Do We Even Have a Choice? - Fluke

Okay, so, could things have been different? Like, are we just living out some kind of pre-written story, or do we actually have a say in what happens? That's kind of the big question I've been dancing around this whole time. I mean, I’ve been going on and on about how little things can change everything, right? That like, a tiny fluke can send your life in a totally different direction. But, uh, is that even possible? Can we *actually* change things? Or are we just passengers on a train that's already on the tracks? Do we even *have* free will, or is it all just, you know, an illusion?

I know, it sounds kind of out there, doesn't it? Like, of course things could be different! You could, I don't know, stop listening to this podcast right now. You could get up and do a goofy little dance. You could, uh… I guess, spontaneously decide to dye your hair green. And any of those things would change your life, right? But what *makes* you do those things? Like, what *causes* you to have those thoughts? We talk about "thoughts" all the time, but what *are* they, really? Are they somehow separate from, like, the cause-and-effect thing that drives everything else in the universe? I think it's time we took a little bit closer of a look at it, you know?

So, remember that question we started with? "If you could rewind your life and hit play, would everything turn out the same?" I mean, where would the differences even come from? What makes our paths, you know, split off in different directions? I think most people would probably answer that in one of six ways.

First, some people would say, "No way, things would be different because people are just unpredictable! I mean, I've definitely thought about doing things differently in my life, and if I got another shot, maybe I *would*." So, that's the "I could have done otherwise" answer.

Then, you've got the "divine intervention" answer. Like, "No, things would be different because God, or some other higher power, sometimes steps in and changes things."

And then there's the "quantum flukes" answer. This is a bit more nerdy, but basically, it says, "No, things would be different because quantum mechanics shows that some things, at least at the tiny, tiny level of atoms, are just random. And random stuff, when you repeat it, gives you different results."

Okay, so those are the "no" answers. Now for the "yes" crowd. Some people would say, "Yeah, everything would be the same because God decides everything, and the universe is just unfolding according to a fixed plan." So that's the "God decides everything" answer.

And then there’s, "Yeah, things would be basically the same, because even if there are small changes, they don’t really matter in the long run, everything happens for a reason." We can call this the "everything happens for a reason" answer.

And finally, there's the "deterministic universe" answer. Which is "Yes, everything would be exactly the same because the world follows the laws of physics, and everything that happens is caused by something that happened before it, like a never-ending chain reaction."

Now, I already kind of tore down the "everything happens for a reason" idea, so I'm not going to rehash that. And I'm also not going to debate the "divine intervention" or "God decides everything" answers, because, honestly, if you believe in that, it's a matter of faith, and you can't really argue with faith using logic or science. I mean, believe what you want, that’s totally okay.

So, that leaves us with three options based on reason and evidence: the "I could have done otherwise" answer, the "quantum flukes" answer, and the "deterministic universe" answer. Basically, if a rewind of our lives could be different, it would either be because of free will or because of random quantum stuff. Or maybe the rewind would always be the same, no matter what. Which one is it?

First, we have to figure out if the world is deterministic or indeterministic. I mean, there isn't a third choice, it's one or the other. The people who think the rewind would be identical are determinists. The ones who think it could be different are indeterminists.

If the world is deterministic, then everything is basically scripted. Determinism means that change is just a result of the starting point and the laws of physics. Everything that happens is caused by what came before it, a chain reaction, you know?

We already accept determinism in lots of parts of our lives. Like, if you hit a pool ball and it hits another one, the laws of physics tell you exactly where those balls are going to go. There's no magic, it's not random, the balls don't have a choice. Where the ball is right now is caused by where it was a split second ago, plus any forces that are acting on it. That's just physics. The way the universe *is* at any moment is caused by what happened before. The past causes the present, and the present will cause the future. It all links together, going back forever.

But if the world is completely deterministic, where does it stop? What happened just now was caused by what happened a second ago. Today was caused by yesterday. What happened, I don't know, on some random day in the past was caused by what happened the day before that, on and on forever.

So, the logical conclusion is that everything that happens was caused by the way things were at the very beginning of the universe and by the laws of physics. The way the particles were arranged right after the Big Bang, determined how they were arranged the next instant, and the next, and the next, until now. So, if you brushed your teeth this morning, or your dog barked at a squirrel, that was caused by the initial conditions of the universe billions of years ago! Everything was set in motion way back then. Our whole existence is like the most complex game of pool ever, with trillions of atoms colliding. If that's true, then everything in our lives is ruled by the deterministic forces of physics. It couldn't have been any other way, because physics doesn't allow for magic causes. It's weird, but maybe it's true.

Okay, so you're probably thinking, "Wait! I thought that this podcast was about how small changes can change everything!" How does that fit with a scripted universe where nothing can be different?"

Think about that movie "Sliding Doors," where Gwyneth Paltrow's character either makes or misses her train. The movie shows how different her life would be based on that one little thing. Determinism says that only one outcome *is* possible given the way the world was at that moment. But that doesn't mean it's not interesting to think about what would have happened if she had made the train when she missed it in the film. As a determinist, you know, examining that stuff that is *impossible* is still valuable. We understand our world better when we ask that "What if?" question.

Think about it like this: Determinism says that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs couldn't have hit the Earth a second later, it was on a fixed path. But if it *had* hit later, the world would be totally different. Now, imagine that humans are just more complicated versions of that asteroid, our thoughts and actions caused by physical stuff. Even if we can't change the script, it's still useful to think about how little tweaks could change the story, even the scenes that will never happen.

In a deterministic world, small details still matter a lot. Like, a grain of sand on a pool table could change the path of the balls. Moving that grain of sand a tiny bit could make the ball miss the pocket. And that could change the whole game. The laws of physics still rule everything, but a tiny change can change everything that follows. We get that when we think about time travel and how risky it would be to make even small changes to the past. But we don't seem to think that way about our present.

Determinism doesn't mean we can predict the future. Chaos theory says that even tiny changes to the starting point can cause huge differences over time. So, our lives could be both deterministic *and* totally unpredictable. The question isn't whether we can guess what will happen, but whether everything is caused by what came before. There's nothing magical about rain clouds, it's all physics, caused by what came before. But because it's so complicated, we can only predict the weather a few days out. After a couple of weeks, forget it. Determinism and chaos theory say we can't change the script, but if we *could*, even one tiny change, a butterfly flapping its wings, could change everything else that happens in the play.

Now, you might be thinking, "Wait a minute! I've learned from my mistakes in the past! I decided to lose weight, and now I go to the gym!" But that's a common misunderstanding. Determinism isn't saying things are fixed, it's saying that the pattern of causes and effects is fixed, but that doesn't mean that *you* are fixed. If you see a documentary about how smoking causes cancer, you might decide to quit. And that fits with determinism. The chain of events led you to that documentary. Why did you watch it? Because your friend recommended it. Why did she recommend it? Because she lost someone to lung cancer. And so on and so on, back and back. And it was also inevitable that your brain would react to the documentary by deciding to quit, or not. The way your brain was made, determined how it would react to new info. And when you got that new info, the output was already determined, a physical thing in your brain that felt like a decision.

It's not about whether you can improve yourself, it's about where that self-improvement comes from. Determinists say that complex things in the physical world rule how you decide to act. There aren't any thoughts that exist by themselves, separate from your body. Decisions come from the stuff inside your brain and body, which is shaped by your genes, your experiences, your environment, your traumas, even the bacteria in your gut. It all fits together in a chain to make what happens happen.

Indeterminism, on the other hand, says that the script can change. If you rewound your life and started again with the exact same conditions, things could go differently. Multiple futures could come from the same starting point. We're not stuck on a fixed path. But then, what causes those changes if everything is caused by what came before?

People have answered that question in different ways over time. Some ancient philosophers thought the universe was deterministic thousands of years ago. But when people said that, others objected, "If you believe in determinism, you have to give up on free will!"

Then, someone came up with the idea of an atomic "swerve." A Greek philosopher said that atoms sometimes randomly deviate from their path. There wasn't any scientific reason for it, but it was a way to soften the blow of determinism. If some things were random, then the world was uncertain, maybe leaving room for free will.

But that didn't convince everyone. Because where did *that* randomness come from? What caused *that* to happen? Great thinkers have been arguing about this for centuries, trying to figure out if determinism is true, what God's role is, and how much humans can change the story. Some came up with ideas about theological determinism, saying that God wrote and directed everything. Others said that free will was real. God created the universe, but sins are freely chosen, not scripted by God or physics.

Then, science changed everything. One physicist’s book explained how a lot of things work in the universe, and it's deterministic. That led to the idea of a clockwork universe. But that doesn't explain everything. There are some limits. His laws don't work well for things that are very small, very fast, or very big.

And that leads us to quantum mechanics. It says that the tiniest particles act in weird ways. Scientists have seen it happen over and over again, but they don't agree on what it means. Some scientists just "shut up and calculate," not trying to figure out any big meaning. But the main idea is called the Copenhagen interpretation. It says that at the tiniest levels, some things are totally random, ruled by probabilities, not determinism. Some changes are genuinely uncaused.

Quantum mechanics was a little bit like a scientific version of the swerve from thousands of years ago. It led some people to think that the world is indeterministic, not because we can change things, but because things change randomly. The world isn't scripted, it's just random. Rewinding the tape of life would give different results because the random behavior of atoms would never be the same twice. So, the world is ruled by randomness, at least at the smallest level.

Some ideas about quantum effects are still deterministic, but the debate isn't settled. Nobody really knows! But most scientists agree on one of these two things: Either determinism is true, or the world is indeterministic, but only because of quantum weirdness.

You might notice that something is missing: the idea that *we* can change our own scripts. Where's free will in this?

The feeling of free will is something that everyone has. But when you think about it carefully, it gets less certain. When I think about where "I" am, it seems like I'm inside my body. But if my whole body is "me," then cutting my hair would change something fundamental about who I am. So, it feels like the real "me" is somewhere behind my eyes, like the rest of my body is just a robot controlled by "Brian HQ" in my brain.

That's why some old scientific ideas thought that sperm cells contained tiny, fully formed humans. It shows that we want to think of ourselves as having an eternal executive inside us, a soul who controls everything.

Most people don't think about determinism and free will that often, so they haven't tried to fit the feeling of free will with science. We know there's no tiny human pulling levers in our skulls, but it's tempting to think that our brain does the same thing. Yet, it feels weird to replace that idea with billions of boring neurons. Then we have to ask, "Am 'I' just a physical being, made of chemicals and matter?"

That leads to the question that someone asked a long time ago: Where is our mind, or our soul? His answer was that they were nonphysical. Our brains are made of physical stuff, but our minds are not. Our bodies can't think.

But as we learned more about the world, it became clear that that idea would break every rule about how the universe works. Everything has a physical reason, so your thoughts, memories, and will are all inside you, made of matter, caused by complex things happening in your brain.

Once we accept that our minds are physical, then we have a problem. If there's no little person directing things, and if our thoughts are all physical, then are we just the result of a bunch of chemical things happening that we can't control? We like to think we're in charge, separate from our brains and bodies. But free will, at least in the sense of our minds being separate from our brains, doesn't fit with the laws of physics.

People have argued about what free will means for a long time. Philosophers twist the idea to the point where nobody can agree on what "free" or "will" means. But for most people, it means that you, and only you, can choose what to do. You feel like you could do something different at any moment, that your choice isn't already written for you. You're not a tiny person pulling levers, but you feel like you're not tied down. You're free to keep listening, or to stop, or to throw your device out the window. That idea, that we can choose freely, separate from what's happening in our brains, is called libertarian free will.

Our feeling of having libertarian free will is important to being human. It leads to the idea that we feel like we have free will, so we must have it. But that's bad logic. Feelings don't make reality. The Earth doesn't *feel* like a ball flying through space, but it is. Our brains have evolved to trick us. What we feel isn't what is. The laws of physics don't care about your feelings.

If you're a logical thinker who believes in science, then everything that happens must either be caused or uncaused. There are only two options. If something is caused, then it's caused by what came before. Our thoughts are caused by our neurons and the rest of our bodies, which is caused by lots of things: DNA, chemicals, our upbringing, past experiences, memories, and so on. We don't control any of that.

So, to save libertarian free will, we have to say that human brains have a special, magical thing that doesn't exist anywhere else in the universe. That's why some philosophers call libertarian free will the "ghost in the machine" argument. It's the idea that inside our brains is some supernatural substance that's totally different from everything else, allowing us to make decisions. Can we make nonphysical thoughts that can change physical matter, out of thin air? Nobody knows how that would work.

If libertarian free will exists, it would break everything we know about the universe. It would require us to be able to control our brains from the outside. One physicist calls libertarian free will "logically incoherent nonsense" for anyone who "knows anything about physics." Most neuroscientists are also very skeptical of this idea. It requires a belief in magic.

If we accept that our thoughts are caused by physical matter, then we have to ask what we mean when we say "free will." Maybe it just means that our behavior is caused by something inside us. Think about whether you like this podcast. I hope you do, and you probably hoped you would, too, or you wouldn't have started listening. But you've reacted to it. And your reaction is somewhere between the people who are telling everyone they know how great it is, and the people who are thinking about burning it. Now, could you choose to react differently? If you hate it, could you choose to love it? You could try to persuade yourself, but in the end, your reaction is caused by your brain and body, shaped by the laws of physics. But might you still have free will even if your first reaction isn't really "up to you?"

That's what the compatibilists say. They think that free will and determinism can both be true. They admit that your thoughts are probably caused by things that came before. Nobody's forcing you to order a cheese pizza instead of a pepperoni pizza, but your choice will be caused by your taste buds, how long it's been since you had each kind, how your brain reacted in the past when you ate each type, and so on. Each of those things gets turned into something physical in your brain, which changes your future decisions. If you pick pepperoni pizza, then that choice was always going to happen at that moment, given the way you were at that time. There's no way you could have picked cheese pizza instead. When we talk about cravings, we don't think there's a choice involved. But what's the difference between choosing pizza and having a craving, if not just a difference in the intensity?

It gets clearer when we talk about thirst. You can decide to drink water, but do you choose to want to drink water? Do you think about it and then say, "I choose to feel thirsty!"? No. Your body decides for you. When you decide to drink water, you're responding to your body. But what's true of thirst is true of everything else. There's no difference between a thought about a bodily need and a thought about a desire. But people still talk about their thoughts as if there's a little person in their head who's in charge.

When I was a kid, my parents showed me the movie "Gettysburg." Then we went to visit the Gettysburg battlefield. And something happened in my brain that made me obsessed with the Civil War.

I started reading tons of books about it. I wanted to know everything. I even begged my parents to let me be a Civil War reenactor. (Thankfully, they said no, but they did get me the magazines for my birthday.)

Why did I get so obsessed? I have no idea. Nobody else in my family cared about it. I didn't choose to become obsessed. I just had an obsession that I couldn't explain. Through a mix of genes, experiences, upbringing, and the stuff happening in my brain, I got hooked. And then I was free to follow that passion. So, is that free will?

Some say yes, but a weaker kind. We are free to want what we want, but we can't choose what we want. We are free because we can follow our desires, even if we can't choose those desires. To a compatibilist, my Civil War obsession was a form of free will because I decided to follow what I found interesting, without being forced to do anything else.

Compatibilists point out that humans have "second order desires." Drug addicts might want drugs, but they also might wish they didn't want drugs. You might crave chocolate, but you might wish you didn't have that reaction. Most other animals don't seem to have second-order desires. My dog loves his Frisbee. Does he ever wish he wasn't so obsessed with it? I don't think so. But where do those second-order desires come from? From our brains interacting with other people, objects, and ideas. So, our thoughts are still subject to the laws of physics, following a series of causes and effects, just like everything else. We're back where we started.

If you think that's a cop-out, then you're probably a hard determinist. They think compatibilists are just trying to save free will by playing with words, twisting us up in philosophical knots until we forget what free will really means. It's like saying, "A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings." Redefining free will doesn't save it. It's just wishful thinking.

I don't believe in free will, but I know these questions are confusing. We don't understand consciousness, so maybe some new discovery will change things. But if libertarian free will is what we have, then almost everything we know about science would have to be wrong. Compatibilist ideas of free will don't disagree with science, they just redefine what it means to be free.

Some people try to use quantum mechanics to support free will, but that doesn't make sense. Yes, some things might be random. But if your choices are different only because of randomness, are you any more free? No. Having your behavior decided by a random number generator isn't freedom.

But there's something inside us that makes us feel like we're more than just cells. We love and hate. We reason. We cry. We're inspired. We're always trying. Some of us would give our lives for an idea, or to save someone we love. So, it's tempting to reject science. "To hell with logic! I know what free will is, and I have it! Don't tell me I'm just a meat computer!" I understand that. All I can do is show you how the pieces of the puzzle fit together, as I see it.

So, take your pick. Solve the puzzle your own way. But after listening to this, the way your brain and body are right now, I'm afraid it's probably inevitable which solution you'll choose. That choice, as free as it feels, was probably affected by everything that came before you, going back forever.

A world without libertarian free will has some scary results. Some people use those results to argue against determinism. "If we don't have free will, then morality doesn't make sense!" I disagree. But even if that were true, it's a bad argument. I wish cancer didn't exist, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But still, the moral results of rejecting free will are worth thinking about. Let's think about a murderer.

A guy grew up as a polite Boy Scout with a high IQ. He went to college. He got married.

Then, one day, he wrote a note saying he didn't understand what was making him write it. He said he was having strange and irrational thoughts. He had headaches and asked for an autopsy after he died to see if something was wrong with his brain.

A few hours later, he killed his mother. Then he went home and murdered his wife. He left notes saying he was sorry. The next morning, he went to the University of Texas, climbed to the top of a tower, and started shooting. He killed a lot of people before he was killed by the police. After he died, they did an autopsy and found a tumor in his brain, pressing on the part of his brain that controls emotions and decisions.

Does that change how you feel about him?

For a lot of people, it does. It makes us less sure that he was just evil and chose to kill people. When we hear about the tumor, we start to see him less as a monster and more as a victim of cancer. We feel like he's less morally responsible because he wasn't in control of his actions.

But if libertarian free will is just a trick, then can we ever feel like someone is morally responsible for what they do? If our thoughts come from our neurons, and we can't control our neurons, then the way we think is no different from someone whose thoughts are changed by a tumor. One act is caused by cancer, the other is caused by healthy tissue, but does that make them morally different? We can't control healthy tissue any more than we can control cancer. If I couldn't choose to be interested in the Civil War, because my thoughts were the result of my brain and the laws of physics, then why would it be different for choices that have moral importance?

We don't choose our genes, our parents, our childhood, or our brains, but those things decide how we act. Does it make sense to blame people for their actions, or to praise them for their achievements? If not, that's scary, because it seems to let "evil" people off the hook. And it raises a problem: How could we punish criminals if they had no choice?

We punish criminals for three reasons. Some think punishment is for revenge, an eye for an eye. Others see it as a way to stop future crimes. A third group sees punishment as a way to rehabilitate criminals, to turn them into good people. If free will doesn't exist, then punishment for revenge doesn't make sense. But the other two reasons still apply. Even if murderers don't have free will, they still need to be kept away from other people to protect society. Punishing them will still prevent future crimes, and rehabilitation is still good. Criminals would still need to be punished, but it would be less about blaming them as monsters who freely made bad choices.

We already do this in some ways. Some people are born smarter than others. But smart people didn't choose to be smart. Nobody "earned" their intelligence. But we've decided that we're all better off if the person in charge of cancer research is someone who's smart and had the chance to develop their intelligence. It doesn't make sense to praise Einstein for being a genius. But that means it also doesn't make sense to condemn a bad person if they truly couldn't have done otherwise.

We should celebrate Einstein because having heroes inspires us. And we should still condemn people who do bad things, because that also serves a purpose, even if it wasn't their "fault" in the way we usually think about it. As someone said, "Viewing human beings as natural phenomena need not damage our system of criminal justice. If we could incarcerate earthquakes and hurricanes for their crimes, we would build prisons for them as well…. Clearly, we can respond intelligently to the threat posed by dangerous people without lying to ourselves about the ultimate origins of human behavior."

I think that's right. But other ideas might also be true. As science learns more about the brain, these will be the big debates of our time.

Strangely, these debates aren't happening in a lot of social science research. You'd think that free will and determinism would be important ideas for people trying to understand why things happen in society. But outside of psychology, it's basically a wasteland. It's rarely talked about. I learned about determinism for about an hour in grad school, then it disappeared. The reason for that is kind of random. It's because determinism became a bad word for social scientists.

Bad forms of determinism were used to justify racism and colonialism. People said that the environment or our genes determined our behavior, and they used that to support terrible ideas. So, there was a big reaction against any idea that even smelled like determinism. But in rejecting those bad ideas, they also rejected the idea that the world follows any deterministic things at all, even though it clearly does.

As a result, entire fields have rejected deterministic ideas not for good reasons, but for moral ones. Critics of determinism said it was dangerous and could be used as an excuse. This led social science to have a set of beliefs that don't make sense, including the idea that humans have libertarian free will, "in the sense that the individual could, at any phase in a given sequence of conduct, have acted differently."

That's the "magic" that philosophers and physicists have warned about. But so much emphasis has been put on free choices that the word determinism has become an insult. Calling a theory "deterministic" is a way to say it's both absurd and morally bad. The "ghost in the machine" still affects how we see ourselves and our world.

But we shouldn't be afraid of ideas that challenge our beliefs. We should debate these ideas, not just dismiss them because they make us uncomfortable. It's better to turn on the light and look at something scary than to pretend it's not there.

I think determinism is amazing. The present is connected to the past by infinite threads that stretch back billions of years. If you try to pull on one thread, hoping to change just one little thing, the whole thing would unravel. Change one tiny part of the past, and you probably wouldn't exist, or you'd have a different life. But if you changed something else, you might have avoided a heartbreak, or the loss of someone you loved. So, our best and worst moments are connected. The happiest parts of your life are connected to the worst parts. One couldn't happen without the other. That might sound strange, but I wouldn't exist if my great-grandfather's first wife hadn't done something horrible. So my best moments are tied to that tragedy. In a way, my happiest moments couldn't exist without that. That doesn't mean we should celebrate suffering, but knowing that future happiness can come from suffering can help us get through the bad times. And my good moments will lead to someone else's pain. That's just how it works. For better or worse, I think that's beautiful, it's a vivid connection between all beings, across space and time.

If you think of yourself as a person who is totally in control, then the loss of free will is bad. But if you think of yourself as a part of something bigger, a complex being who is constantly causing and being caused by the whole world, then seeing the deterministic story can be exciting.

If someone else was you, the world would be different. Because you exist, you'll have an effect on the world, good and bad, but all part of the story. You matter, down to the smallest choices you've made or will ever make. Your words, your actions, even your thoughts, will have effects that spread out, beyond what you'll ever see, even long after you're gone. The decisions you make now will help decide which humans will exist in the future, and what world they will live in. That's incredible. What you do matters, all of it. That might not be free will, but it's definitely a kind of will that's worth having.

Is it important whether you feel, deep down, that you could have acted differently? For me, it's enough to know that I can freely follow my desires. Is it really so bad to think that your actions and thoughts, which will always feel like your own, have been caused not by a phantom or a tiny person, but by everything you've experienced, your brain chemistry, and everyone and everything that came before you?

You are the result of the whole history of the universe. Everything had to be exactly as it was for you to exist, just as you are, at this moment, in this world. And that leads us to something wonderful: we all are the living result of billions of years of random flukes.

Maybe we can finally accept that we'll never fully understand our own existence. But someone gave us good advice on how to live with that uncertainty: "A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."