Date: January 2007

The issue of human “freewill” divides both scientists and theologians. For scientists there is the basic conflict of a generally deterministic approach to neurophysiology and a personal experience of choice. For theologians there is the tension between accepting that we are part of a “lawful” nature, and explaining human moral responsibility and divine love if our sinful actions are predetermined by our physiology. There is no official “scibel” line on these issues, and contributors to this site will differ, but it is a key ongoing debate.

In The New Scientist in 13^th January one of the foremost philosophical commentators on this issue, John Searle at the university of California, Berkeley, produced so pithy a short article that is it worth outlining it here. He entitled it: “Between a rock and a hard place.”

Searle notes first the significance of the debate:

If you believe that rainbows are systematic illusions, you can lead your life consistently on that basis. But if you believe that free will is al illusion, you cannot live your life on that basis.

The point, he explains, is that, as humans we have to make choices because we have to choose how to act (even if it is to decide to do nothing!) To merely perceive is passive, and is consistent with determinism, but to make choices requires that we act as though we have freewill whatever we theoretically believe about determinism.

Searle suggests that this leaves us with two basic hypotheses:

Hypothesis One says that freewill is an illusion, that our consciousness of free action is as illusory as our experience of rainbows as “real” objects.

Hypothesis Two says that our experience of free will reflects something real in the brain mechanisms that produce and sustain consciousness.

All humans experience apparent “gaps” where “choice” is undetermined. Either these are illusory, or else: The gap is not only psychologically real, it is neurobiologically real.” If this were so, there must be some indeterminacy in actual physical processes. The only such indeterminacy we know is in quantum mechanics. With this, however, (i) it is described in terms of “randomness” not choice (ii) the indeterminacy tends to cancel out at macro-level. Searle, though, states:

…when the machine produces conscious decision making it would have to produce the indeterminacy of the quantum level without its randomness. I am not sure that this makes sense in physics, but it is the best I can do.

Searle argues that it would be unlike the evolutionary process to evolve elaborate and “costly” biological mechanisms simply to give us an illusion of choice. He admits the mysteries in tying together the science and the reality of freewill, but concludes with a point about a question in one of his lectures:

…someone in the audience asked: “If Hypothesis One were demonstrated to be true, would you accept it?” Notice the form of the questions: if it were demonstrated that there is no such thing as free, rational decision making, would you freely and rationally decide to accept that demonstration?

The professor of philosophy at Warwick, Roger Trigg, who is a Christian, has made similar points in his work. Whatever we claim to believe we simply cannot avoid some kind of assumption of what is called “libertarian” free will (freewill that is not predetermined) in our everyday lives. The denial of it seems as impracticable as it would have been to live by Parmenides’ ancient rationalistic “proof” that all reality was a motionless changeless sphere.