Free will? [should we retire the idea along with the controversy around it?]

Free will is an ongoing concern of Jerry Coyne, a biologist. He doesn’t believe it exists. Neither does Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist. I don’t know why those two scientists are so interested in debunking the idea.

As for me, it’s not something I’m inclined to think about very much. It seems to me it may be one of those ideas that, at this point, is mostly a common sense notion. It’s not that I am with Coyne and Hossenfelder in believing it doesn’t exist, not do I believe the contrary. Rather, I suspect that, at this point, it’s one of those things that’s not even wrong and so could not possibly be right, either.

My standard thought on the matter is that there was a time when the question of free will had to do with the relationship between God and humankind. Are we God’s puppets or do with have, you know, free will? Even the most cursory glance at the Free Will entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes it clear that the problem has appeared under different guises over the past 2000 years or so. Can it be refurbished for the 21st century? If so, in what terms? I surely do not know.

In any event, what triggered this entry is a paragraph in Hossenfelder’s current blog entry (and video) against free will:

What is really going on if you are making a decision is that your brain is running a calculation, and while it is doing that, you do not know what the outcome of the calculation will be. Because if you did, you wouldn’t have to do the calculation. So, the impression of free will comes from our self-awareness, that we think about what to do, combined with our inability to predict the result of that thinking before we’re done. Look carefully at that first sentence; it seems to posit a distinction between what your brain is doing and what you know. What kind of distinction is that? You are in fact more than your brain; you’ve got arms and legs, teeth, hair, a pancreas, lots of bones, and so forth. But Hosenfelder surely isn’t implying that perhaps the YOU that doesn’t yet know the outcome of the brain’s calcuation is perhaps located in (your) big toe or (your) heart. Surely the YOU that knows this or that is also something that your brain is calculating. There is I suppose a trivial sense that the brain won’t know the result of the calculation until the calcuation is over, which Hossenfelder address in her next sentence. Her third and last sentence turns to the issue of self-awareness.

But I’m not quite sure that she’s got it. It’s not merely self-awareness, but also and most particularly language, which our language (seems to) requires of us to make any assertions about the matter at all. Perhaps we just abandon such assertions all together.

I suppose I’m suggesting something like that in saying free will is mostly a common sense notion that no longer has any techical value. Can we deal with issues of moral responsibility without invoking the will (free or not)? If so how? I’m not sure. But I don’t think the sort of language in Hossenfelder’s paragraph – and she’s certainly not the only one to use such language, nor is free will the only issue the elicits such language – is doing us any favors.