Guest post: Petter Häggholm on Determinism

 So a reader of mine recently commented on my post on determinism, and his comment was thought-provoking to the extent that I feel the need to post it as a guest post. Petter Häggholm’s website can be found here, and here is what he has to say about determinism:

This is a purely philosophical question, untouchable by science, because (thanks to Heisenberg) we know that it is impossible (theoretically, not just in practice) to gather all the information about-well, even so much as a single particle.

That aside, I think (having read Dennett’s Elbow Room) that non-determinism doesn’t really do much to save the notion of free will as it seems to be commonly envisioned. Basically, we have two possibilities: Either the universe is completely deterministic, in which case everything that happens does so according to fixed rules, and everything that happens could in principle be predicted if we knew everything in the universe (which happens to be impossible); or the universe isn’t deterministic, in which case some things happen randomly, for no ‘reason’ whatsoever-as we tend to think with regard to phenomena like quantum field fluctuation, radioactive decay, etc.

Apply this to the notion of ‘will’, and what do we get? Either our decisions are all completely determined by events in the past; or they are influenced by random events. We tend to look aghast at the former notion and protest that it robs us of free will, and I can see this; but is the latter notion really any more palatable? Personally, I would rather that my mind worked entirely on the basis of things that happened in the past (because there is then a possibility that I’m behaving rationally according to known, accessible facts) than that my decisions are influenced by completely random elements. After all, how does the latter free my will? It seems just as un-free, only now it is chained not only to the past, but also to a pair of metaphysical dice on which I can exert no control whatsoever (even in the sense that I control things as a causal agent in a deterministic universe, however foreseeable my actions).

It seems to me that defenders of ‘free will’ are really thinking of a third option, where the will is neither deterministic nor non-deterministic. I’m not sure what that third option is supposed to be, though.

Ever since reading Susan Blackmore’s book on consciousness, and Dennett’s Elbow Room (subtitled, not coincidentally, The varieties of free will worth having), my standard response to people who argue for a notion of free will is to ask them to please define it. Unfortunately, the conversation has never yet advanced from thence…

 So there you have it. Written from the hands of a guy with superb mindmeat. (and you should check out his essays here)

P.S. Petter managed to figure out why I could not paste entries from word or other sources directly into blogger without encountering annoying character translation problems, thus fixing a problem I have had since I started this blog. So everyone should thank him now for being awesome.