In recent conversations with theists I’ve come across a common objection to the possibility of free will if there be no supernatural dimension to the world in which we live. The argument goes along the lines of:
P1. Materialism assumes we consist of only matter (i.e. atoms)
P2. Atoms don’t have free will
C. We experience free will so there must be more to this world than just matter
an alternative is:
P1. Materialism assumes we consist of only matter (i.e. atoms)
P2. Atoms don’t have free will
C. Under the materialistic worldview we can’t ultimately have free will
I’ve heard this argument couched in numerous ways but the essence of it is that if our smallest bits don’t have free will then we can’t explain the freedom we appear to experience.
I can think of two answers to this.
The first (which I’m not personally convinced of) would be that we only have the appearance of freedom and that, as participants, we are able to fool ourselves into thinking we have control over what we do. My analogy for this is where the desperate dog-owner repeatedly tries to tell their disobedient dog to sit and when they finally notice that the dog is about to sit of its own accord, quickly say “sit!” in order to give themselves the feeling of being in control. This would make what we experience as free will a kind of a self-deception and, like I said, I’m not convinced this is the case but it is a valid answer to the first problem pointed out above. (Although, I must say that I think there is some truth to this at times, especially when it comes to self-justification).
The second, and far more powerful, option is to look at the analogy of music. Take a CD of your favourite musician and if we look closely we’ll see that the ‘music’ is made of only on or off states. 0s or 1s. When we play a CD we experience music but when we look at what this music (on a CD) is made of we can see that it’s just binary bits. And as we all know, a 0 or a 1 is not in itself music. This second argument would suggest that both free will and music are the emergent properties of their component parts doing something.
In the second set of arguments above I italicised the word ultimately. My analogy of music also helps to address the logical fallacy of the usage of this word. I don’t believe there is such a thing as ultimate music. Nor do I believe there is such a thing as ultimate free will. I believe that both are subjectively experienced and are results of non-free and non-musical atoms and bits doing something. We experience free will just as we experience music.
The use of the word ‘ultimate’ in this argument tries to imply that there are only two kinds of free will; ultimate free will or no free will at all. This is a false dichotomy. I would argue that there is at least another type of free will and that is the kind that is experienced subjectively and is only explainable at the macro level of bundles of atoms that are doing something. A world within a world. And using the music analogy once again, you can see how silly this argument is when I say “There is only either ultimate music or no music at all”.
“Free will” is a word that we’ve made up to describe an aspect we observe of the world around us. We have a tendency to want our words and categories to clearly demarcate things we observe into black/white, on/off, etc. But sometimes the words we invent fail at a point when the thing we are describing is a gradient, like ‘red’ (when does red become orange?) or ‘alive’ (are viruses alive? is fire alive?) or ‘music’ (is a ‘chirp’ music? what about a vibration on a violin string? or wind in the trees?). Free will is one of these words. We can observe a gradient of organisms with various abilities to do things. Free will is a gradual and emergent process and to treat it as a binary state is to become a slave to a simplistic understanding of the world and to imperfect vocabulary.
