Is Belief in Free Will Obsolete? (Pt. I)

Yuval Noah Harari has an essay in The Guardian in which he argues that liberal democracy will not survive the technological age as long as we continue to believe that we have free will, or something like that. His argument is dubious for a couple of reasons.

1. It's not clear how accepting volitional determinism will enhance liberal democracy and save us from corporate and governmental powers which would seek to use technology to control us.

2. He doesn't make much of a case for believing that determinism is true. He simply asserts it.

The closest he comes to arguing for it is this passage:

Unfortunately, “free will” isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology. Theologians developed the idea of “free will” to explain why God is right to punish sinners for their bad choices and reward saints for their good choices. If our choices aren’t made freely, why should God punish or reward us for them?

According to the theologians, it is reasonable for God to do so, because our choices reflect the free will of our eternal souls, which are independent of all physical and biological constraints.

This myth has little to do with what science now teaches us about Homo sapiens and other animals. Humans certainly have a will – but it isn’t free. You cannot decide what desires you have. You don’t decide to be introvert or extrovert, easy-going or anxious, gay or straight. Humans make choices – but they are never independent choices. Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself.

I can choose what to eat, whom to marry and whom to vote for, but these choices are determined in part by my genes, my biochemistry, my gender, my family background, my national culture, etc – and I didn’t choose which genes or family to have.

It's true that there's much about us that we don't choose, but as neuroscientist Michael Egnor points out, these things are not will:

Humans have emotions which are indeed not free, in the sense that we cannot freely choose our passions. Appetites—lust, greed, hunger, fear, etc—are common to all animals, rational and irrational. While humans can tame our appetites to a considerable extent, we are indeed subject to them and do not have libertarian control over them.

Will is a different matter entirely. Will is an immaterial power of the human mind, and it follows on intellect, which is also immaterial. The immateriality of intellect and will is obvious from the objects of intellection and will—universal and abstract concepts, which are immaterial themselves.

The contemplation of these concepts is necessarily immaterial in turn. The immateriality of human intellect and will has been demonstrated logically and philosophically for several millennia by philosophers of all (and no) religious stripes, and the immateriality of intellect and will is strongly supported by modern neuroscience, despite Harari’s uninformed claim.

Harari's belief that free will is a myth is an unstated entailment of his belief in materialism. If all there is to us is our material body, if there is no such thing as an immaterial mind, then determinism may well be true, since matter is indeed deterministic (except at the quantum level). If, however, we do have immaterial minds then our intuition that we really are somehow free to choose may well be true.

Belief in libertarian free will is a properly basic belief. That is, it's a belief that has had a powerful hold on us most of our lives, and since free will is necessary if we're to make sense out of our moral experience, there's no good reason to give it up unless Harari can give us a powerful argument, a defeater, for that belief. This, however, he doesn't do. He simply assumes materialism is true and tacitly concludes that therefore determinism is true also.

But like most determinists Harari can't live consistently with his determinism. In the conclusion of his essay he employs language that only makes sense if in fact we're free. In answer to the question of what we should do in the face of threats to liberal democracy from those who would use technology to control us, he answers:

We need to fight on two fronts simultaneously. We should defend liberal democracy, not only because it has proved to be a more benign form of government than any of its alternatives, but also because it places the fewest limitations on debating the future of humanity.

At the same time, we need to question the traditional assumptions of liberalism (i.e. that we have free will), and develop a new political project that is better in line with the scientific realities and technological powers of the 21st century.

Perhaps he's right about what we should do, but whenever one uses the word "should" in this context one is implying that one's interlocutors possess the ability to choose between alternatives. In other words, Harari is assuming we have the freedom to deny that we are free even as he implies that we are indeed free to pursue the alternatives he urges us to pursue. This borders on being incoherent, if indeed it doesn't cross the line altogether.

More on this important topic tomorrow.