undermining free will

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Undermining Free WillAuthor(s): Paul DaviesSource: Foreign Policy, No. 144 (Sep. - Oct., 2004), pp. 36-38Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4152977 .

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The World's Most Dangerous Ideas ]

UNDERMINING FREE WILL By Paul Davies

ou don't have to read this article. But if you do, could you have chosen otherwise? You probably feel that you were free to skip

over it, but were you? Belief in some measure of free will is common to

all cultures and a large part of what makes us human. It is also fundamental to our ethical and legal systems. Yet today's scientists and philosophers are busily chipping away at this social pillar-apparently without thinking about what might replace it.

What they question is a folk psychology that goes something like this: Inside each of us is a self, a conscious agent who both observes the world and makes decisions. In some cases (though perhaps not all), this agent has a measure of choice and control over his or her actions. From this simple model of human agency flow the familiar notions of responsibility, guilt, blame, and credit. The law, for example, makes a clear distinction between a criminal act carried out by a person under hyp- nosis or while sleepwalk- ing, and a crime commit- ted in a state of normal awareness with full knowledge of the consequences.

All this may seem like common sense, but philosophers and writers have questioned it for centuries- and the attack is gathering speed. "All theory is against the freedom of the will," wrote British critic Samuel Johnson. In the 1940s, Oxford University philosophy Professor Gilbert Ryle coined the deriso- ry expression "the ghost in the machine" for the widespread assumption that brains are occupied by immaterial selves that somehow control the activities of our neurons. The contemporary American philoso- pher Daniel Dennett now refers to the "fragile myth" of "spectral puppeteers" inside our heads.

For skeptics of free will, human decisions are either determined by a person's preexisting nature or, alternatively, are entirely arbitrary and whimsical. Either way, genuine freedom of choice seems elusive. Physicists often fire the opening salvo against free will. In the classical Newtonian scheme, the universe is a gigantic clockwork mechanism, slavishly unfolding according to deterministic laws. How then does a free agent act? There is simply no room in this causally closed system for an immaterial mind to bend the paths of atoms without coming into conflict with physical law. Nor does the famed indeterminacy of quantum mechanics help minds to gain purchase on

the material world. Quan- tum uncertainty cannot create freedom. Genuine freedom requires that our wills determine our actions reliably.

Physicists assert that free will is merely a feel- ing we have; the mind has no genuine causal effica- cy. Whence does this feel- ing arise? In his 2002 book, The Illusion of Conscious Will, Harvard University psychologist Daniel Wegner appeals to ingenious laboratory

experiments to show how subjects acquire the delusion of being in charge, even when their conscious thoughts do not actually cause the actions they observe.

The rise of modern genetics has also undermined the belief that humans are born with the freedom to shape their individual destinies. Scientists recognize that genes shape our minds as well as our bodies. Evolutionary psychologists seek to root personal qualities such as altruism and aggression in Dar- winian mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection. "We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish

"The scientific assault on free

will would be less alarming if

some new legal and ethical

framework existed to take its

place. But nobody really has a

clue what that new structure

might look like."

Paul Davies is professor of natural philosophy at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Syd- ney. He is the author of 25 books, including The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999) and How to Build a Time Machine (New York: Viking, 2002).

36 FOREIGN POLICY



molecules known as genes," writes Oxford Univer- sity biologist Richard Dawkins.

Those aspects of the mind that are not prede- termined by genetics lie at the mercy of "memetics." Memes are the mental equivalent of genes-ideas, beliefs, and fashions that replicate and compete in the manner of genes. British psychologist Susan Blackmore recently contended that our minds are actually nothing but collections of memes that we catch from each other like viruses, and that the familiar sense of "I" is some sort of fiction that memes create for their own agenda.

These ideas are dangerous because there is more than a grain of truth in them. There is an acute risk that they will be oversimplified and used to justify an anything-goes attitude to criminal activity, ethnic

conflict, even genocide. Conversely, people convinced that the concept of individual choice is a myth may passively conform to whatever fate an exploitative social or political system may have decreed for them. If you thought eugenics was a disastrous perversion of science, imagine a world where most people don't believe in free will.

The scientific assault on free will would be less alarming if some new legal and ethical framework existed to take its place. But nobody really has a clue what that new structure might look like. And, remember, the scientists may be wrong to doubt free will. It would be rash to assume that physicists have said the last word on causation, or that cog- nitive scientists fully understand brain function and consciousness. But even if they are right, and free

SEPTEMBER I OCTOBER 2004 37



The World's Most Dangerous Ideas ]

will really is an illusion, it may still be a fiction worth maintaining. Physicists and philosophers often deploy persuasive arguments in the rarified confines of academe but ignore them for all prac- tical purposes. For example, it is easy to be per- suaded that the flow of time is an illusion (in physics, time simply is, it doesn't "pass"). But

nobody would conduct their daily affairs without continual reference to past, present, and future. Society would disintegrate without adhering to the fiction that time passes. So it is with the self and its freedom to participate in events. To paraphrase the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, we must believe in free will-we have no choice. [IM

BUSINESS AS USUAL AT THE U.N. By Samantha Power

For the United Nations, relevance may be almost as perilous as irrelevance. In the span of a year, the Bush administration went from

taunting the world body to begging for its help. A beefed-up U.N. team will soon arrive in Baghdad to advise the Iraqi government on reconstruction, social services, and human rights and directly assist with elections. At the same time, U.N. peacekeeping mis- sions are sprouting or expanding in Burundi, Demo- cratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and Ivory Coast. Indeed, by the end of 2004, more blue helmets will likely be in action than at any time in history.

Although some U.N. backers revel in the growing global reliance on the world body, now is no time to get smug. These weighty responsi- bilities are landing on the shoulders of an organization that national governments have delib- erately kept weak. The United Nations' 60-year- old machinery has never seemed so ill-equipped for its work, and its credibility has plummeted. As the major powers fight terrorism and dwell on homeland security, they will hand the United Nations essential but thankless tasks they might once have tackled them- selves (or just ignored). Without major changes, the United Nations may well buckle under the growing strain.

The idea that the United Nations can stumble along in its atrophied condition has powerful appeal in capitals around the world-and even in some offices at U.N. headquarters. But believing that the status quo will suffice is dangerous.

Regrettably, most of those who could change the organization have an interest in resisting reform. None of the permanent Security Council members wants to give up its veto; smaller powers delight in their Gen- eral Assembly votes, which count as much as those of the major powers; repressive regimes cherish partici-

pation in United Nations' human rights bodies, where they can scuttle embarrassing resolutions; and the Western powers whose troops and treasure are needed to strengthen U.N. peacekeeping have other priorities. Even with- in the U.N. bureaucracy, many veterans shy away from dramatic reform-it has taken them decades to become masters of the old procedures, and change is risky. And while U.N. offi- cials, including the secre-

tary-general, are quick (and correct) to blame the member states for the constraints they face, they too rarely find the courage to spotlight those specific states whose obstinacy, stinginess, and abuses undermine the principles behind the U.N. Charter.

Much U.N.-bashing is, of course, unfair. The Unit- ed Nations is in many respects just a building. It is a

"The idea that the United

Nations can stumble along in

its atrophied condition has a

powerful appeal in capitals around the world. But

believing that the status quo

will suffice is dangerous."

Samantha Power is a lecturer in public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and author of "A Prob-

lem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize.

38 FOREIGN POLICY



undermining free will

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