mattismyname

Discussions of human free will often come down to an argument from physics: “Humans have free will because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.  The principle says that you cannot accurately measure the exact position of a small particle such as an electron without having a significant impact on its position.  The implication of this is that scientists must treat such particles not as having an exact position, but rather as having a probabilistic distribution of positions where the particle might be at any moment.  Because of the uncertainty of the particle’s position, its future response to an external force cannot be exactly predicted.  Because human brains are made of billions of such particles, the exact response of the brain to any external event cannot be exactly predicted.  This uncertainty is what we call free will.”

That argument is a bunch of horse hockey and here’s why: The uncertainty principle doesn’t say that the particle has no exact position.  It only says that the particle’s position cannot be accurately measured (presumably by humans) without affecting its future position.  Now it makes sense why scientists must treat the particle as an inexact probability distribution of possible locations — in order to draw any useful conclusions about the particle, they must be able to quantify it in some way.  Because they know they cannot know its exact position, the make the most mathematically precise statement they can: its probability distribution.  But that probability distribution is just a tool used by the scientists to draw useful conclusions about the particle.  We are not scientists here, we’re philosophers and as such are under no pressure to use a tool like the probability distribution.

We would be perfectly allowed to say that the particle has definite position but that we as humans will never know what it is.  This changes the whole argument about human free will.  If the particle has definite position and follows a finite set of physical laws, then all of its future positions must be calculable — they must be preordained.  Because the human brain is composed solely of these particles with definite but unknowable position, the brain itself and its future actions are definite but unknowable.

The scientists out there may say, “So what?  If the brain’s future actions are unknowable then there’s no useful conclusions that can be drawn about them and thus it doesn’t matter at all that they are definite.”  That’s true, but to a philosopher the mere fact that our future actions are preordained could give us a completely different outlook on the world.  Some people may fear that without a belief in free will that they would just give in to any temptation by convincing themselves that that bad action was their preordained future.  That’s the same fear that concerns a lot of christians: “If I stop believing in heaven and hell, then I’ll have no motivation to act good while on earth.”  As any atheist will tell you, that eventuality is greatly outweighed by a knowledge that our time in existence is limited and that we must carefully consider how they spend each and every moment.  Knowing that our future is preordained gives us just as much motivation to make that future as good as it can be – it’s the only one we’ve got.  We will not be fooled into leaving our futures to chance.  We will live our lives deliberately seeking the things we want our future to contain.

The end.

(I did have a thought experiment I wanted to work into the above article.  It didn’t fit anywhere, so I’ll just include it here.  For a moment, imagine that there is some magical entity to whom the Heisenberg uncertainty principle does not apply.  This guy is able to observe the exact position of sub-atomic particles without affecting their future positions and he takes the opportunity to do so on a regular basis.  Now remove that guy (cause hey, magic doesn’t exist) and we’re back to our current universe where nobody knows the exact position of the particle, but with one big difference: We know that the particle must have definite position because the magic guy knew it; we just can’t get in touch with him to ask him.)