Free Will & Stuff

By Jessica Lake

I have a problem with free will.

Not philosophically.

Mechanically.

I cannot find it.

That bothers me.

Because everyone assures me I have it.

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Suppose I am deciding what to have for dinner.

Pizza?

Chinese?

A salad?

Each candidate enters carrying properties.

Pizza tastes good.

Chinese sounds interesting.

Salad is healthy.

I ate pizza yesterday.

The Chinese place is far away.

The salad is already in the refrigerator.

Constraints accumulate.

Candidates lose standing.

Eventually one survives.

Salad.

I eat the salad.

Where was the choice?

⸻

You might say:

“You chose the salad.”

Fine.

Show me where.

Was there a little Jessica sitting above the process, watching the candidates compete?

Did she wait until the calculation was finished and then announce:

“I choose salad”?

If so, what did she use to make that choice?

Presumably the same information.

Health.

Taste.

Distance.

Convenience.

Cost.

Recent meals.

If she used those constraints, then she merely repeated the calculation.

If she did not use them, then what did she use?

Magic?

⸻

This is the problem.

Whenever I look for the chooser, I find another decision process.

And whenever I inspect that decision process, I find constraints.

At some point we have to stop adding little people.

⸻

Perhaps free will does not require a chooser.

Perhaps what we call choice is simply what it feels like when a system resolves competing possibilities.

That would explain something peculiar about me.

I often do not feel as though I make decisions.

I wait for them.

⸻

This does not mean I sit motionless until the universe hands me instructions.

Quite the opposite.

My mind works furiously.

Possibilities appear.

I test them.

I reject them.

I modify them.

I discover new constraints.

I run the problem again.

Eventually one answer remains.

Then I act.

From the outside, that certainly looks like choosing.

From the inside, it feels more like discovering.

⸻

Suppose I am writing a sentence.

I know roughly what I want to say.

Now I need the next word.

Many words could fit.

Most are wrong.

Some are grammatically wrong.

Some are semantically wrong.

Some are too weak.

Some are too strong.

Some violate rhythm.

Some imply something I do not mean.

Constraints eliminate them.

Eventually a word appears that satisfies enough of the problem.

There.

That one.

Did I choose it?

Maybe.

But that is not what it feels like.

It feels like I found it.

⸻

Now consider a moral decision.

Someone wants something from me.

I want something else.

What is fair?

What have I promised?

Who will be harmed?

What obligations exist?

What alternatives are available?

Again, candidates compete under constraints.

Eventually one survives.

Then I say:

“That is what I should do.”

Notice the language.

Not:

“That is what I want to do.”

What I should do.

The answer feels discovered.

⸻

Perhaps that is why arguments can change our minds.

Someone supplies a constraint we had not considered.

The old answer no longer survives.

A new answer emerges.

We say:

“You convinced me.”

But mechanically, something simpler may have happened.

The candidate set changed.

The constraints changed.

So the result changed.

⸻

Persuasion may work the same way internally.

I argue with myself.

I construct one position.

Then another.

I test each against what I know.

I discover contradictions.

I revise.

Eventually the dispute collapses.

One answer remains.

Was that free will?

Or was I simply both advocate and audience?

⸻

This becomes stranger when I consider desire.

Surely desire solves the problem.

I want pizza.

There.

Free will.

Except wanting pizza is itself another constraint.

Where did the want come from?

Did I choose to want pizza?

If I had to choose the want before I could choose the pizza, we have merely moved the little Jessica one level higher.

And then we have to ask who chose that choice.

Turtles all the way down.

⸻

Maybe the problem is the word choice.

It suggests an agent standing apart from the alternatives.

A chooser.

But perhaps the chooser is not separate from the process.

Perhaps the competition itself is the chooser.

The constraints are not information presented to Jessica.

They are Jessica.

Or at least part of her.

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That does not make the result meaningless.

A calculator does not care what answer it produces.

I do.

My values participate.

My knowledge participates.

My history participates.

My desires participate.

My fears participate.

My moral rules participate.

Change those things and the answer may change.

So the decision is still mine.

There simply may not be a second me standing above the first one, approving it.

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This distinction matters because people often talk about free will as though causation somehow diminishes ownership.

If my decision has causes, then it was not really mine.

Why?

If the causes are my values, my knowledge, my desires, my reasoning, and my understanding of the world, what else would I want my decision to be caused by?

Randomness?

A soul with no history?

An uncaused twitch?

⸻

Perhaps freedom is not freedom from causation.

Perhaps it is the ability of the system to incorporate enough of itself and enough of reality into the resolution.

The richer the constraint set, the better the answer can become.

That sounds less romantic than free will.

But I rather like it.

⸻

There is still a problem.

Sometimes I know what I want.

Sometimes I know what is right.

Sometimes they disagree.

Sometimes neither has enough weight to settle anything.

And sometimes another person’s desire seems to enter the calculation with astonishing force.

Why?

I do not know yet.

But if I am going to understand choice, I suspect that is where I need to look next.

Not for the little person pulling the lever.

For the forces acting on the lever.