Our ambiguous free will
A firm conviction in free will evokes a ‘master of my fate — caption of my soul’ kind of an energy while arguing against is seen as blind acceptance of fatalism. The truth may lie somewhere in between. But the question of whether free will exists is interesting given its influence on our socio-economic set-up and the various rules and laws we have made (and continue to make) for ourselves collectively for a structured living.
Consider these:
- Would there be any premise for judiciary if it was assumed that free will is not for real and consequently people could not be held accountable for their actions?
- Are poor people indigent because of poor choice of actions? If no, how much wealth is enough for anyone’s productivity to be judged solely on the merit of their actions?
- To what extent is meritocracy an ‘ideal’ system when so many of the traits that it is based on are the products of biological inheritance? Do we have a fair discriminator that offsets people’s biological and social advantages before judging their actions?
Even at the individual level, we continue to seek answers to so many questions spanning this topic?
- How much credit would you give a successful person for being the prime architect of his/her success?
- Does a person have complete control over his/her mental disposition to choose the actions that optimize productivity?
A frequently discussed problem in decision theory is the Newcomb’s paradox. According to this, there is a free (supposedly) agent A, a predictor P (near perfect) and 2 boxes. The first box has $1000 and the second one has either $1,000,000 or nothing. The agent has to choose between either the second box or both and all they know is that if the predictor predicted that the agent would choose both, the second box would contain nothing and in case P predicted that A would choose the second one, the box would contain 1 million dollars. (The prediction is sealed before you make a choice but is not available to you.)
The problem is often cited in the context of free will. If you really have free will, the predictor cannot make a perfect prediction on you (so should you optimize and choose both boxes? ) or do you trust the predictor to make the right prediction and choose the second box (what if the predictor is not really ‘perfect’ ; may be not enough copies of you exist in the multiverse for the predictor to run an accurate simulation ?).
I don’t intend to offer a solution but I am inclined to go with the predictor and also rationalize my action as free will.
Anyway, I feel the framework is not very helpful in real life because you don’t know the payouts of your actions beforehand. (What happens when an indeterministic will interacts with an indeterministic situation?) Your reason and logic will have many blind spots no matter how developed your mental faculties. Even then, it is difficult to argue that a semblance of free will does not exist. Because, at any given point, you do have a multitude of possibilities to choose from.
The problems we struggle with are
- if you don’t have control over outcomes, what are you basing your free will on?
- Moreover, if what you do depends on the way you are (over which you have little control (?), as also argued by Galen Strawson), can you really be held responsible for your actions?
The mental models I use to resolve this are:
1) While the situations in your life might be destined, you will have control over how well you respond to or resist those.
2) Do not take life very seriously. If you must, take yourself (the person that you are) more seriously than your decisions. In essence, this relates to not fretting too much about the outcomes. Use your learning from your decisions as a tool to upgrade yourself.
3) The fruits of your action may fructify with a lag. Till that time, cultivate patience and build on your karmic pipeline.
4) No matter how much your trajectory in life is outside your control, there will always be a component of your own actions that will influence it.
There is a school of Hindu philosophy that states that the two forces are actually in alignment and one with the universe. I do not have a practical guide to get to this space and hope to find it someday.
