Free will? The “Sapolsky-Mitchell debate”

Oh, that worry, that your prizes will feel empty. – Robert Sapolsky

True, that title’s been meant to let you know what this is about, and – if I’m lucky – to even make you curious. In reality, there is no such debate: not in a factual, concrete way, and not with regard to content/substance either. Rather, there are two books, Determined – The Science of Life without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky, author of Behave, and Free Agents by Kevin Mitchell, author of Innate. For me, the link has been there ever since I listened to Brain Science Podcast episode 213, featuring Kevin Mitchell and his new book. Somehow, there was mention of another book forthcoming on that topic, by Robert Sapolsky. I immediately pre-ordered the book.

Here, then, follow my impressions from reading both books… – although, and I may be totally wrong there, “free will”, for many people, is not, not really, a topic up for discussion. Instead, you already know the answer; it is there, deep inside you. (To be frank, that’s how it is to me.) The answer is Yes, or No, and whichever it is, it is as a matter of course. Why then this post? Because still, you might be curious whether “the other side” had any new and/or convincing arguments, and because still, you might want to learn how someone like-minded addresses open questions and implications.

Sapolsky

“Determined” is wonderfully written, an easier read than “Behave”. If you’ve read “Behave”, you won’t find too much new content here. But the focus is different; Sapolsky dedicates the major portion of this book striving to answer the, undoubtedly, hardest question: If there is no free will, how should we organize our living together? If no-one is responsible for their actions, no sensible meaning assignable to “self control” and “willpower”, if there is no “crime” and no “punishment”, how can we make our societies safe to live in? (As an aside, this is not the only societal question ensuing. Sapolsky doesn’t discuss this at length – it being more urgent to address the “crime question” – but: If, just like responsibility, merit dissolves into nothing, how then do we build a just, a fair, an ethical society?)

Why is there no free will? Because at all times, what you think, what you feel, what you consider doing depends on how your life looked before. Here Sapolsky gives a condensation of what 800-page “Behave” is dedicated to: hormonal, neurological, environmental, genetic, cultural, evolutionary factors that have shaped, every moment of your life and even when still in the womb, how your brain, your body, your ways of feeling and thinking look now.

Following that summarization, he addresses popular arguments, as brought up by various flavors of free-will proponents. Some are philosophical, meaning they’re profferred by professional philosophers. For example, Sapolsky cites Daniel Dennett arguing that, sure, there’s luck, or bad luck, but in the long run, it will all average out : “[…] a good runner who starts at the back of the pack, if he is really good enough to DESERVE winning, will probably have had plenty of opportunity to overcome the initial disadvantage”. (Capitalization by Sapolsky, who I imagine to have felt some complex emotion of revulsion and “cruel satisfaction” in citing this passage.) – But does luck average out? Not in the marathon, where the person starting from the back is, in some endurance sports, likely to have to wait in pile-ups, causing them to lose yet more time, and to arrive at refreshment stations already emptied from all the good stuff. And not in life either – in that regard, Sapolsky’s book is full to the brim of shocking, disillusioning, depressing examples.

Supplementing this “averaging out” postulate is the view, popular among philosophers as well as “normal people”, that sure, you might sense whatever strong temptation, but if so, you just have to resist – to exercise self-control, a.k.a. discipline, a.k.a. “will power”. If you’re driven to binge-eat, throw the food out; if you can’t motivate yourself to study, give yourself a kick in the ass; if you’re tempted to give up, then just don’t give up. This certainly makes for narratives more than compliant with Western, meritocracy-shaped societies. But where does that two-step process – “me no. 1”, the subject that’s driven, coerced to do (or let be) something, and “me no. 2”, the boss who orders and forbids – come from? If your past determines what you feel and think now, then certainly it, too, decides over access to willpower now.

Unsurprisingly, Sapolsky does not seem to be much impressed by arguments like this. What about a second line of arguments, based on results from the natural sciences (first and foremost, from physics, the science that keeps us all in awe and subjection)? There are three fields frequently advertised as exhibiting indeterminism, and thus – it is said – to enable free will, and to each of those Sapolsky dedicates two chapters: one giving a readable, lucid introduction, and one, discussing the claim that from the quantum (right…) of indeterminacy they introduce, free will does emerge.

I won’t lie and admit upfront that in all three cases, either I find his respective arguments very convincing, or I’d want to put things even more sharply, or both. First, there is the fascinating subject of chaos theory. But magical though its results may look to us humans, all it implies is unpredictability – not randomness, however, not indeterminism. Chaos theory is all about how, under certain circumstances, deterministic processes can produce completely different results. All that’s needed are incredibly small differences in initial conditions, i.e., the starting state. In practice this means – seeing how we never can determine a starting state to 100% precision - that no reliable forecast is possible. But that’s very different from randomness.

Second, there’s complexity science, with its impressive demonstrations that out of very simple building blocks, complex, organized behavior can emerge. But here again, we struggle to demonstrate a sensible connection to free will. Not only are the building blocks – neurons – anything but simple. Also, the emergent behavior – ant foraging, say, or network layout – has nothing to do with free will. Concretely, the individua – single ant, network node - aren’t acquiring free will (nor do they gain in agency, to use the term figuring prominently in Mitchell’s text).

Finally, and most importantly, there’s quantum physics. Most importantly, because this is the field whose theories and findings have inspired people, physicists and non-physicists alike, to the wildest fantasies. (I’ll talk a little bit about this when we get to Mitchell, in a minute.) The fundamental problem is very down-to-earth, though. Whatever tiny structure is claimed to possess quantum-like indeterminacy, we need to show how from that layer, bigger structures arise that, in the end, produce what we call free will. Sapolsky calls it the bubbling-up, and of this, it looks like there does not exist any even half-way plausible account.

Mitchell

A convincing story of that bubbling up, that’s exactly what Mitchell is trying to present. He presents a detailed account of how, with the very first appearance of life, something like agency came into being, and how from there, it continued to evolve. It’s a fascinating read, especially as regards the very early stages. To me, at least, it is; I’ve never thought about very simple organisms – single-celled organisms! – in that way. Mitchell explains how life itself is intimately linked to agency: No life is possible without continuous work being done to keep an “inner” separate from an “outer”.

In consequence, to not go extinct, organisms have to evolve in the direction of – call it however you want: agency (in the sense of actively shaping one’s fate), intelligent decision-making, creative adaptation… I find this super convincing - it’s just that, employing words like “intelligent” or “creative”, I’m using the language I’m accustomed to think in. Just like I use them for describing my own behavior, I can use them referring to any living organism’s actions. (Yes, I think that there’s no more “truth” in using these terms for humans than for other creatures. To me, it’s totally fine to use them, though, as long as I’m conscious of my just utilizing some form of agreed-upon linguistic code here.)

End of “irresistible aside”, back to Mitchell. I like the agency story, but I fail to see how from – gradual, as he himself demonstrates so nicely! – increase in complexity might arise what we call free will. In fact, Mitchell dedicates several chapters to elaborating this link. The main role is played by quantum physics. Mitchell cites prominent contemporary physicists who have built whole high-level (and quite audacious, I’d say, sometimes) world views on quantum-scale indeterminacy. For example (citing Mitchell): “Gisin and del Santo argue that, beyond some decimal point, the numbers describing the physical parameters of classical systems in the future simply become indefinite. It’s not just that we don’t know what they are—the universe also doesn’t know what they are, not yet. The numbers are not given with infinite precision all at once; instead, they evolve as processes through time. Again, it is through interaction that these parameters take on a definite value, paralleling the “collapse” of quantum possibilities. It’s not that these parameters can take any value; they’re not completely random. They are constrained, often tightly, by the physics of the system in question —they are, however, not completely constrained.”

This, to me, reads, in a way, as “indefinite” as the future parameters are posited to be. What does Mitchell make of it?

“Indeed, the behavior of everything in the universe would have been predetermined from the dawn of time, including me writing this sentence and you reading it. In my view, this claim is absurd on its face. That is not an argument for whether it’s true or not but just an observation that this claim jars so bracingly with our actual experience of the world that we should be strongly suspicious of it. […] There is only one future open, with no possibilities, no deciding or acting, no purposiveness, no mattering, no trying, no goals, or functions—it would be literally a meaningless universe.”

I’m sorry, but all I can think reading this is “wishful thinking”. We don’t want to live in a meaningless universe. But meaning is something we construct, or fail to construct, in our lives, not something outside.

More on the “hard facts side”, even the big bang jumps in to help: “Indeed, the observed organization of matter in the universe depended on the presence of quantum fluctuations in a phase of “cosmic inflation” that preceded the “hot” Big Bang. As the universe was rapidly expanding, it was initially a homogeneous field of energy. Without random quantum fluctuations that broke up this symmetrical field, matter and energy would have been so evenly distributed that pretty much nothing would have happened. Instead, these tiny blips introduced enough inhomogeneity into gravitational fields that galaxies and stars and planets could form.“

I can say absolutely nothing about the facts, but again, I have problems following Mitchell’s conclusions:

“No, the really crucial point is that the introduction of chance undercuts necessity’s monopoly on causation. The low-level physical details and forces are not causally comprehensive: they are not sufficient to determine how a system will evolve from state to state. This opens the door for higher-level features to have some causal influence in determining which way the physical system will evolve. This influence is exerted by establishing contextual constraints: in other words, the way the system is organized can also do some causal work. In the brain, that organization embodies knowledge, beliefs, goals, and motivations—our reasons for doing things. This means some things are driven neither by necessity nor by chance; instead, they are up to us.”

“This opens the door…” – does it? How exactly do higher-level features come to exert causal influence?

Wrapping up,- - when Mitchell cites Bergson, his concept of durations, I am, emotionally, all on his side: I like that concept a lot, I find it totally emotionally attractive. But still, I think it’s a description of how our reality feels to us. If you don’t want to make statements about an external reality (and I’m lucky there; I don’t want to) that’s fine, but otherwise you somehow have to, in Sapolsky’s words, make that “bubbling up” plausible.

Speaking of Sapolsky – I think that as a proponent of free will, you also have to explain of how bubbling up, if it’s successful, circumvents his account of how the past – your past, immediate, recent and less recent; your environment, starting from when in the womb; and finally, evolution, both cultural and biological – make up what you are now.

Foto von Tim Schmidbauer auf Unsplash