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Conscious Evolution and Free Will?
Part of the controversy over Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has always been its deterministic tone. Darwin saw evolution as happening through the combination of chance variation and natural selection. The theory goes something like this. Individual organisms of any species are born with variations that occur randomly. Some of these variations are inheritable, meaning that they can be passed on genetically from parent to offspring. Of those variations that can be passed along to offspring, some have survival advantages. Over time more and more individuals with this new beneficial trait will be born until having that trait becomes the norm. Over time change of this type results in the evolution of one species into another.
With this explanation for evolution, Darwin had no need of God. He had no need to postulate some guiding force outside of “chance variation” and “natural selection.” His thinking is deterministic in the sense that there is no intelligence required to guide the process. The guidance system is inherent in the need to survive in order to produce offspring.
When this line of thinking is applied to the development of our intellects it can lead to the conclusion that every choice we make is determined by conditioning resulting from past choices that we have made. Essentially the idea is that if you have a choice between A and B and choosing A results in pain, then the next time you face the same choice you will choose B. Taken to its extreme it is possible to imagine that all of our choices are “determined” by what we have been conditioned to do because of all of our past choices.
Those of us interested in what is known as conscious evolution believe that our newly emerging understanding of the evolutionary process (from which we have been produced) puts us in a position to consciously participate in guiding the future development of evolution. To my mind that immediately raises the question of the existence of human freewill. It would seem that if human beings were going to be in a position to guide the evolutionary process they would need to have free will in order to make choices outside of the bounds of “chance variation” and “natural selection.”
Certainly William James and John Dewey put the fact of human choice at the forefront of their thinking about what it would mean to consciously participate in the evolution of consciousness. James in his essay “Are We Automatons?” concludes the function of consciousness is to act as a selecting organ for choosing what part of our experience to give our attention to. He refers to consciousness as an “organ of selection’ and in this he is following the same line of thinking that led Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Spiritual Laws” to define man as “a selecting principle.” Dewey in his book “Human Nature and Conduct” states that the question of morality and ethics only arises in situations in which it is possible to make a choice between two or more alternatives. The fact that this choice is “free” is implied.
But I wonder if “free will” in the personal sense is truly required for a possibility of conscious evolution to be there. Certainly “freedom” is required. No one would argue that in order for there to be any evolution at all it would have to be possible for something “new” to emerge. If there was no freedom for something new to emerge in the universe, nothing could ever change. So freedom, or as Charles Sanders Peirce would call it “spontaneity” has to exist in order for evolution to be possible. The question is, “Does the necessity of spontaneity in an evolving universe require the existence of personal free will for the human being?” This is a question that I would like to think about and respond to in future posts – and I would appreciate any insights from my readers.
Jeff, You keep bringing up my favorite subjects. Now I’m determined to comment.
The roots of scientific determinism grew into (and then from) Newton’s seemingly iron-clad laws of motion which Laplace parlayed into a “present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future.” It seems to me that classical mechanics are the underpinnings even for today’s determinists. But let’s continue to follow the progression of scientific thinking to see if our philosophies can keep up.
Before Darwin, naturalists were busy with taxonomy — the fixed classification of life forms into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. Darwin used a detailed understanding of classical taxonomy to arrive at the suggestion that species morph over deep time, breaking the classical ice in biology.
Einstein’s theory of relativity found that Newton’s “laws” don’t hold when time and space bend to the speed of light. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle showed that we cannot know both the location and speed of a particle. And Bohr’s complimentarity explained that any description of the behavior of a particle or system reflects the point of view of the observer. Together, uncertainty and complimentarity form the Copenhagen interpretation, which indicates that physical properties and actions may be non-deterministic to some degree.
To be clear, it is not that scientific measurements are not advanced enough and some day they will be. As I understand it, the uncertainty, or more precisely the indeterminability, is inherent and by definition cannot be overcome even with improved methods.
Now I won’t make the claim that these relativities, uncertainties, and complimantarities give rise to activities in the brain that create free will. Instead it is with these ways of thinking, these breaks from fixed classical mechanics, that give rise to the understanding of the emergence found in complex adaptive systems and the possibility of free will in which we can be responsible for our actions.
Before we get there, we must recognize that the tool we will use to understand all this is our brains. And our brains are evolved organs that help us survive in a world where the objects that matter are neither very large (cosmic) or very small (microscopic). We live in Middle Land where the scale of things is between, say, ants and mountains. Therefore, the activities of Heisenberg’s indeterminate electrons don’t sway our decisions, except as they roll up into objects and events in Middle Land.
None the less, we make our decisions in a very complex environment where there are so many causes that none of them have a controlling interest, like shareholders in a large corporatation. This leaves us with a degree of freedom to make decisions and take actions within certain physical limits. We cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound, but we can choose to walk around them either to the left or to the right depending on which seems more advantagous. Yes we are very much influenced by genetic, environmental, and historical factors. But these are influences, not causes. As we learn from subjects like quantum mechanics, evolutionary psychology, experimental philosophy, and the Arts, we become more aware of these influences. But our freedom may lie in our ignorance of their net effect, leaving us in downhill skiing to “swerve left, swerve right, or think about it and die.”
And the choices we make matter, affecting not only our own outcomes, but also the future for our descendents and the emerging complex adaptive systems of which we are all a part. I can’t say it more clearly than Stuart Kaufman in his book Reinventing the Sacred: “We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know.”
Free will seems limited to humans and possibly to other higher animals, and so it is unlike anything else in wider nature. But then the same is true of other features of our mind, such as emotions, reasoning, and understanding. Free will is no more puzzling than these other features and no less worthy of our belief. We can no more abandon our belief in free will (or the exercising of it) than we can abandon emotions, reasoning and understanding. And there is nothing yet to convince us we are wrong to believe in our own free will. The challenge, then, is to continously improve our understanding of causation, including the relative impact of genetic, environmental, and historical factors, in order to make better choices. Yet somehow we must act, and we must act appropriately without taking time to weigh all the reasons.
This is a very interesting point, especially since my first response is “of course you need freewill.” But then when I think about it it isn’t so clear.
A few things come up as I think about it.
1. One thing that occurs to me is that the statement “of my own freewill” is equally an expression of free choice as it is of responsibility. Without freewill, how can responsibility be established?
2. I’m not really clear on what your distinction between freewill and freedom/possibility of newness/spontaneity is? Are you suggesting that new things can emerge in consciousness without our freely having choose them?
2.5 The more I learn about how culturally conditioned I am, the more I realize that what I previously thought to be my choices are mostly not very free. Freewill in this sense operates only within the boundaries of our identifications.
3. There is something about the fact that the when you contemplate your life, and you come to the conclusion that only conscious evolution makes sense, because it is more true then anything else, your own freely made decision to align yourself with that higher evolution feels mandatory.
4. “Not my will, but thy will, be done.” Personal freewill only goes so far, and ultimately merges with the will of God/consciousness/universe….?
It is a great discussion! I think about this subject sometimes, and I like to ask how we differ from mashines/computers after all… do we have some kind of free will that they couldn’ t ever have? I always have to leave it open, but if we start the other way around, then what would it mean to conclude that we are like mashines? Without free will (as we normally understand it)?
Could we then ever choose freely, or are we changing by “programming” only, wich could mean experience? And what would “the choosing faculty” actually mean then?
I still dont get any answers…
Thanks for your great blog, Jeff.
Mette , Copenhagen
Thank you all for these fantastic and extremely thoughtful posts. To address Christiana’s question – i do think that there is a difference between “newness” and “free will.” To use a Darwinian example, the radom mutations that occur in individuals are “new,” but no one made any choice in the matter. So what exactly is free will is the question.
My understanding seems very closely aligned with Brian’s.
The ideas that Christiana introduces have intrigued me for many decades.
It seems that ultimately it comes down to either we are automata following rules (even though we can never quite know the starting conditions, so can never predict outcomes with 100% certainty); or
at some level we actually have free will, and the concepts of “morality”, and “responsibility” actually have some meaning (and are not simply myths).
I choose to subscribe to the latter theory.
If I am wrong, then I was predestined fromt he time of the big bang to be so.
Having spent several decades exploring possible methods of proving the case one way or the other, I am satisfied that no such proof is logically possible.
Let’s just say I am choosing to be a responsibe optimist ! 😉
I have a few thoughts related to the free will vs. determinism discussion.
First, it seems to me that this is a matter of perspective or vantage point. From the “inside” experience of being the self, we make choices. When the choices are between two or more POSITIVE options, we feel free. When one or more of the options is negative – when we choose to avoid or escape NEGATIVE outcomes – then we do not feel free, and we say that we are being “coerced.” A good current-day example of this is confession under torture. Such confessions are coerced, not free, according to the way we talk about it. Thus, they are less likely to be reliable, since people will make things up to escape the pain. From the “outside” perspective, decades of research on choice in both humans and non-humans has shown choice to be lawful. That is, behavioral scientists/economists can predict mathematically the outcome of choices between options that they can identify and measure in the laboratory, in terms of the amounts, preferences for, and various other parameters of the things there are to choose from. While there are sometimes measurable biases in our choices based on history and other variables (what the behavioral economists call “irrationality”), the choices are nonetheless lawful or orderly, like other elements of the universe. Our choices are not “random.” Science, which seeks to discover the lawfulness in nature, has identified laws that predict choice. This means that from the “outside” viewpoint, choice is lawful (“determined”) and predictable, if we can identify the variables at play. I would say, then, that we choose “freely” when experienced from the subjective angle and the choices are positive, and we choose “for reasons” or lawfully, when viewed from the external perspective. BOTH are true, which accounts, I believe, for the often reported experience of paradox in enlightenment experiences, where we feel both free and part of a completely continuous whole at the same time, both separate and part of a single consciousness. Both autonomous, and in communion with the whole. I believe it is this sometimes even humorous experience of paradox that corresponds to the fact that both free will (from the inside, among positive choices) and determinism (from the outside perspective) are true at the same time.
In the “real world” we can neither control nor measure ALL the choices available. So from that point of view, we cannot identify or predict all behavior as it occurs. This is the same problem as being able to predict behavior of objects in a wind tunnel but not able to predict their behavior outside in the ocean breeze, because we can neither control nor precisely measure all the variables in the ocean breeze at any moment. But that does not mean science does not apply, or that movements of objects in the breeze are not determined or orderly. We just can’t measure them precisely under the circumstances.
A second point is related to the sense in which we can take control of our own lives, our own destiny. That can be a profound experience of “free will” although it also requires “effort” and skillful means, to make choices that lead to further choices that lead to desired outcomes, and so on. The way that we do this is, to a large extent, mediated by language and conceptual/verbal behavior about our “selves” and our own behavior in relationship to other factors. That is, because we are self-aware, and we understand to some extent the variables that affect our own behavior, we can change the variables in our environment in order to change our own behavior. We can “freely” choose to manipulate the very deterministic factors that influence our own behavior. We can exert self-control, we can envision the future and arrange things to increase the chances of our behaving in a resourceful way, and so on. That is one of the miracles of being human, having language, and being self-aware in the way that we are. We can change the world in order to have it change us.
This is, I think, a kind of “snake swallowing its tail” element of our existence. Because we can verbalize, represent, and be aware of our own behavior and what is likely to influence it, we can ourselves manage the very variables that “determine” our own choices and thereby take control of our own future, to some extent. We can freely use determinism to direct our own lives!
To the extent that we take advantage of that by recognizing and committing to our own ability to do so, facing into the factors that influence our own behavior, and view ourselves “impersonally” and from the “outside,” we can consciously influence our own evolution and evolution of the whole. Notice, however, that these choices themselves are often determined by our experiences and communications from others, and from other factors in our worlds, for example, the influence of spiritual teachers who affect our behavior.
By the way, in this context it is important to remember that a modern understanding from behavioral science is that our behavior is influenced by a continuous stream of genetic and environmental factors, and that our behavior itself is a continuously varying pattern of probabilities, not Newtonian/mechanical linkages. So the “determinism” we are talking about is not some of mechanical robotic thing. It is, like the weather, a matter of continuously varying probability distributions.
I believe that the elements of free choice and lawfulness or determinism are both essential to this ability we have to influence evolution. Without the subjective experience of free choice coupled with growing self-awareness, we could not easily choose options that are anything but immediately gratifying, that lead to better outcomes in the future. And without an understanding of the variables that determine our own behavior, there would be no laws, rules, or predictable principles that we could use to inform choices intended to influence our own future.
Both are true.
I agree with almost everything Carl says.
The point that is open to serious debate on interpretation is the claim that science “has identified laws that predict choice”.
To the best of my knowledge that is not so.
What science has done is develop probability functions that can be used with large populations with very high probabilities. But at the level of any specific individual the probability degrades, and with some individuals approaches zero.
This science is not determining what governs choice, it is predicting the outcomes of choice across large groups – a very different thing.
I agree with the wind tunnel analogy – but it is a real minefield.
Werner Heisenberg showed (and Kurt Goedel reinforced for a different perspective) that we cannot know the initial conditions of anything at the very fine scale, so that there will always be perturbations to our probabilities.
Chaos theory has shown us that there are some classes of processes for which these minor perturbations can be magnified to very large scale in relatively short time.
Many people Starting with Einstein and most recently with John Murphy, have shown us that our conceptions about time are not accurate. John has shown that there is no such thing as universal time, that time is local to each and every particle.
So the notion that choice is predictable, is actually a nonsense – at the level of the individual (with all due respect to Hari Seldon).
For me the important thing to note about life is the number of layers and levels of recursion.
Last time I had a close look I identified 21 levels of system within my being where the output of a process formed an input to the next iteration of that process.
Such processes are not “predictable”. They may be modelled and simulated but in a very real sense, the only way to determine the output is to run them and see – and it is likely to be a different output each time it is run.
Populations modelling in fisheries these days is done by doing thousands of simulation runs, and averaging the outcomes, and noting the limiting cases observed. This gives managers some level of confidence, without actually being certain about anything.
At each new level of awareness we gain access to greater levels of predictability about the level we just left (and it predecessors) and yet we must necessarily be ignorant of the affects of the level on which we find ourselves.
I have transitioned enough levels to be confident that the process is infinite – not limited to the 8 proposed by Buddhist thought – though they are a great start.
I can happily contemplate a life if millions of years, involving ongoing and continuous development and transitioning.
Whether I manage to achieve it or not is a different question. Not as confident about it now as I was 30 years ago.
Just to be clear in response to Ted, at the level of the individual subject, the work begun by R. J. Herrnstein on what is called “The Matching Law” during the late 1960’s has spawned an entire field of work in the science of the experimental analysis of behavior. It demonstrates that the relative rate of response among choices matches the relative rate of reinforcement. All kinds of work involving variations in quality, quantity, delay, etc. have been factored into equations and contributed to a field now known as behavioral economics. This is at the level of the individual, and not for groups. And once individual parameters for preference, etc. have been calibrated for an individual, it’s possible to predict absolute rates of response in controlled laboratory situations. This is as orderly as were the earlier studies of schedules of reinforcement conducted by Skinner and his students, and many of the other basic findings of the experimental analysis of behavior.
I wasn’t talking about pigeons, I was talking about people. So far as I am aware Herrnstein’s work has not been reliably repeated with human subjects.
I would be prepared to guarantee that if tried on my wife the correlation would be less than .2 (ie worse than a random .5).
I’m a little more easy going in most areas, so you might get a .8 out of me most of the time, dropping to 0 in some subject areas.
This is one of the key differences between humans and animals.
Humans keep shifting the domains of preference – we do not simply shift preferences, we shift the entire framing for preference, and there does not appear to be any limit to the number of times nor to the dimensionality with which we can do this.
Ted, the results are, indeed, somewhat mixed. But in a variety of areas including drug self-administration, time allocation in various situations, and gambling, the equations of the matching law have been shown to apply to human behavior. Having done some lab work in this area myself 40 years ago, I know how hard it is to control the motivational variables in humans compared to lab animals — you can’t starve them to 80% body weight and then use food as a reinforcer! But the data, are in general, orderly, and my only point is that human behavior is certainly not random, conforms roughly to mathematical formulas when the conditions are well-controlled, and could be said to be as lawful as anything else in nature, rather than being a sort of self-caused cause (the definition on God in traditional theological arguments). We are as much a part of the lawful ecology of life and nature as any other element. I don’t mean to take this off into technical details, only to make a general point about the lawfulness of human behavior.
Hi Carl
I think we’re back on the same page now.
It is well over 30 years since I worked in behavioural and biochem labs.
I understand many levels of process underlying human awareness. Those processes are entirely lawful in the sense you express.
Within myself, I would describe my behaviour as lawful 99.99999% of the time. Yet I am also aware that while lawful, because of the levels of recursion involved, it is also unpredictable.
At another level, there do appear to be occasional instants when “something else” happens, and the unexpected is produced.
I believe I understand the mechanics of this process also, and it introduces an even deeper level of unpredictability (what some might term a deeper magic), and yet even there there does appear to be law to follow.
So yes – we obey laws, most of the time, and sometimes we create new laws, which allow us to bend old ones.
And there is a clear distinction between lawfulness and predictability – if you don’t accept that, then spend some time (took me about 6 months) in Kurt Goedel’s work.
Ted
Ted,
Yes, I think we are in agreement. Certainly lawfulness doesn’t imply predictability in any given moment in real life. One of the interesting things that comes out of the work of my teacher, B.F. Skinner, is an account of creativity or novel behavior that relies on two principles: variability and selection (same principles as account for evolution). There are many sources of variability in behavior, including “turning off the reward” (called extinction) which leads to increasingly wide variation in behavior; one’s individual history which makes various responses more probable, and so on. Selection occurs by consequences, which either increase or decrease the probability of the behavior they follow. Put together, these two principles can predict — yes, I use that term in this case — new behavior. One of Skinner’s students, my fellow grad student Robert Epstein, has conducted experiments in which human subjects were videotaped. They were given specific histories of learning and then put in situations that made combining elements of those histories more likely. Robert was able to predict the moment in which a new response, one that the person had never before exhibited, would occur. It’s kind of mind-blowing, but it shows that even the emergence of new behavior is something that follows laws, and can be predicted if we can narrowly control history and current circumstances. But, of course, we can’t do that in real life…..
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