Of all the controversial topics I’ve raised on this blog, free will is the one that seems to most grab people by the nuts and/or teats and twirl them around. I understand why. Belief in free will is the reboot button for civilization. Don’t read any further until you have saved your applications.
A lot of smart, thoughtful people are religious or at least believe in some sort of relevant God. It’s a safe belief to have, in the sense that there’s no way to disprove the existence of an entity that is beyond time and space and the natural world – whatever any of that means. If you throw in the concept of omnipotence and his “mysterious ways,” you even have an airtight case for why he can avoid detection by atheists. I will avoid the question of God’s existence today because it is a debate no one can win.
Luckily there is a simpler question that is almost equally important: Do humans have free will?
If we DO have free will, that leaves open the door that God could exist and might be relevant to the choices we make throughout our lives and beyond. But if we DON’T have free will, God is no more important to our choices than he is to the toaster’s choices. In that case, choices are illusions.
Unfortunately, I can’t convince most people that free will doesn’t exist. I have tried arguing that the laws of physics clearly apply to brains, and brains cause your actions. That seems so obvious to me that belaboring it with additional evidence would be overkill. And yet, the free willys counter my seemingly airtight chain of reasoning with something that sounds a lot like this:
“I come to a fork in the road. I can choose to go left or right. Therefore I have free will.”
No one doubts that you FEEL as if you make choices in those situations. But the argument ignores the fact that your specific brain in that specific situation can only operate in one specific way unless the rules of physics stop applying at decision-making time.
Some free willys argue that the universe is brimming with uncertainty at the quantum level, as if that helps the case for free will. But at most it makes the case that our actions might have a random component, and that’s very different from free will.
Today I offer a new approach to understanding why you don’t have free will. I call it The Little Robot That Could. I will show that a robot, designed with current technology, could exhibit everything you call free will. Once you accept that the robot has every bit of “choice” that you have in this world, your superstition about your own choices will begin to dissolve. That process will take about a month.
Imagine a robot that is designed to watch over a human baby in a crib. This robot is nothing but a computer, keyboard, one articulated arm, and an array of sensors for sound, motion, smell, movement, and whatnot. The robot’s primary mission is to gently rock the crib when the baby cries. But the articulated arm has many more capabilities. It could, if it were so programmed, kill the baby.
The programming for this computer is more complicated than a simple if-then sequence. The robot gathers input from its environment and increments or decrements counters in its memory that are the equivalent of human urges. If any of those urges reaches a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, the robot is programmed to ignore all other program code and act according to a specific subroutine. Otherwise, if no special urges are redlining, the robot just does its job of gently rocking the baby when it detects crying.
So for example, the robot would have a “jealousy” counter. When the human parent enters the room, the robot detects whether its keyboard has been touched. Each time the baby gets attention but the computer’s keyboard is untouched, the robot adds 1 to its jealousy counter. If the keyboard is touched, the robot subtracts 1.
You can imagine the robot having a number of urges analogous to humans. It could have an “anger” counter that increases if the room temperature stays above 70 degrees for longer than a day. And the anger counter could be linked to the jealousy counter such that more anger makes the jealousy counter increment more than just 1 each time it is ignored. As you add more urge counters, and link them, eventually the robot’s state of “mind” becomes exceptionally complicated.
The program could be written so that some combination of urges, once they are maxed out, causes the robot to kill the baby. And just to keep things interesting, the robot routinely generates random numbers that alter how the urge counters are incremented. Sometimes an urge increases by exactly 1, other times maybe only .75 or 1.25 or even -1. The randomness isn’t so great that the robot is entirely unpredictable. Most times it acts as you would expect and gently rocks the baby. But between the complexity and the subtle randomness, even the programmer can’t know for sure what the robot will do next unless he manipulates the environment to some extreme, such as heating the room to 90 degrees to spike the anger counter.
The robot will, for all practical purposes, exhibit what we call “choice.” It doesn’t have to kill the baby even if the environmental sensors pick up enough “urges” to do so because the randomness might decrement the urges just in time. And just for fun, the robot’s voice will say out loud “I chose to do that” after every action.
At this point I think those of you on either side of the free will argument can see that the robot is merely unpredictable and not enjoying free will no matter how often it states it is making choices. The challenge for those of you who believe in free will is to explain how the moist robots you call humans are any different. We have, for example, a basic program that keeps us from doing harmful things. But, if we get hungry enough, and our urge counters spike, we will become cannibals.
[Note to the first person who says, “But I can CHOOSE and a robot can’t! Therefore I have free will!” That’s not an argument. It’s a collection of words.]
[Note to the first person who says, “If you don’t have free will, how did you choose to write this post? Ha! I have uncovered the flaw in your concept!” I had no choice but to write this exact post given the state of my brain this morning. And like everyone else, I have the persistent illusion of making choices.]
[Note to the first person who says, “If there is no free will then you are saying people shouldn’t be punished for crimes. Civilizations will collapse!” People who don’t believe in free will still support the legal system. We have no choice. We’re wired that way. So relax.]
[Nerd note: I realize computers only create pseudo-random numbers. If it helps you, add some imaginary equipment for generating true random numbers by sampling a source of entropy and sending the result to the robot.]