Determinism and motivation for acting on ethics

[Arturo_Munoz]

WHAT IS FREE WILL?

Arturo Munoz Holguin

There are two topics that I want to say something about in thinking about free will: the first is the metaphysical issue of whether or not there is such a thing as free will and the second is the ethical issue of whether or not there can be any motivation for doing anything if we do not presume first the existence of free will. The metaphysical issue will have me touch a little on physics, a topic which I am not by any means an expert on; so I invite any qualified physicists to give their opinions about the correctness of my claims.

As a matter of metaphysics the question of whether or not there is free will depends on what we think about determinism. If we believe that the past states of the universe uniquely determine the future states then we cannot believe that there is such a thing as free will. From what I understand from my admittedly limited physical knowledge, it is the case that at least in this universe, given our still limited knowledge, the Schroedinger wave function works out to be completely deterministic. So, if we believe that the state of the universe can be described in those terms we are committed to disbelieving in free will.

Now I have also encountered some people who have tried to argue from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that the universe is decidedly not deterministic. But here is where I think that a little bit of philosophy will help: there is a difference between the meaning of determined as in single, unique and a the meaning of determined as in discovered. The way that I see it, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a limit on the descriptive power of quantum physics (there are no states describing a particle as having both a definite momentum and a definite position), but not in any way an assertion about the particle itself. The particle is where it is and it has the momentum that it has (so far as I know no one argues that it has multiple positions and momentums at the same time), regardless of whether or not our physics can describe this.

So if we think that this is the actual world and that physics best describes the actual world and that possible worlds do not exist in the same sense as the actual world does or that if they do they are describable by our physics as well then I think we are committed to dismissing free will as a fantasy. What happens is in a very real sense determined by what has happened, and we are mere components of a very large place.

The reason that many people find this view unpalatable is that it seems to make our lives senseless. If we are conscious of our own determinedness it may seem like we are trapped in an absurdist novel. I think that this view is very wrong. A novel is determined. Its words don’t change as we turn the page (or at least I would like to think they don’t), but that doesn’t make the experience of finding out any less pleasant. The same goes for theater, for musical scores, for art. Our lives are in all likelihood also determined; but we don’t have knowledge of the future. And so we are constantly finding out how they will play out. Will they play out the way they had to play out? Yes. But that doesn’t make the process of it any less significant.

That leads into my last point. Some claim that without free will there is no motivation to do the right thing (whatever that may be). This doesn’t make any sense. If we accept that free will does not exist then whatever things (good or bad) were going to happen before are going to happen anyway. It doesn’t matter whether people are motivated since they are in a sense moving in a set direction. Approached from the opposite angle there will never be a definitive proof that there is no free will (there are no definitive proofs of facts since logical exceptions can never be completely eliminated); so there is always some motivation to act as if there were free will, no matter how small. So the world won’t break down: it will continue as it must.