In Search of Freedom in the Free Will Debate
- Bookshelf
- November 7, 2023
One of the big philosophical and religious questions is our capacity to freely choose our actions. Is choice a clever ruse? Are there no true alternatives? Thinkers like the classical mathematicians Laplace and Newton believed the world was mechanical and predictable. Humans were reduced to mathematical objects. If human action seemed less predictable than the planets and stars visible in the night sky, it was perhaps due to ignorance alone. Newton, grappling with the ambiguity of human nature, would assign absolute knowledge to equations, and the system that governed the stars became, for him, the divine Great Mathematician. Thinkers who adopted this framework, embracing mathematical divinity, interpreted the cosmos as the mind of God, with human perception being an imperfect model or proxy of that mind. But the mere existence of a divine, all-knowing, all-seeing entity, process, or system implied that anything could be possible—a free choice could indeed be free, willed from on high by whatever decides the fate of the cosmos. This divine Will was distributed, with humans receiving the greatest proportion.
But the question hasn’t really gone away. New perspectives always emerge, creating spaces just large enough to preserve these historical views. Scientists continuing the debate are now wondering if we’ve been too accommodating—bending science and math to fit a world of our imagination, perhaps at the expense of truth.
Neuroscience, an intellectual tradition that emerged from philosophy and psychology, threatens to subsume its origins. Fields that were once independent, under pressure to prove their worth using the most agreeable methods of proof for funding, have become neuro-centric. And if a field of study is merely a collection of methods and commentaries on those methods, inevitably the walls begin to crack, and classical problems—free will, for example—may once again be taken up by neuroscientists.
Robert Sapolsky’s new book addresses free will and follows a line of neuroscientists who have written about the subject (e.g., Michael Gazzaniga’s Who’s in Charge?). Sapolsky has spent his career studying the neurobiology of behavior, publishing research and writing popular science books, primarily in what I view as the field of neuroethology. Although I’m unsure of the precise neural emphasis, ethology is an attempt to study behavior holistically. As founders like Konrad Lorenz suggested, a biologist can’t study an organism in isolation; doing so risks framing that organism in inappropriate human terms. Robert Yerkes, who predated the official naming of ethology, was also a precursor. Additionally, the historical origins of the Behaviorism movement, championed by the likes of Thorndike, Skinner, and Watson in the United States, are relevant to the free will debate. This movement got the general public talking about how much the environment determines behavior. B.F. Skinner, for one, left little room for the brain at all. For him, the brain was an irrelevant black box. If an analyst could observe behavior while understanding the contextual or environmental influences on it, that black box—the brain—would reveal whatever was suitable for scientific inquiry.
The debate continues in Sapolsky’s Determined: A Life Without Free Will. Advances in biology and neuroscience offer new insights into the longstanding tradition of asking: To what degree is human behavior truly free? Is it just one grand illusion—are we hopelessly moving levers connected to nothing while the machinery below churns out the answers?
It would be presumptuous to provide answers to these questions as anything other than beliefs, since, and I’ll explain in detail in this article, free will is not easily separated from subjective experience and consciousness in general. Experiments on free will, as with consciousness, can be interpreted in many ways. Each interpretation, assuming it is based on established science, is reasonable. The differences or disagreements that arise are not scientifically sound—at least not according to the standard some hold science to, as if the scientific method itself is capable of assigning truth. In fact, applying the method to an ill-defined problem is just belief or an example of inventing puzzles for the joy of developing solutions.
Free will is a classical, ill-posed or ill-defined problem. That a problem is characterized as such isn’t always clear. However, it’s reasonable to assume that a long-standing unresolved line of questioning results not from insufficient methods or technology but from a more fundamental inability to define the problem in indisputable terms. Historically, this fuzziness has been addressed by adopting a mathematical perspective, while acknowledging that it isn’t complete.
Let’s set free will aside for a moment. Before thermodynamics, an engineer could observe machines or devices, proposing new additions to increase output and efficiency. A second engineer with different experiences might disagree. The engineers would proceed to poke holes in each other’s designs. To solve the disagreement, the two engineers might have no choice but to build their proposed solutions and compare them, which might be impractical or impossible. However, thermodynamics would eventually reframe the problem computationally (statistically). The engineers, with knowledge of thermodynamics, could evaluate the designs and determine that both—in spite of apparent differences—were equivalent (there was no disagreement after all).
Now, when applying the concept of free will to that dialogue, the disagreement will always remain. One party designs an experiment; a rival party designs a different experiment. Both parties can’t provide definitive evidence (no one can say for sure what the results support), as there is no external adjudicator, as there might be in physics, where research is guided by universals. For example, a theory, the physicist Arthur Eddington noted, can be many things, but it is immediately hopeless if it rejects the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. For most cases, scientific truth is not this rigorous; it depends on our belief in the assumptions, often implicit, that guide experimental design.
Although I’m biased, the solution to this dilemma—just as it was with the two engineers—seems mathematical. What we need is mathematization—something that transcends our trivial and self-serving debates. Accordingly, I will argue that life, when seen through a mathematical lens, is free. By necessity, humans must express this freedom as well.
Sapolsky provides a respectable survey of scholarly work on free will—even though it never approaches originality, leaning heavily on deeper thinkers and assembling an uneven, patchwork argument. The book starts with what might be called “argument by metaphor.” Basically, the natural world is law-abiding, decentralized, and self-assembling. The argument goes: to suppose that humans freely choose their actions seems unnatural; free choice doesn’t seem consistent with the law-like assembly of organisms during embryonic development, genetic determinism (the gene variants an organism possesses), and environmental determinism, which occurs when repeated environmental exposures alter the regulation of genes, sometimes long after the exposures have disappeared. Let’s explore this further, as I will later offer an alternative take on how we can and should think about nature and our place in the cosmos.
A Law Abiding World
While I’m sympathetic to the message, the Sapolsky’s determinism is likely far softer. Take for example, the argument that children raised in impoverished surroundings are in some sense condemned to a life-life long struggle.
Sapolsky cites studies correlating gene expression and brain activity irregularities with measures of poverty and socioeconomic status (SES). Researcher reported that ACE scores — a measure that approximates, to some extent, the degree of impoverishment — were linked to increased amygdala activity and lower prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity (the PFC inhibits the amygdala). Initially it was thought that the amygdala mediates fear and anxiety responses; however, subsequent findings suggested the brain structure is a more generic, novelty detector; a fear-inducing scenario involves novelty (e.g., pay attention to this; it’s important). So, if the PFC can’t suppress or inhibit the amygdala effectively it indicates a high likelihood of pathologies (anxiety disorders, an overactive stress response, panic attacks, etc.)
I began by reviewing some of this literature outside of neuroscience to see if there was any cross-discipline consensus. However, I found the effects to be limited in the one case I examined, the immune system. Although some effects of SES linger, they seem to ebb and flow. When the researchers grouped the data longitudinally, from childhood to adulthood, the childhood SES effect — a rise in inflammatory markers like IL-6 — went away.
My point here is not to nitpick, arguing that, actually, SES is somehow irrelevant to human health. It’s that complex systems don’t really support directional conclusions. What appears to be a scientific and authoritative claim is in actuality a belief based on an incomplete snapshot. Let’s see what I mean by this.
Sapolsky also refers to studies showing low SES children have increased glucocorticoid levels throughout the lifespan. But glucocorticoids are steroid hormones that increase the expression of pro-inflammatory genes. And the latter increase is what leads to poorer health outcomes. Recall that IL-6 wasn’t elevated in the longitudinal meta-analysis (a statistical survey of multiple studies) I just referred to. It seems, fundamentally, like we can’t make out what these studies are saying. What we have is a belief.
Again, my goal here is not to disregard SES on health. It is that biased interpretation is the rule rather than the exception in biology and neuroscience. These two fields, in which I originally worked and trained, aren’t, for the most part, like physics and chemistry, the fields that are more closely aligned with my current work. Importantly, a hypothesis — a question that is framed as a testable statement (e.g., we expect ___ or I expect___) — is ultimately derived from mathematics in physics and chemistry.
Biology and neuroscience, on the other hand, almost always tests hypotheses that are simply observational (like the party game, Telephone, building off of other observations). So, validity here isn’t truly mathematical. At its core, it is rooted in belief—the belief that an observation is valid. How did they frame the problem? What terms did they use? What does that brain structure actually do? Does it even make sense to discuss a brain structure in isolation since it functions in a network? And the same thinking applies to genetics rather the just brains and brain structures. That is, if the researchers looked at one gene or protein, doesn’t a coherent interpretation depend on an understanding of the larger network?
Because these questions exist throughout his (and to some extent my) specialization, Sapolsky’s argument for hard determinism, including the data he cites, seems strangely non-deterministic. So, either purposively or accidentally, most of the later effort goes into rejecting the arguments in favor of free will, which we will turn to next, hopefully approaching a less biased perspective.
Simple rules and Emergent Phenomena
Is complexity theory the path to freedom? That is the hope of some of Sapolsky’s alleged free will debaters. This argument has its origins in the 1970s and 80s. With the publication of James Gleick’s Chaos, the science of complex systems went mainstream and was all the rage. Gleick reported on the intriguing self-organizing behavior of complex systems. Later work showed that nearly everything around us is a complex system—economic markets, earthquakes, weather, and genetic and brain networks to name a few. One property of these systems is their extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Random perturbations may get amplified creating large scale shifts in macroscopic behavior. One of the founding researchers named this phenomenon, the Butterfly Effect, because the degree of sensitivity implied a hurricane, an atmospheric pattern, might be attributed to a distant butterfly flapping its wings. Not long after the publication of Chaos people began overinterpreting the results, referring to the lack of predictability as evidence of free will.
Somewhat unintuitively while complex systems are rule or law abiding, knowledge of these rules may not support predictions. Despite the amplification of random perturbations, complex systems organize into patterns that are described as emergent properties of the system. Emergence is, however, not mysterious. It is fully describable by mathematics (hence, determined). The “what” or end state is expected and describable mathematically while “how” the system gets there is known only by observing it. This doesn’t offer support for the idea of free will that dominates the popular imagination.
Sapolsky calls into question a system of free, deliberative action. If free will emerges like a hurricane from a butterfly flapping its wings, the argument must show how free will emerges from neurons and can then influence them, completely free from deterministic influences. Free choice seems to imply an unrealistic detachment of a self or chooser.
Early thinkers wrestled with this very idea. Descartes observed differences between humans and other animals as well as plants. Subsequently, he was convinced that such dramatic differences between humans and the natural world must be attributable to an external, animating force. He speculated that the force interacts with the pineal gland because it is a structure that is centrally located in the human brain. More contemporary “emergent” interpretations of free will fit into this category, though disregarding the Pineal Gland. Implicitly, much like Descartes, these thinkers must still preserve an animating force or fictitious chooser. This view is cut off from the methods of scientific analysis. It can be whatever the believer wants it to be, which sounds intellectually disingenuous. If one must believe, why demand sensibility or intellectual rigor? Just believe in free will and be done with it. In the critique, Sapolsky quotes from two psychologists, Mascolo and Kallio, “While emergent systems are irreducible, they are not autonomous in the sense of having causal powers that override those of their constituents .. . While the capacities for experience and meaning are emergent properties of biophysical systems behavior regulation is not. Self-regulation is an already existing capacity of living systems.”
In other words, regulation is not an emergent property. And free will or free choice must involve some form of regulation, regulating, that is, the state of being “hungry” and selecting an action that changes that state. Since organisms from the simplest to the most complex rely on regulation (feedback loops), it seems like our capacity to act or intervene freely must, to be scientifically viable, follow general mathematical rules (not truly special human rules). We can’t suppose a mysterious animating substance that emerges from the brain but is not determined by it. A description of free will must be constrained by what we understand about neurons and neural regulation. We understand that neural systems are complex systems, which are hopelessly deterministic.
But there are problems here with Sapolsky’s newest take on determinism. First, let’s accept that determinism should now mean mathematically determined; that is, an event is explainable by mathematics, but it may still be unpredictable. Or, to put it plainly, no one is caught off guard, so to speak, by the initial unpredictability around an event—proposing an unusual, magical explanation for that event and how it originated. No, the mathematical interpretation works just fine. Okay.
Next, let’s go ahead and deny free will, using this mathematical understanding of determinism. We are researchers observing someone else making a choice. Accordingly, this observed scene is now just a chain of mathematical relations, causes into effects. We ask this person to explain their choice, to which they respond, “I,” and they continue with more detail (…).
We go on to tell this person, attempting to do so free of condescension, well, that’s not what you did, and we show them the evidence (this is actually a very common finding in neuroscience experiments that use first person accounts). We continue, explaining to this person that it must have only felt like they had control over their action in the experiment. In reality, their subjective awareness of the choice seems to be detached. Otherwise, clearly, their description would have fit the data. The experimental volunteer gets defensive—it’s so clearly their planning and choice that the suggestion it isn’t seems preposterous. It’s common sense. We settle them down and explain that our subjective experience is that of an observer who assigns ownership after the fact. This constructs a convincing illusion of conscious will behind the action—the command “do this” is transformed into “I am doing this.” The volunteer concludes, “I guess so. But something’s still unclear. Why is there subjective experience? It seems useless and inconsistent with evolution. If subjective experience lacks causal power, that’s a lot of energy to spend carelessly.”
And that’s a very interesting point. So, we return to mathematical determinism in our response to the volunteer. We begin to think about subjectivity. Clearly, it must be mathematical, but really, at a deeper level, it’s not clear what that even means. We start by concluding the brain is an information machine — it accepts information and computes transformations of it, outputting new information and feeding it back, continuously. Subjectivity is also a unique experience, resembling an infinity mirror effect, in that we can think about our thinking and can perform this doubling endlessly. This implies that the neurobiological or mathematical explanation of subjectivity involves feedback or regulatory loops.
Let’s step back for a minute. Though we’re now attempting to align our argument with the determinism of mathematics (e.g., complexity theory), it seems like we’ve fallen victim to our own counter argument, which was as follows: free choice must act as a type of regulation, but that regulation can’t emerge from neurons and then mysteriously hover above it. How could the choice work? One must propose a fictious energy field, and claim, well, it’s not like anything we know or understand but it exerts a force that translates the otherworldly subjective experience of deliberation and choosing into observable behavior.
But if the subjective experience of making a choice does nothing, an instance of simply observing at a distance, it would appear as though we can’t deny the causal power of our choices without suggesting that subjectivity and consciousness are equally of no consequence. We move away from free will to a deeper, longstanding counter argument to materialism/determinism in the consciousness literature: Shouldn’t humans be zombies, then, optimizing mathematical functions without conscious awareness?
Where the typical determinist goes wrong is in denying free choice without anticipating that others will counter, “so, you’re saying it’s just an illusion?” To which the standard determinist simply concedes, “yeah, I guess it is.” The keyword is “just.” It would seem that a mathematical, deterministic interpretation of the free will debate must also define “illusion” in non-eliminative terms. Otherwise, if it is eliminative, we run into the obstacles covered in this section and can counter Sapolsky’s denials by showing they are just as metaphysical as the free will supporter. Let’s clarify the dilemma using a less contentious example from neuroscience.
Revealing the Circularity of the Free Debate
It is often instructive to translate a contentious issue into less emotional terms. The phenomenon of phantom limbs provides some guidance. Here, a doctor attends to a patient with an amputated limb; they patient reports experiencing a phantom or illusory sensation that the limb remains, often uncomfortably and painfully immobilized. Interestingly, the doctor can resolve this by using a mirror box. This box alters the flow of visual input, convincing the patient that the phantom limb is real and under their control. They subsequently experience a decrease in pain and discomfort, having regained control of the phantom.
It is remarkably fast acting, implying it is a top-down effect that is distinct from opioid pain relievers that act bottom-up through opioid receptors. What does this mean? We could conclude that the pain, along with the limb, is illusory—that there’s biological pain and then there’s fictitious pain. This doesn’t sound right, though. Yet we could just as easily say of free will that there’s biological choice and then there’s fictitious choice. Biological choice is deterministic and real. Fictitious choice is _____? Well, don’t worry about that. But if we leave it alone, it hovers, like the phantom limb pain, magically and unscientifically.
If we accept reality is wholly mathematical, we make some progress.
Now, mathematically, our perceptual contents are inputs into and outputs from mathematical expressions, which basically means since outputs become inputs, our experience is that of the flow of inputs. When determining our perceptual experiences are fictitious, it’s no longer clear what we mean by this. Neural systems are self-organizing structures, guided by evolution, which is essentially thermodynamics. We aren’t inclined to claim thermodynamics is illusory.
In the free will debate, then, we can’t simply claim the experience of free choice is illusory and hope that it will fade away. We must accept that the experience is real and wrestle with the mathematical and neuroscientific implications.
The Search for Freedom Evolves
The description of “self” plays a key role in the free will debate because a choice is made by someone (by me). That begs the question, who is “me” here? It supposes a hierarchy in which “me” presides over the perceptual content and chooses an option from a pool of candidates. Although anthropocentric perspectives can’t be entirely removed, science always demands generality. For our purposes, this entails creating “what if” scenarios: what if humans don’t occupy a privileged vantage point. It isn’t wild speculation to conclude that a deeper, natural history underpins human biology. So, then, in applying this logic to our personal experience, does it make sense to suppose a hierarchy, with a self that presides and chooses from above? If we accepted that stance, it disconnects our experience from the rest of nature, which, even for the theologically minded, doesn’t make much sense; a perspective that elevates humans to a privileged position dominates history because it has been politically useful; it preserves hierarchies elsewhere: the monarch, the government, the church.
Choice and Self as Processes
How can we remove the hierarchy, turning the phantom — that seems to rule authoritatively over perception — into something egalitarian and scientific? How do we embed ourselves in nature? We’ll start by redefining what a “self” is. Instead of a self being a fixed “something,” we’ll claim that it is constantly generated (computed) over time (See Box: Challenging the idea of a fixed, unchanging self; Image Carousel, Images 2 and 3). It is a feature of the world like color and shape, texture, or any remembered features, which would include prior generations of that self in memory.
Our introspective access, however, into this process – for example, the capacity to describe brain states — evolves later. Why? Feature binding. A precursor to action, an act of choice, is a coherent, whole, representation of the world, a process that is called feature binding because the formerly discrete activities of sensory receptors — processing auditory, tactile, visual, and olfactory features — must be integrated to generate an appropriate action plan. That generative process is a time-dependent computation. It can’t be instantaneous. Also, since the sense of being a “self” is bound to other perceptual features (“I am hearing, seeing, feeling), it can’t truly preside over anything in actuality. Above or below what exactly? In studies of virtual reality-induced out of body experiences, volunteers describe a sensation of perceiving the world as if they are detached form their seated position and they may claim a virtual body or avatar is their real body. These disorienting effects are induced when the volunteer observes a touch, for example, while also experiencing it. Eventually, the perceptual experience becomes borderless or extended—non-self or inanimate objects become “self.” Experiments like this expose a mathematical or computed reality in which a self is a feature of the world.
All of this means that our precise awareness of deliberating, which feels like a “self” presiding over the perceptual content and selecting, simply can’t be the start of the deliberation. It must be generated alongside one’s later sense of being a self – a self that is making the choice. Notably, a self and the choices of that self must be features of the entire generative process.
If it is not, strange dualisms arise: free will is ghostly in its action; it can’t be acting in the brain but must act on it– that’s what’s necessary to preserve freedom; and yet its denial will leave an equally ghostly impression; the awareness that is tied to a choice (someone made the choice, e.g., “I did”) must be denied as well, hovering there–created by the brain but not interacting with it. Taken together, this suggests that free will can’t be studied within an arbitrary time slice (the “I choose ___” time slice). As I have argued, whether one denies or supports free will, most arguments focus on this narrowly defined window, and it leads to absurd and unscientific conclusions.
If we admit it makes no sense — on account of falling victim to dualism — to attribute self and the choices of that self to an arbitrary time slice, freedom is possible, and, I think, it’s inevitable, given a mathematical and non-anthropocentric perspective. Let’s explore this further.
First, we must revisit mathematical determinism, resisting the temptation to view this as “it couldn’t be otherwise.” Far from equilibrium thermodynamics is a branch of physics and chemistry that describes the flow of energy (or information) in physical systems that, as the name suggests, don’t reach equilibrium. Instead, they leverage instability to build stable patterns, displaying life-like properties. They are regenerative and self-sustaining, suggesting that the category of living systems is an instance of generic physical properties.
How do these systems work? Nature wants to maximize entropy. To achieve this goal, systems, including living systems, are undoubtedly determined–searching for mathematical operations that satisfy nature’s thermodynamic laws. For example, in living systems, this means evolving structures – that act as miniature computing machines — to help reach thermodynamic goals–distributing energy and facilitating the conversion of energy to entropy. Accordingly, at the most basic level, cellular structures, neural networks, and brains are computing machines in the service of thermodynamic law.
Notably, nature is imbued with diversity. Living systems, while describable by mathematics, seem to make choices. How is that given the mathematical/physical constraints? It is because different configurations can be mathematically identical. Entropy can be the same, so the search space is large.
Living systems are open systems (perturbed by outside influences), which drives the configurational search, and the system evolves over time. Hence, although the entropy constraint leads to a complete mathematical description or determinism, the configurations or patterns could still be otherwise. In a Darwinian sense, the thermodynamically least successful patterns will be transient and fade, replaced shortly thereafter by alternatives. After a billion years of evolution, nature has significantly constrained the search (some configurations are exceedingly rare and unreachable), but freedom isn’t denied as these are necessary and desirable restrictions. Restrictions transform abstract, pure mathematics into the familiar types, forms, or patterns of molecules, humans, brains, and selves.
When properly understood – that is, when acknowledging that each special case implies membership in a broader category — the free will debate ultimately concerns freedom throughout nature. If freedom is expressed broadly, as I just suggested, then the debate seems irrelevant. Freedom must, in some sense, be preserved if it abounds. Our task isn’t one of if but how freedom arises. Specifically, it is to define how freedom arises in the special cases, which would include neural systems and the human brain. And I will discuss this in the last and final section using a series of illustrations. Hopefully, these graphics will summarize the computational perspective of self and our capacity for freedom.
Box: Challenging the idea of a fixed, unchanging self
Epileptic patients may undergo surgery that severs communication between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, which prevents the anomalous activity in a seizure focus from spreading. This rather drastic solution treats the seizure disorder but introduces a strange “split brain” effect; here, the formerly continuous sense of agency is now divided among the left and right hemispheres. Interestingly, the introspective awareness — the patients capacity to describe their actions, decisions, and brain states — is dominated by the hemisphere that is language dominant. This was discovered because the left half of the visual field is processed by the right hemisphere and the right side of the visual field by the left hemisphere; in the split brain patient, where the left and right hemispheres can’t communicate, each hemisphere only receives input from one half of the visual field. Typically, the right hemisphere isn’t language dominant, which means visual information from the left half of visual field can’t be verbalized. The researcher or doctor may request that the patient draw the contents of the left half of the visual field, which they do. Now things get interesting. Next, two different scenes (objects) are shown to left and right hemispheres. The patient is asked to draw the contents of the visual scene using their left hand, controlled by the right hemisphere, at which point they provide an accurate drawing. When the doctor or researcher asks the patient to report what they saw, the patient ignores the drawing; instead, the patient reports the contents of the right half of the visual field. Well, why the drawing then? The patient disregards it, I don’t why.
One way of interpreting this is that much of the brain is in “autopilot” and our capacity to reflect on our mental life and describe our actions is rather limited. This however, reintroduces the dualism of a meaningless sense of self or agency and that seems equally strange and implausible in the context of evolution and thermodynamics. An alternative perspective is that severing the communication between hemispheres alters the input into mathematical operations that compute the representation of self; the perceptual scene isn’t sufficiently bound, or another way of putting this that it is not “glued” together, which means the feature, “self” — like texture, color, shape — is incomplete. This prevents the interpretation that the surgery created two distinct agents, entities, or minds, with one, the one with access to language presiding over or dominating awareness. Namely, mathematics or mathematical operations don’t sever and become two separate entities. Physics, for example, works because it is strongly theoretical (it’s mathematical, which means, abstractly, it’s a study of fixed relationships, within which there is a multiplicity of allowable relationships, the focus of others studies like chemistry, neuroscience, and computer science). It isn’t contextual–where the laws and interpretations must suddenly change. Context and vantage point and interpretation don’t create reality, so why should a surgical procedure create anything?
So, what have we learned? It seems like the brain must be thought of as one agent or entity — unless we’re accepting of metaphysics. mysterious energy fields or ghostly agents that merely imagine that they possess causal powers, all of which should be avoided because this thinking, while useful psychologically, remains unproven. Fundamentally, this property of “oneness” originates in mathematics. So, self, agency, or identity, given this — the most sensible interpretation — is computed. After arriving at this conclusion, a self and the choices of the self can’t fixed; rather, self must be recycled or recomputed continuously, as required by the mathematical interpretation. The freedom of choice must be a system-level property. Not a narrow window of time in which we may describe and mull over the contents of perception. Why exactly does our experience seem like that of a fixed, presiding self? Memory has a limited capacity, so, although the precise algorithm is unknown, some from of compression is needed. Netflix and other streaming services use algorithms that determine which pixels change considerably from frame to frame and must be updated; some pixels don’t change significantly so those values can be fixed. This gives the impression of experiencing tv as if it were live or as a continuous flow of information. But it’s actually choppy, strung together form a series of images; some images in the sequence may not change very much at all. Given this, our perceptual experience of a self is feature that doesn’t need to be rapidly updated. Also, refer to the section above and the Image Carousel below for a perspective on how, thermodynamically, freedom emerges in living systems.
Image Carousel
Conclusions: Freedom Abounds
My goal in this articles has been to counter Sapolsky’s hard determinism, mainly because it leaves us with no choice but to reject all moral or ethical responsibility. If it couldn’t be otherwise, what meaning does punishment have? As is often the case, the hard determinist response isn’t to eliminate punishment altogether but to use compassionate isolation or imprisonment. But we are still making a value judgement here, appealing to “best” or “better” in describing a society where criminality is isolated. We constantly suppose, in other words, alternative worlds in daily life. We have before us a completely untenable claim. By necessity, we can’t, though Sapolsky naively imagines otherwise, preserve any kind of ethical world in his hard determinism. The world becomes a valueless collection of happenings, and the most authentic response is to “deal with it.” Nature is as depicted in Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam, “Red in tooth and claw.”
Fortunately, that image of nature is more consistent with laziness. Just as living systems are members of a broader class of physical systems, suggesting a unifying mathematical description, terms like purpose, value, and choice are increasingly generalizable. The task before us isn’t one of translation; it isn’t to adapt our cherished positions so that they become mathematical interpretations. I freely grant that the mathematical interpretation remains an interpretation, which is to say, it exists in a space of other possibilities. That means the mathematical interpretation is but one energetically favorable configuration in the brain. Nature demands exploration, and it offers, within certain constraints, the freedom to identify other comparable configurations. As a pathway to these possibilities, the mathematical interpretation ensures that freedom, purpose, and value are plausibly real, rather than being useless inventions, and that our belief in them isn’t wishful or magical thinking. We may therefore authentically accept our belief in an ethical world without aggressively reducing everything to math or, as some neuroscientists do, reducing complex, personal experiences to the effects of serotonin or oxytocin. We admit that reality, and yet accept that we can’t detach ourselves from the experience that it is otherwise. We are free to live, experience, and enjoy life because freedom abounds. Science doesn’t force depressing narratives on anyone. It is the scientist and the storyteller that does. Let’s tell a different story.
