Free Will and Evolution E-Book

Ingvar Johansson

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: ProtoSociology - Publications on Contemporary Pjilosophy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 132

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The book Free Will and Evolution defends the old notion of free will, according to which such a will is incompatible with determinism and not identical with mere indeterminism. The defense is made from an entirely secular evolutionary perspective. The theory of evolution - properly considered - is argued to be fully compatible with a belief in in a little bit of free will. Moreover, it is claimed that a complete denial normally contains a kind of contradiction. Not a logical contradiction, but a so-called performative contradiction. The denial argued for contradicts the very existence of argumentative discourses.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1

Freedom of action in human beings

Chapter 2

Why it seems absurd to believe in free will

Chapter 3

Why it is absurd to completely deny the existence of free will

Chapter 4

The core of the problem elucidated

Chapter 5

Emergence and spontaneity in the natural sciences

Chapter 6

Awareness phenomena and evolution

Chapter 7

Free will before the Scientific Revolution

Chapter 8

Free will from an evolutionary perspective

Chapter 9

Evolutionary biologists and free will

Chapter 10

Freedom of action in perception

Chapter 11

Free will and morality

Chapter 12

Concluding summary and hopes

References

PREFACE

With this little book, I wish to demonstrate that not all philosophers have given up on the belief that humans sometimes have a little bit of free will. All states, events, and processes in the world can, in my opinion, not be explained solely through causal factors, regardless of whether these are seen as completely determining or only determining with a certain degree of probability. It is not the case that everything happens due to necessity or chance. Sometimes, humans have a little bit of freedom of action and—more often yet—a will that is, within certain limits, free. For a long time, this opinion has not been held in high regard among philosophers and scientists, especially not among natural scientists and social scientists of the structuralist proclivity.

After tentatively starting to write this book in the early autumn of 2020, my motivation to finish the work was reinvigorated in an unexpected way later in October, when the three recipients of the Nobel Prize in physics were announced. One of them, Roger Penrose (b. 1931), has long held the door open to a belief in free will. Though he was not given the award for these opinions, of course. He received it for his theories on how black holes are formed in the universe.

To me, it feels as though, toward the end of the 20th century in the academic West, belief in free will was sucked into a cultural black hole. Once matter and radiation has been absorbed by a physical black hole, they can—according to prevailing theories—never escape again (except for any possible Hawking radiation). Yet I allow myself to remain optimistic that a belief in free will may yet escape the black hole by which it has been swallowed.

In Shadows of the Mind (1994), Penrose writes: ‘This book will not supply an answer to these deep issues [about free will], but I believe that it may open the door to them by a crack—albeit only by a crack’ (p. 36). His words brought to my mind a famous line from the song ‘Anthem’ by Leonard Cohen (1934– 2016): ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.’

The most central chapter of this book is Chapter 3, ‘Why it is absurd to completely deny the existence of free will’. It can be read independently of the other chapters. The same goes for Chapter 11, ‘Free will and morality’.

Two of the chapters are significantly more philosophically finicky than the others, and thus likely to be more difficult for most readers to immediately digest. These are Chapter 7, ‘Free will before the Scientific Revolution’, and Chapter 8, ‘Free will from an evolutionary perspective’. Yet I hope and believe that a quick reading of these chapters may give any reader a sense of how I want to tackle certain philosophers’ arguments as to why free will is an illusion.

For valuable comments on a previous draft of the book or parts of it—both supportive and requiring me to rethink—I wish to thank: Jan Almäng, Thomas Caesar, Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson, Nils-Aage Larsson, Ida Linde, Niels Lynøe, Carl Gustaf Olofsson, Svein Solberg, Christer Svennerlind, Per-Olof Westlund, and Olof Öhlén.

Ingvar JohanssonLund, Sweden, December 2021

Chapter 1

FREEDOM OF ACTION IN HUMAN BEINGS

Sometimes when we want to do something, we can just go ahead and do it. But other times, we are prevented by people or other external circumstances. Sometimes, we are prevented by such things as disease. In both kinds of cases— external and internal obstacles—most people would probably consider their restricted freedom of action as consistent with a will, behind the regrettably impossible actions, that nevertheless to some degree is free. If we are unsure of whether we can actually do what we want to do, we sometimes give it a try to see if we can. If we are 100 per cent sure of its impossibility, our will is reduced to a free wish, and we might say to our friends: ‘Oh, how I wish I could do this, that, and the other.’

We often look at others the same way, that is, we believe that behind their— perhaps for the moment limited—freedom of action there is a free will and a free wish. The debate usually focuses on free will, but the arguments against it are such that they also lead to a denial of the existence of free wishes.

Thus my book is also a defence of our freedom to create wishes.

If you believe that—in the way I have outlined—human beings have some, albeit limited, degree of freedom of action and free will, but do not believe in a god or some other supernatural phenomenon from which our free will derives, this book is a thorough defence of your position. Herein, I explain free will from an entirely naturalistic, evolutionary, and secular perspective. At some point during the course of evolution, I argue, free will has arisen on our planet. It may be highly limited in its content, yet nevertheless it is not in all respects predetermined by the laws of nature, social structures, and the previous moment.

If, on the other hand, you believe that you and everyone else lack any free will whatsoever, and that this opinion is the only one that is consistent with modern science, I hope this book may disturb your circles. At closer inspection, the view offered by modern science is neither as unequivocal nor as universal as deniers of free will tend to think. Almost everyone accepts evolutionary theory; yet few appear to have properly thought it through.

The will is a mental phenomenon, and as such it differs in its very nature from purely material phenomena. Yet despite this, I will not be defending a dualism like the kind known as Cartesian dualism after its originator René Descartes (1596–1650; Latin, Cartesius)—that is, the belief that matter and consciousness are of such different nature that they can theoretically exist independently of each other. My stance could be referred to as both non-Cartesian dualism and non-reductive materialism. I argue that, though matter may exist without mental phenomena, the latter cannot exist without a material substrate.

In the next chapter, I will explain why it has become so easy—indeed, all but a given—for many naturalists to completely deny the existence of free will. The absurdity such a total denial actually leads to will be explored in the third chapter. In chapter by chapter, I will then present and defend various positions I hold. These, taken together, lead me to conclude in Chapter 8 that it is fully reasonable to believe that evolution has given rise to a partially free will. In Chapter 9, I comment briefly on the views held by evolutionary biologists—in particular, Richard Dawkins. Chapter 10 is dedicated to exploring freedom of action as it shows itself in our perception, and Chapter 11 to free will and morality. All that then remains for the final chapter are some concluding reflections.

But before I begin, a few words on the not entirely unambiguous term ‘naturalist’ that I have already used.

I am not a naturalist in the sense of believing that knowledge can only be gained through the kinds of methods used in the prototypical natural-scientific disciplines of physics and chemistry. Believing in the fundamentals of the scientific theories about the cosmos and its origins, as well as the biological theory of evolution—as I do—is not the same as believing that all knowledge about our world must be obtained using natural-scientific methods. In particular, I do not believe that the natural sciences offer methods appropriate for all types of logical-semantic reasoning (see Ch. 3) or for providing an adequate description of perceptions as conscious mental phenomena (see Ch. 10). In both cases, the natural sciences have, through abstraction, done away with significant elements of human subjectivity—what is sometimes referred to as the ‘first-person perspective’. This often yields successful results, but when the impersonal third-person perspective of the natural sciences is built into our general view of the world, these abstractions have devastating consequences.

I am a naturalist in the sense that I believe everything that exists is part of the spacetime unity we call the universe. This means that if a phenomenon in our universe can be explained with the help of one or several other phenomena, the latter must also exist in our universe.

I regard the question about the existence of free will as a purely ontological problem: does it exist or not? All too often, this question is immediately linked to whether people can ever be said to be morally responsible and how harshly they should be punished if they fail to live up to certain moral standards. My answer to the ontological question, as I have already indicated, is unequivocally in the affirmative; the reasoning is as follows. My answer to the moral-philosophical question is more loosely sketched. It can be found in the penultimate chapter (Ch. 11).

Chapter 2

WHY IT SEEMS ABSURD TO BELIEVE IN FREE WILL

According to today’s science, both humanity and the planet we live on have a history of origin—neither has always existed. It is not that science believes itself to have finally uncovered the evolutionary details. But it is certain that in both cases there is a long, drawn-out history of origin of some kind. I will initially present some parts of what the prevailing physical cosmology and biological theory of evolution have to say on the subject. I want to stress that these are the views of today. The details will almost certainly change in the future, as they have over the past one hundred years. But this does not affect their undermining of a belief in free will, a fact I will return to in a special section toward the end of the chapter.

Many readers will most likely be familiar with many—maybe even all—of the popular-scientific views I outline herein. For this reason, I shall present the chapter’s conclusion already at its outset. Any reader who wishes to may then proceed directly to Chapter 3, in which I explain why—despite the evolutionary origin story thus presented—it is absurd to completely deny the existence of free will.

Before I present my conclusion, however, I must make a distinction pertaining to the philosophy of science. Scientific theories that describe temporal sequences can be divided into two main categories: deterministic and indeterministic. Deterministic theories allow scientists to feed initial conditions into a system that the theory is presumed to describe, such that it is in principle possible to predict exactly what the system will look like at later points in time. What happens is assumed—given the initial conditions—to do so by necessity. If the theory is not entirely correct, or the initial conditions do not correspond to reality, the prediction will be more or less incorrect. Indeterministic theories, on the other hand, contain a component which assigns a certain probability to each of the various results that are theoretically possible. In other words, indeterministic theories can be said to formulate probability laws. With such theories, no definitive predictions can ever be made, even in principle. What happens is assumed—given the initial conditions—to happen with a certain degree of probability. But even deterministic theories can be involved in predictions and probability distributions. In a coin toss, the results of each individual attempt are determined by the laws of nature as well as the initial conditions. But if the initial conditions vary by chance, the results of many attempts will still follow a probability distribution. The conclusion drawn from this chapter can be stated as follows:

All theories and hypotheses on the basis of which evolution is described today are either deterministic, indeterministic, or a combination of the two.

If all individual phenomena associated with indeterministic theories (probability laws) are referred to as random, the same conclusion can also be formulated in the following way: Everything that happens or has happened in evolution is due to necessity and/or chance.

If this is true, free will does not exist. In the case of free will—as I choose to characterise it—all of the content of said will may per definition not arise out of necessity, chance, or a combination of the two. Some small part must be freely created. Here, I want to emphasise that it is indeed a matter of ‘some small part’, as no one’s will can be entirely above all the needs and desires that arise throughout life.

Today, a much abbreviated popular-scientific story about the origins of the Earth and mankind goes as follows.

Originally, the universe was very, very small. But around 14 billion years ago, it began to expand. Whether the universe had already existed for a while or completely lacks a point of origin in time is a question left unanswered. In this sense, today’s story differs from that of the Big Bang—with an absolute starting point—that I and those of my generation grew up with, and which is still likely to be prevalent among the general public.

At the start of this expansion, the universe was extremely hot and dense (mass per unit of volume). In this state, there was no difference between various types of particles. For this reason, it is not possible here to distinguish between different types of particles and any interplay between them. When, for some reason, the universe began to expand, it led to a drop in temperature and particles began to form. Initially, this happened at an enormous rate. In just a few trillionths of a second, various kinds of subatomic particles (quarks, leptons, and bosons) were formed, as well as the four types of fundamental forces or interactions postulated by modern physics: gravity, electromagnetism, strong interaction, and weak interaction.

Subatomic particles are not particles in the sense of classical mechanics or everyday life—that is, unities clearly delimited in space. Nor are electromagnetism, strong interaction, and weak interaction forces in the sense of classical mechanics—that is, a relationship between particles. Instead, they are considered mediated by one of the particle types: the boson particle. Nor is gravity a force in the sense of Newton’s law of gravity; rather, it is considered an effect of the curvature of spacetime.

Subsequently, these subatomic particles came to form atoms—primarily hydrogen and helium atoms. Later still, the atoms came together to form molecules.

The story outlined above is not a distillation of one single overarching physical or physico-chemical theory. Today’s standard model for the origin of the universe, as presented thus far, builds on two separate theory fields: the general theory of relativity and the theory (or theories) of quantum gravity. The former is used for calculations when the given distances or intervals in spacetime are not too small (but without any upper limit), while the latter is used in cases of very minute distances or intervals of time, as was the case at the beginning of the story.

The general theory of relativity is a deterministic theory. The theory of quantum gravity, however, falls back on an indeterministic