose between, and even if our choices are predetermined, this experience is still as important as we imagine, because this experience and the underlying process of weighing different hypothetical courses of action is what leads to our final and hopefully qualified choice. What Searle seems to miss is that even if we are "sufficiently caused" to act, and believed ourselves to be so, it would not change the fact that we experience and consider alternative possibilities in our direct experience, and that we would still think and act in that way, because that is how we make good decisions – that is how we function, at least when we function well.

So the process of decision-making, including our experience of making decisions that is part of this process, does matter, since it does have an impact in the world. This we know, and, unlike what Searle seems to think, we need not suppose more than this in order to reasonably engage in decision-making and voluntary action. Searle's problem of free will is therefore not so special or problematic after all.

Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris

Two of the most influential and discussed thinkers in the public debate on the subject of free will today are the philosopher Daniel Dennett and the neuroscientist Sam Harris. Their respective approaches to the subject seem to differ much from each other, and since these two different approaches seem to clash, and also since both approaches seem to have many adherents, it seems relevant to take a closer look at these two approaches and the differences between them.

In short, the disagreement between Dennett and Harris is that Dennett says that we do have free will, while Harris says that we do not have free will, and could not possibly have it. This disagreement seems like a rather clear disagreement about what we are and can, but is it? No. The root of the disagreement between Dennett and Harris over the subject of free will is that they define free will in two completely different ways. What Dennett means by free will can roughly be said to be what has been defined as freedom of action in this book – the ability to act according to one's own intentions – while Harris deals with free will in a more traditional sense, which according to Harris seems to rest on two assumptions: "[...] (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present." (Harris, 2012a, p. 6).

The truth is that Dennett and Harris actually are in complete agreement on their respective points about whether we have free will in these different senses of the term: Harris agrees with Dennett's point that we have free will in the sense that we have the unique ability to choose to do actions that we intend, and Dennett agrees with Harris that we do not have free will in the sense of being uncaused authors of our own choices and actions (Dennett, 2013, p. 358; Harris, 2012b). So the disagreement between the two is not about what we are and what we are capable of, but rather (again!) a disagreement about what meaning we should attach to the term 'free will'.

Much confusion would have been avoided if only Dennett and Harris had not chosen the same term for the two different abilities, or notions, they are referring to with the term 'free will', and I think Dennett carries the greatest responsibility for this confusion, because he is the one who insists on giving free will an alternative meaning than the one most people traditionally attach to it. I think that it would have been much wiser of Dennett if he had called his notion of free will for 'freedom of action', first of all because 'freedom of action' simply seems a better term for this ability, since the ability Dennett refers to really is a freedom to act in certain ways. Second, as pointed out above, others have traditionally called what Dennett means by free will for freedom of action, which is another reason why Dennett would have been wise to call it freedom of action: he is causing confusion by giving the term 'free will' a meaning already appropriately attached to another term. Furthermore, the term 'free will' has so many meanings attached to it already, and promoting new ones only seems to promote the confusion that surrounds the subject. Again, it is not that we are not free to define words in any way we want, but clear communication depends on a shared understanding of terms, and if we mean different things by the same terms, we will just have confusion. For instance, if I choose to define the word 'children' to mean money, I will make communicating clearly with other people rather hard for myself, and I will make people confused, even if I am careful to point out that I do not mean children in the traditional sense. This, I think, is basically what Dennett does when he promotes what he also himself knows to be an untraditional notion of free will. Why not spare the confusion and call it freedom of action instead? If Dennett did this, he might even get support from the many philosophers and scientists who say that free will is an illusion, because they all agree about this point, and because conveying that we do have freedom of action surely is important, as it is the freedom that we by definition want to have.

Dennett does not merely cause confusion by defining free will in an alternative way, but also writes about free will as if his own definition were the only right one: "[...] free will isn't what some of the folk ideology of the manifest image proclaims it to be, a sort of magical isolation from causation." (Dennett, 2013, p. 358). One simply cannot say that most people are wrong about what they understand by this broad and ill-defined term, which ultimately means whatever one defines it to mean. I suspect that what Dennett means here, and what he fails to point out, is that what he understands by free will – basically our ability to act according to our own intentions – is not some kind of magical isolation from causation, and that is of course true. But using the word as if it only had that single, well-defined meaning when the opposite is the case simply creates confusion.

That Dennett and Harris define free will in different ways is a major part of their disagreement, but it is not the only difference between their approaches to the subject, however. There seems to be another major disagreement between them, which has been pointed out by Harris in the following way: "[...] unlike Dan [Dennett], I believe that [the] popular confusion on this point is worth lingering over, because certain moral impulses—for vengeance, say—depend upon a view of human agency that is both conceptually incoherent and empirically false." (Harris, 2012b). So Harris attacks the common notion of free will, the view that we are not caused to act by causes that are ultimately beyond our own control, partly because he considers it ethically relevant to do so, while Dennett does not spend much time on the illusory idea that we are uncaused. I think that Harris is right about his emphasis here, because it is morally relevant to focus on this idea. For some reason, we tend to perceive intentional actions as fundamentally different from other natural events. We do not intuitively perceive them to be the product of a multitude of underlying natural causes, as they indeed are. And it is true that our feelings of hatred and our lust for vengeance to a great extent do depend on our putting intentional actions in such an entirely separate box and on our not seeing the causes of people's actions. When we keep the causal origins of people's actions in mind, our primitive moral intuitions related to punishment are undermined. I have for instance often heard otherwise intelligent and compassionate people express the notion that certain criminals should be tortured in the most terrible ways for what they have done, and such notions also appear as immediate impulses in myself. Yet these intuitions simply break down when it is pointed out and realized that the criminal ultimately was caused to act by impersonal causes. It forces us to think deeper before we make judgments and call for torture and slow death upon others, and it even seems to promote viewing other people with more compassion than otherwise. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow expressed it: "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." And even if no sorrow or suffering were to be found, what we would find in the secret history of anyone is that all their actions were caused by causes that they did not ultimately choose themselves, and hence that hating them makes no sense.

So I think Harris is right about the ethical importance of realizing that we are caused to act by causes that are ultimately beyond our own control. Dennett not only overlooks this, but even seems to deny it explicitly when he writes: "I wholeheartedly agree with the scientific chorus that that sort of free will is an illusion, but that doesn't mean that free will is an illusion in any morally important sense." (Dennett, 2013, p. 358). Surely, it does not imply it, but it is the case nonetheless, and Dennett seems to be missing this point.

I think Dennett and Harris both point out relevant truths about human freedom, and they are not half as much in disagreement as it immediately seems, except when it comes to the ethical relevance of realizing that we are causal beings, where they really do seem to disagree. And this disagreement, their respective views on what we should tell people about free will, actually seems to be what gives rise to their two different approaches: Dennett seems to fear the moral consequences of people being told that they do not have free will, and he therefore focuses on pointing out that we do have free will, while Harris finds it important to point out that we do not have free will. This seems to set the stage for a great face-off over free will: "We do have free will vs. We don't have free will", which is of course silly, since they, as mentioned above, are largely in agreement about what kinds of freedom we in fact have. Again, this confusion could have been avoided completely had Dennett simply used the appropriate term 'freedom of action' instead, which I think would also help him on his moral mission, since it is in fact belief in lack of freedom of action that Dennett is afraid of, and that mistaken belief is surely worth attacking, and many people would probably help him do that if he only made it clear that he is speaking about the most important freedom of all: freedom of action, the freedom we by definition want to have.

It is hopefully clear at this point why I chose not to engage with the contemporary debate over the subject of free will, but instead ignored it altogether. It should be clear that this debate generally suffers from many different points of confusion, which have directed the debate away from what is important, namely the truth about human freedom. What is needed in order to answer the most basic and ethically important questions concerning human freedom is simply to focus directly on answering those questions – no confused terms or "positions" are needed.

And it is indeed important to focus on and convey the truth about human freedom and to clear up confusion about it, because if there are any ideas about human freedom that create moral anarchy, it is, I maintain, the confused and wrongheaded ones. That is why we must go beyond framing this entire subject in terms of: "Do we have free will, yes or no?" because no one-word answer to this question tells us anything of relevance. Rather than trying to answer such bad questions, we should keep the relevant truths about our own freedom in view, for instance that our intentions, motivations, choices and actions do have an impact and do make a difference in the world. Such truths are important to spread, because they should keep the, in the context of this subject, much feared moral anarchy and fatalism at bay, and they should motivate us to have good intentions and make good choices. This is the truth of the matter, and that is all we need.

#  Acknowledgements

I would like to give great thanks to Louise Hemmingsen for always being so supportive and for her immense indulgence and patience with me while I have been writing this book. I would also like to thank my brother, Mikkel C. Vinding, for his critical and helpful comments and perspectives, and for his reading of an early draft of the book. My deep thanks also go to my friend Kaare Andersen who also read an early draft of the book and contributed with useful comments.

#  Notes

* * *

[1] See for instance Kane, 2011.

[2] These definitions diverge from the way these terms are usually defined. Determinism is often defined in the way that predeterminism is defined here, and indeterminism is often defined to mean the opposite of that: that the world does not have only one possible outcome. These common definitions are, however, not ideal for the following discussion, and therefore the terms have been defined in this way.

] Intentions and choices are indeed the product of physical processes in the brain, as various cases of neurological disorders resulting in dramatic alterations in the mechanics of intentions and choices make clear. For instance, people who have alien-hand-syndrome, a condition where patients, usually due to an acquired brain damage, feel that one of their hands is controlled by someone else. See also Eagleman, 2011 ([link), Koch, 2009 (link) and Desmurget et al., (2009) (Link).

[] Personal communication.

[5] A note on the so-called neuroscience of free will: In many discussions of free will, great significance has been given to some neuroscientific studies – for instance Libet et al., 1983 (link) and Soon et al., 2008 (link) – that seem to suggest that decisions are made in the brain before we are conscious of making them – in one study up to several seconds before. This finding goes much against our common intuition, but it is not a surprising finding if one knows that decisions are physical processes. It is obvious that there must be physical processes in the brain that precede any given decision, and these must at least give a good hint of what the decision will be.

Neuroscience will hopefully give us a better understanding of the role and place of consciousness in decision-making and reveal how decisions are made, which are the important aspects of these studies. (It is important to note that while experiments seem to have shown consciousness to be almost redundant in some decision-making, these decisions have only been small and short-timed decisions. The role of consciousness in deciding path of education or where to live seems unlikely to be the same as in choosing between pushing a button with right or left hand.) New neuroscientific studies will, however, not reveal anything new about free will in the sense of being an unmoved mover. The reason being that no matter where in the process of decision-making that consciousness enters, decision-making is still a physical process, and all choices are still caused by ultimately unchosen prior causes. Claiming that it is an open question in neuroscience whether we have free will or not in this sense, and claiming that we cannot be sure that our choices are caused by causes ultimately beyond our own control, is therefore wrong.

The interesting and relevant questions to ask in the field of neuroscience are how decisions are made in the brain and how the brain "creates" the experience of being a doer of actions. A mature neuroscience of decision-making will answer these questions, and these answers will automatically reveal, as neuroscience already has revealed to a great degree, how the notion that we are unmoved movers and notions like "everybody can just choose to live a different life" and "there is always a choice" are as wrong as the old idea of a flat earth at the center of the universe.

[6] It is because of our DNA that we have the biological traits we have. No matter what culture a human beings are raised in, they will end up with the ability to walk upright and use their hands to grab things with, and they will have a large human brain that can learn and understand complex verbal language. No matter how any other animal is raised, they will never have all these abilities.

[7] The potential to learn language, for instance, lies in our DNA – again in a crude sense – but every spoken and written human language has evolved through cultural evolution. So while the potential to learn verbal language in its modern form evolved at some point in our biological evolution, the actual use of verbal language as it is known today did not arise until much later. In this way, cultural evolution can be said to be a way to utilize our human potential.

[8] Baruch Spinoza made the same point in his Ethics in the following way:

So experience itself, no less clearly than reason, teaches that men believe themselves free because they are conscious of their own actions, and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.  
(Spinoza, 1677/1985, p. 496)

[9] This point has also been made in Harris, 2012a, p. 64.

[10] It is often expressed in the way that we cannot have moral responsibility if we have no free will, and if we do not have any moral responsibility, we cannot meaningfully be punished for our actions, and therefore we cannot meaningfully be punished if we do not have free will. But what is this middle-step, moral responsibility? The meaning of the term 'moral responsibility' is, like the meaning of 'free will', usually taken to be self-evident, but it clearly is not. Is moral responsibility what we have when we can meaningfully be punished? If that is the case, then it surely does not follow that we have no moral responsibility just because we are caused to act by prior causes completely beyond our own control. Moral responsibility intuitively seems like an important concept in this context, but at a closer look, we see that it is merely confusing, since the question we should ask in relation to whether it makes sense to punish someone or not isn't whether this person is morally responsible or not, but simply whether punishment makes sense or not. Invoking a quality called 'moral responsibility' just confuses us and leads us away from simply asking and answering the important question we were asking in the first place.

[11] Thereby not said that our natural intuition of blame and punishment is entirely useless – it clearly is not. It evolved because it was useful, and it is clearly important for us in everyday life. People would for instance intuitively blame someone for not performing some duty s/he is able to do, but which s/he does not do out of laziness, while they would not blame someone who is not physically able to do the same thing, though they in effect are doing the same thing: not performing the duty. This intuition makes perfect sense, since blame can have a consequential impact and change the attitude of the lazy person, while it cannot in the second case.

Our intuition of blame and punishment is, however, far from useful in all cases. Aside from being blind toward needless suffering, this intuition also seems to be a prime source of the illusion that people cannot meaningfully be rewarded and punished if they are not unmoved movers. This keeps us from admitting, and from wanting to understand, the causal origins of human behavior, which then keeps us from understanding them and from basing our decisions on such an understanding.

[12] Mazzella & Feingold, 1994 (link); Mitchell, 2005 (link).

[13] An objection in defense of retribution might be that retribution could be defended as a way of achieving well-being since there is a great pleasure in revenge. While there may be some kind of pleasure in taking revenge over people who have committed crime, it is hardly the deepest form of well-being that a human being can feel, and it also seems unlikely to be a kind of pleasure that should be cultivated in order for a society to thrive, but rather one that should be abstained from. Besides, the mere pleasure of revenge would not, according to any sane ethical framework concerned with the well-being of conscious beings, override the freedom of others. The pleasure of revenge alone seems extremely unlikely to justify imprisonment of people, and it is obviously far more unlikely to justify the execution of them.

[14] Eagleman, 2011. (Link)

15] It may seem outrageous to feel compassion for a psychopath, but it is not. The difference between a psychopath and a compassionate and altruistic human being basically only lies in the structure and function of their brains, which none of them have chosen themselves, and we are beginning to understand what these relevant differences are (see for example Gregory et al., 2012 ([link)). Psychopaths are often completely unable to feel compassion because of their brain physiology, which is surely a great loss for them that makes them more than worthy of our compassion.

It should be noted that a sophisticated understanding of our causal nature is not merely a potential source of compassion for criminals. The reason we need such an understanding, more generally speaking, is simply that it is the only thing that gives us a realistic view of what needs to be done. That is why we must try to acquire and apply an understanding of ourselves as much as we can, and why we fail by not doing so. Some people have for instance been let out of prison in spite of the fact that they were highly dangerous psychopaths who did not care about the lives of other people, and many people have been killed as a result. Such mistakes can only come from a lack of understanding of such individuals, since such an understanding indeed would make it obvious that they should never be let out of prison, or that they at least should not be let out before they had changed in fundamental ways (something that may become possible in the future due to technology of different kinds – again, to the benefit of otherwise dangerous people themselves). In this way, a good understanding of ourselves and our own mechanism does not give criminals a free ride, but rather the opposite: it is the best tool we have for securing the most secure ride for all of us.

[16] Some studies seemingly speak against this, for instance Vohs & Schooler, 2008 (link) and Baumeister et al., 2009 (link), but I am rather sure that it is no more than a mere seeming. Summed up shortly, Vohs and Schooler's study, to take that as an example, showed that people who had been exposed to arguments for a belief in determinism were more likely to cheat in some tests than people who had been exposed to arguments for a belief in free will. (It should be noted that psychologist Rolf Zwaan has tried to replicate Vohs & Schooler's results with a much larger group of subjects – 150 compared to 30 in the original study – but without success (Zwaan 2013a (link); Zwaan, 2013b (link)). This suggests that the results found in the original study may just have been a false positive – or explainable by the fact that about half of the subjects were Mormons!) Many aspects of this study are open to severe criticism, but one major problem with the study, and other studies of its kind, is, as is almost always the case when free will is mentioned, that it is not clear what the 'free will' that was endorsed precisely entailed. Seemingly, it was not the free will defined in this book – being an unmoved mover. The free will endorsed in this study was, it seems, rather that our intentions can and do cause our own behavior. As we have seen, this is indeed true, even though we are not the ultimate causes of our own behavior.

Judging by the information in Vohs and Schooler's article, the truth about our freedom is in fact more in line with that we have the kind of free will referred to in the study than with the determinism referred to, which seemingly referred to predeterminism, and perhaps even to fatalism – the idea that our intentions and actions have no impact on the way the world unfolds.

I do not think that the moral anarchy apparently induced in some people in this study was caused by that these people suddenly came to know the truth about human freedom, but rather the exact opposite: that it was caused by a complete lack of understanding of the truth about human freedom (again, if anything close to moral anarchy indeed was induced in the first place). If moral anarchy did arise, I suspect it was due to a belief in the false dichotomy warned against earlier in this chapter: the dichotomy between "I did it" and "It was physical causes that did it", which can easily lead to: "Since it is all physical causes that govern me, who can blame me for what I do?" Again, this dichotomy is a false one, but if believed in, it can have bad consequences.

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