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Free will is the philosophical doctrine that holds that our choices are ultimately up to ourselves. The phrase "up to ourselves" is vague, and, just like free will itself, admits of a variety of interpretations. Because of this ambiguity, the utility of the concept of free will is questioned by some. Several logically independent questions can be asked about free will.

Contents 1 Determinism versus indeterminism 2 Moral responsibility 3 Compatibilist theories and the could-have-done-otherwise principle 4 The science of free will 4.1 Neurology and psychiatry 4.2 Determinism and emergent behaviour 5 In theology 5.1 In Christian thought 5.1.1 In Calvinism 5.1.2 In Catholicism 5.1.3 In Mormonism 5.1.4 In Other Christian Faiths 5.2 In Jewish thought 6 See also 7 External links

Determinism versus indeterminism

Determinism holds that each state of affairs is necessitated (determined) by the states of affairs that preceded it, an extension of cause and effect. Indeterminism holds this proposition to be incorrect, and that there are events which are not entirely determined by previous states of affairs. The idea of determinism is sometimes illustrated by the story of Laplace's demon, who knows all the facts about the past and present and all the natural laws that govern our world, and uses this knowledge to foresee the future, down to every detail.

Some philosophers hold that determinism is at odds with free will. This is the doctrine of incompatibilism. Incompatibilists generally claim that a person acts freely (has free will) only in cases where the person is the sole originating cause of the act and the person genuinely could have done otherwise. This kind of free will is (at least allegedly) incompatible with determinism. If determinism is true, and everything that happens is completely determined by the past (including events that preceded our births), then every choice we make would ultimately be determined by prior events that were not under our control. Our choices would be just another outcome determined by the past. So if determinism were true, then we would be trapped by the past and free will would be an illusion, under the theory of incompatibilism. "Hard determinists", such as d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who accept determinism and reject free will. "Libertarians", such as Thomas Reid, Peter van Inwagen, and Robert Kane are those incompatibilists who accept free will, deny determinism, and instead believe that indeterminism is true. (This kind of libertarianism should not be confused with the political position of the same name, and is thus sometimes known as voluntarism for this very reason.)

Other philosophers hold that determinism is compatible with free will. These "compatibilists", such as Hobbes, generally claim that a person acts freely only in the case where the person willed the act and the person could (hypothetically) have done otherwise if the person had decided to. In articulating this crucial proviso, Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains". Compatibilists often point to clearcut cases of someone's free will being denied — rape, murder, theft, and so on. The key to these cases is not that the past is determining the future, but that the aggressor is overriding the victim's desires and preferences about his or her own actions. The aggressor is coercing the victim and, according to compatibilists, this is what nullifies free will. In other words, determinism does not matter; what matters is that our choices are the results of our own desires and preferences, and are not overridden by some external (or even internal) force. To be a compatibilist, one need not endorse any particular conception of free will (one need only deny that determinism is at odds with free will), but the positions canvassed here are typical of compatibilism.

Furthermore, it is often held that the phrase "free will" is, as Hobbes put it, "absurd speech", because freedom is a power defined in terms of the will, which is a thing—and so the will is not the sort of thing that could be free or unfree. There is also the question arising of any caused act being free or any uncaused act being willed, leaving freewill an oxymoron. Some compatibilists argue that this alleged lack of grounding for the concept of "free will" is at least partly responsible for the perception of a contradiction between determinism and liberty. Also, from a compatibilist point of view the use of "free will" in an incompatibilist sense may be regarded as loaded language.

Moral responsibility

We generally hold people responsible for their actions, and will say that they deserve praise or blame for what they do. However, many believe moral responsibility to require free will. Thus, another important issue is whether we are ever morally responsible, and if so, in what sense.

Incompatibilists tend to think that determinism is at odds with moral responsibility. After all, how can one hold someone responsible for an action that could be predicted from the beginning of time? Hard determinists say "So much the worse for moral responsibility!" and discard the concept — Clarence Darrow famously used this argument to defend the murderers Leopold and Loeb — while, conversely, libertarians say "So much the worse for determinism!" This issue appears to be the heart of the dispute between hard determinists and compatibilists; hard determinists are forced to accept that we often have "free will" in the compatibilist sense, but they deny that this sense of free will truly matters — that it can ground moral responsibility. Just because an agent's choices are uncoerced, hard determinists claim, does not change the fact that determinism robs the agent of responsibility.

Compatibilists often argue that, on the contrary, determinism is a prerequisite for moral responsibility — you can't hold someone responsible unless his actions were determined by something (this argument can be traced to Hume and was also used by the anarchist William Godwin). After all, if indeterminism is true, then those events that are not determined are random. How can one blame or praise someone for performing an action that just spontaneously popped into his nervous system? Instead, they argue, one needs to show how the action stemmed from the person's desires and preferences — the person's character — before one starts holding the person morally responsible. Libertarians sometimes reply that undetermined actions are not random at all, and that they result from a substantive will whose decisions are undetermined. This argument is widely considered unsatisfactory, for it just pushes the problem back a step, and further, it involves some very mysterious metaphysics. See Ex nihilo nihil fit

St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans addresses the question of moral responsibility as follows: "Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?" (Romans 9:21). In this view, we can still be dishonoured for our acts even though they were ultimately completely determined by God.

A similar view has it that our moral culpability lies in our character. That is, a person with the character of a murderer has no choice other than murder, but can still be punished because it is right to punish those of bad character.

A business venture can be incorportate or given the legal fiction of personhood. This model may be an apt analogy for the individual person, who can also be seen as a legal fiction. There is no stable core elements that do not undergo changes over time yet the whole, the person, is considered the same from birth to death. Thus Stanley Williams age 52 was executed for a crime committed by Stanley Williams age 28. Thus the corporate self can be rewarded and punished legally, whether it be a business or a living being. The question of free will need not enter into this, as the issue is not freedom, but the impact upon other agents. A corporation makes decisions based on the decisions of the people who make up the corporation, a human being makes its decisions based on the decision processes of groups of cells.

Compatibilist theories and the could-have-done-otherwise principle

Many claim that, in order for a choice to be free in any sense that matters, it must be true that the agent could have done otherwise. They take this principle — van Inwagen calls it the "principle of alternate possibilities" — to be a necessary condition for freedom. The literary critic Isaiah Berlin made much the same point.

The claim is that, for example, if a criminal puts a machine in Bob's brain that makes him kill a stranger, his action was not free, for Bob couldn't have done otherwise. Incompatibilists often appeal to this principle to show that determinism cannot be reconciled with free will. "If a decision is completely determined by the past," they ask, "how could the agent have decided to do something else?" Compatibilists often reply that what's important is not simply that the agent could have done otherwise, but that the agent could have done otherwise if he or she had wanted to. Moreover, some compatibilists, such as Harry Frankfurt or Daniel Dennett, argue that there are stark cases where, even though the agent couldn't have done otherwise, the agent's choice was still free: what if Bob really wanted to kill the stranger and the machine in Bob's brain would only kick in if Bob lost his nerve? If Bob went through with it on his own, surely the act would be free. Incompatibilists claim that the problem with this idea is that what Bob "wanted" was determined before Bob was conceived. In Elbow Room, Dennett presents an argument for a compatibilist theory of free will. He elaborated further in the 2003 book Freedom Evolves. The basic reasoning is that, if we do not consider God (or an infinitely powerful demon) or time travel, then through chaos and pseudo-randomness or quantum randomness, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings. The only well-defined concepts are "expectations". Thus, the ability to do "otherwise" only makes sense when dealing with expectations, and not with some unknown and unknowable future. Since we certainly have the ability to do differently from what anyone expects, free will can exist.

The philosopher John Locke also took the view that determinism was irrelevant. He believed, however, the defining feature of free will to be that we are free so long as we have the ability to postpone a decision long enough to reflect upon the consequences of a choice.

More sophisticated analyses of compatibilist free will have been offered, as have other critiques.

William James, both philosopher and psychologist, gave the label soft determinism to the position nowadays known as compatibilism, and complained that soft determinist formulations were "a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of fact has been entirely smothered." But James' own views were somewhat ambivalent. While he believed in free will on "ethical grounds," he believed there was no evidence for it on scientific or psychological grounds.

Moreover, he didn't believe in incompatibilism as formulated above, i.e. he didn't believe that the indeterminism of human actions was a requirement of moral responsibility. In his classic work Pragmatism, (1907) he wrote that, "Instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" regardless of metaphysical theories. But he did believe that indeterminism is important as a "doctrine of relief" -- it allows for the view that, although the world may be in many respects a bad place, it may through our actions become a better one. Determinism, he argued, undermines that meliorism.

The science of free will

Throughout the history of science, attempts have been made to answer the question of free will using scientific principles. Early scientific thought often pictured the universe as deterministic, and some thinkers believed that it was simply a matter of gathering sufficient information to be able to predict future events with perfect accuracy. While not mechanistic in the same sense as classical physics, most current scientific theories are also deterministic, by necessity — it is a basic assumption of all scientific endeavours that the future can be predicted. It is also difficult, if not impossible, to write the mathematics for a non-predictive science.

On its face, quantum mechanics only predicts observations in terms of probabilities. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics may suggest that the universe, when viewed as a single system, is nonetheless deterministic, as there is no outside entity capable of making observations. It is far from clear, however, that microscale interpretations of quantum mechanics can be applied to large systems in this way, and whether quantum mechanics ultimately describes a universe governed by laws of cause and effect or by chance is hotly debated both by some physicists and philosophers of science. Other interpretations are non-deterministic and many physicists find attempts to "interpret" quantum mechanics to be pointless. See positivism.

The leading contemporary philosopher who has capitalized on the success of quantum mechanics and chaos theory in order to defend incompatibilist freedom is Robert Kane, in The Significance of Free Will and several other writings.

Like physicists, biologists have also frequently addressed the question of free will. One of the most heated debates of biology is that of "nature versus nurture". How important are genetics and biology in human behaviour compared to culture and environment? Genetic studies have identified many specific genetic factors that affect the personality of the individual, from obvious cases such as Down's syndrome to more subtle effects such as a statistical predisposition towards schizophrenia. However, it is not certain that environmental determination is less threatening to free will than genetic determination. The latest analysis of the human genome shows it to have only about 20,000 genes. These genes, and the reconsidered intron genetic material, and the newly-described MiRNA allow a level of molecular complexity analogous to the complexity of human behavior. Desmond Morris and other evolutionary anthropologists have studied the relationship between behavior and natural selection in humans and other primates. The synthesis of these two fields of inquiry is that human genetics may be sufficiently complex to explain behavioral tendencies, and that (evolutionarily advantageous) environmental factors such as parental behavior and cultural standards modulate these genetic factors. Neither of these phenomena, genetic complexity nor advantageous cultural behaviors, require free will to explain human behavior.

It has also become possible to study the living brain and researchers can now watch the decision-making "machinery" at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, wherein he asked subjects to choose a random moment to flick their wrist while he watched the associated activity in their brains. Libet found that the brain activity leading up to the subject flicking his or her wrist began approximately one-third of a second before the subject consciously decided to move, suggesting that the decision was actually first being made on a subconscious level and only afterward being translated into a "conscious decision", and that the subject's belief that it occurred randomly was only due to their perception.

A related experiment performed later by Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone involved asking subjects to choose at random which of their hands to move. He found that by stimulating different hemispheres of the brain using magnetic fields it was possible to strongly influence which hand the subject picked. Normally right-handed people would choose to move their right hand 60% of the time, for example, but when the right hemisphere was stimulated they would instead choose their left hand 80% of the time (recall that the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere for the right). Despite the external influence on their decision-making, the subjects continued to report that they believed their choice of hand had been made freely. Libet himself (e.g. Libet, 2003: 'Can Conscious Experience affect brain Activity? ', Journal of Consciousness Studies 10, nr. 12, pp 24 - 28), however, does not interpret his experiment as evidence of the inefficacy of conscious free will — he points out that although the tendency to press a button may be building up for 500 milliseconds, the conscious will retains a right to veto that action in the last few milliseconds. A good comparison made is with a golfer, who may swing the club several times before striking the ball. In this view, the action simply gets, as it were, a rubber stamp of approval at the last millisecond. Also, for planning tomorrow's activities or those in an hour millisecond offsets are insignificant.

Neurology and psychiatry

There are several brain-related disorders that might be termed free will disorders: In obsessive-compulsive disorder a patient may feel an overwhelming urge, e.g., to wash his hands many times a day, and he will recognize the desire as his desire although out of his control. In Tourette's and related syndromes patients will involuntarily make movements (tics) and utterances. In alien hand syndrome (also called Dr. Strangelove syndrome, after the popular film) the patient's limb will make meaningful acts without the intention of the subject.

Determinism and emergent behaviour

In emergentist or generative philosophy of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is the generation of infinite behaviour from the interaction of finite-deterministic set of rules and parameters. Thus the unpredictability of the emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, though free will as an ontological entity does not exist.

As an illustration, the strategy board-games chess and more so Go are rigorously deterministic in their rules and parameters, expressed in terms of the positions of the pieces or entities in relation to other entities on the board. Yet, chess and Go with their strict rigour and rules, generate more moves and unpredictable behaviour than any other games in existence. By analogy, emergentists or generativists suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behaviour.

Dynamical-evolutionary psychology, cellular automata and the generative sciences, model emergent processes of social behaviour on this philosophy, showing the perception of free will being external to causality as essentially a gift of ignorance or as a product of incomplete information..

In theology

The theological doctrine of divine foreknowledge is often alleged to be in conflict with free will. After all, if God knows exactly what will happen, right down to every choice one makes, how can one's choices be free? God's already true or timelessly true knowledge about one's choices seems to constrain one's freedom. This problem is related to the Aristotelian problem of the sea-battle: tomorrow there will or will not be a sea-battle. If there will be one, then it was true yesterday that there would be one. Then it would be necessary that the sea battle will occur. If there won't be one, then by similar reasoning, it is necessary that it won't occur. This means that the future, whatever it is, is completely fixed by past truths — true propositions about the future. (However, some philosophers hold that necessity and possibility are defined with respect to a given point in time and a given matrix of empirical circumstances, and so something that is merely possible from the perspective of one observer may be necessary from the perspective of an omniscient.) Some philosophers believe that free will is equivalent to having a soul, and thus that (at least some) animals do not have free will. Jewish philosophy stresses that free will is a product of the intrinsic human soul (neshama).

In Christian thought

In Christian theology, God is described as not only omniscient but omnipotent, which some people, but not most, (Christians and non-Christians alike) believe implies that not only has God always known what choices you will make tomorrow, but actually chose what you would choose. That is, they believe, by virtue of His foreknowledge He knows what will influence your choices, and by virtue of His omnipotence He controls those factors. This becomes especially important for the doctrines relating to salvation and predestination. Other branches, however, believe that while God is omnipotent and knows the choices that you will make, He still allows you to make the decisions, hence creating "free" will and making you responsible for your actions.

Proponents of the opposing view would make the point that knowledge of a future happening is entirely different than causing the event to happen. The definition of predestination varies among Christians. Many hold that it does not imply that God chose certain people to receive salvation and the rest have no chance of salvation, but rather, He knows that not everyone will choose salvation, and He specifically knows who will and who won't. The Bible says of God, "...God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:3-4, NIV).

Free will is also a point of debate among both sides of the Christian communism theory. Because some Christians interpret the Bible as advocating that the ideal form of society is communism, opponents of this theory maintain that the establishment of a large-scale communist system would infringe upon the free will of individuals by denying them the freedom to make decisions for themselves. Christian communists adamantly oppose this by arguing that free will has and always will be limited to some extent.

In Calvinism

Calvinists, however, embrace the idea that God chose who would be saved from before the creation. They quote Ephesians 1:4 "For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight." In its purist form, Calvinism is an extreme version of theological determinism. One of the strongest defenders of this theological point of view was the Puritan-American preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards.

Edwards believed that indeterminism was incompatible with our dependence on God and hence with his sovereignty. He reasoned that if our responses to God's grace are contra-causally free, then our salvation depends partly on us and therefore God's sovereignty isn't "absolute and universal." Edward's book Freedom of the Will defends theological determinism. In this book, Edwards attempts to show that libertarianism is incoherent. For example, he argues that by ‘self-determination’ the libertarian must mean either that one's actions including one's acts of willing are preceded by an act of free will or that one's acts of will lack sufficient causes. The first leads to an infinite regress while the second implies that acts of will happen accidentally and hence can't make someone "better or worse, any more than a tree is better than other trees because it oftener happens to be lit upon by a swan or nightingale; or a rock more vicious than other rocks, because rattlesnakes have happened oftener to crawl over it." (Freedom of the Will, 1754; Edwards 1957-, vol. 1, 327).

Non-Calvinist Christians attempt a reconciliation of the dual concepts of Predestination (determinism) and free will by pointing to the situation of God as Christ. In taking the form of a man, a necessary element of this process was that Jesus Christ lived the existence of a mortal. When Jesus was born he was not born with the omniscient power of God the Creator, but with the mind of a human child - yet he was still fully God. The precedent this creates is that God is able to abandon knowledge (or ignore knowledge) while still remaining God. Thus it is not inconceivable that although omniscience demands that God knows what the future holds for us, it is within his power to deny this knowledge in order to preserve our free will.

However, a reconciliation more compatible with non-Calvinist theology states that God is, in fact, not aware of future events, but rather, being eternal, He is outside time, and sees the past, present, and future as one whole creation. Consequently, it is not as though God would know that Jeffrey Dahmer (for example) would become guilty of homicide years prior to the event, but that He was aware of it from all eternity, viewing all time as a single present.

In Catholicism

Free will is important in the Catholic Church, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas being major early figures in the history of the concept. Catholic Christianity's emphasis on free will and grace is generally in contrast to the emphasis on predestination in Protestant Christianity (see the link to Catholic Encyclopedia below for more).

In Mormonism

Mormons or Latter-day Saints, believe that God has given all humans the gift of free will (agency) where the ultimate goal is to return to His presence. David O. McKay, former prophet and president of the Church, stated, "It is the purpose of the Lord that man become like him. In order for man to achieve this it was necessary for the Creator first to make him free." (In Conference Report, Apr. 1950, 32.)

As for the conflict between predestination and free will, Latter-day Saints believe that God foreordained men to particular stations in life in order to advance His plan to lead humanity back to His presence. These foreordinations were not unalterable decrees, but rather callings from God for man to perform specific missions in mortality. Men are ultimately responsible for their own destiny, through their faith and obedience to the commandments of God. "Free agency" therefore should not be interpreted to mean that actions are without consequences; "free" means that it is a gift from God and consequences must necessarily come as a result of choices made. Thus free agency and accountability are complementary and cannot be separated.

A major difference, and a key insight to Mormons' understanding of free agency (will), between mainstream Christians and Latter-day Saints involves the belief of a life before mortality. Latter-day Saints believe that before the earth was created, all mankind lived in a pre-existent life as spirit children (Hebrews 12:9) of God. Here God, their Father, nurtured, taught and provided means for their development, but never robbed them of their free agency (Doctrine and Covenants 29:35). In this pre-existing state they could learn, choose, grow or retrograde even as on earth. This preparation would allow them to later become the men and women of earth, to be further educated and tested in the schoolhouse of mortality in order to return to God's presence and become like Him. Thus the pre-existent life is believed to have been an infinitely long period of probation, progression, and schooling. Some of the spirit children of God, so exercised their agency and so conformed to God’s law as to become "noble and great"; these were foreordained before their mortal births to perform great missions for the Lord in this life (Abraham 3:22-28). But even these who were foreordained for greatness could fall and transgress the laws of God. Therefore, mortality is simply a state wherein progression and testing is continued from what began in the pre-existence. Without free agency, mortality would be useless.

In Other Christian Faiths

Arminians believe that humans always have free will, but God's prevenient grace is always calling them.

In Jewish thought

The belief in Free will (Hebrew: bechirah chofshith בחירה חפשית, bechirah בחירה) is axiomatic in Jewish thought, and is closely linked with the concept of reward and punishment, based on the Torah itself: "I [God] have set before you life and death, blessing and curse: therefore choose life" (Deuteronomy 30:19). Free will is therefore discussed at length in Jewish philosophy, firstly as regards God's purpose in creation, and secondly as regards the closely related, resultant, paradox.

The traditional teaching regarding the purpose of creation, particularly as influenced by Jewish mysticism, is that "This world is like a corridor to the World to Come" (Pirkei Avoth 4:16). "Man was created for the sole purpose of rejoicing in God, and deriving pleasure from the splendor of His Presence… The place where this joy may truly be derived is the World to Come, which was expressly created to provide for it; but the path to the object of our desires is this world..." (Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim, Ch.1). Free will is thus required by God's justice, “otherwise, Man would not be given or denied good for actions over which he had no control” [1]. It is further understood that in order for Man to have true free choice, he must not only have inner free will, but also an environment in which a choice between obedience and disobedience exists. God thus created the world such that both good and evil can operate freely [2]; this is the meaning of the Rabbinic maxim, "All is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven" (Talmud, Berachot 33b).

In Rabbinic literature, there is much discussion as to the contradiction between God's omniscience and free will. The representative view is that "Everything is foreseen; yet freewill is given" (Rabbi Akiva, Pirkei Avoth 3:15). Based on this understanding, the problem is formally described as a paradox, beyond our understanding.

“The Holy One, Blessed Be He, knows everything that will happen before it has happened. So does He know whether a particular person will be righteous or wicked, or not? If He does know, then it will be impossible for that person not to be righteous. If He knows that he will be righteous but that it is possible for him to be wicked, then He does not know everything that He has created. ...[T]he Holy One, Blessed Be He, does not have any temperaments and is outside such realms, unlike people, whose selves and temperaments are two separate things. God and His temperaments are one, and God's existence is beyond the comprehension of Man… [Thus] we do not have the capabilities to comprehend how the Holy One, Blessed Be He, knows all creations and events. [Nevertheless] know without doubt that people do what they want without the Holy One, Blessed Be He, forcing or decreeing upon them to do so... It has been said because of this that a man is judged according to all his actions.” (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Teshuva 5:5)

(The paradox is explained, but not resolved, by observing that God exists outside of time, and therefore, His knowledge of the future is exactly the same as His knowledge of the past and present. Just as His knowledge of the past does not interfere with man's free will, neither does His knowledge of the future [3]. One analogy is that of Time travel: The time traveller, having returned from the future, knows in advance what x will do, but while he knows what x will do, that knowledge does not cause x to do so; x had free will, even while the time traveller had foreknowledge. This distinction, between foreknowledge and predestination, is in fact discussed by Maimonides' critic Abraham ibn Daud; see Hasagat HaRABaD ad loc.)

Although the above represents the majority view in Rabbinic thought, there are several major thinkers who resolve the paradox by explicitly excluding human action from divine foreknowledge. Both Saadia Gaon and Judah ha-Levi hold that "the decisions of man precede God's knowledge" [4]. Gersonides holds that God knows, beforehand, the choices open to each individual, but does not know which choice the individual, in his freedom, will make. Isaiah Horowitz takes the view that God cannot know which moral choices people will make, but that, nevertheless, this does not impair His perfection. See further discussion in the article on Gersonides.

The existence of free will, and the paradox above (as addressed by either approach), is closely linked to the concept of Tzimtzum. Tzimtzum entails the idea that God "constricted" his infinite essence, to allow for the existence of a "conceptual space" in which a finite, independent world could exist. This "constriction" made free will possible, and hence the potential to earn the World to Come. Further (according to the first approach), it is understood that the Free-will Omniscience paradox provides a temporal parallel to the paradox inherent within Tzimtzum. In granting free will, God has somehow "constricted" his foreknowledge, to allow for Man's independent action; He thus has foreknowledge and yet free will exists. In the case of Tzimtzum, God has "constricted" his essence to allow for Man's independent existence; He is thus immanent and yet transcendent.

See the related treatment of Negative theology, Divine simplicity and Divine Providence in Jewish thought, as well as Jewish principles of faith in general.

See also

• Block time
• Civil disobedience
• Consciousness
• Christian communism
• Determinism
• Daniel Dennett
• Elbow Room
• The free will theorem
• Gödel, Escher, Bach
• Robert Kane
• Prevenient grace
• Problem of evil
• Newcomb's paradox
• Randomness
• Responsibility assumption
• The Sirens of Titan
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• Stapp, henry
• Teleology
• Theodicy

External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Free Will
  • Incompatibilism
  • Divine Forknowledge and Free Will
• Article at Roman Catholic Encyclopedia
• Article at Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Article at Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website
• Article at h2g2
• An Introduction to Free Will and Determinism by Paul Newall, aimed at beginners.
• Article at Jewish Encyclopedia
• Free Will from a conservative Calvinist perspective
• Repentance and Predestination in Jewish Thought
• The Paradox of Free Choice from a Jewish perspective, Discussess Determinism, Robotism, Prescience, Omnipotence, Oneness and Primal Cause
• Super Free Will: Metaprogramming and Quantum Indeterminism
• Libertarian Accounts of Free Will, by Randolph Clarke (electronic version of print book ISBN 019515987X)
• egodeath.com Ego Death and Self-Control Cybernetics - A discussion of dissociation, cybernetics, determinism, and metaphor.

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This article is about the general notion of determinism in philosophy. For other uses of the word "determinism" see: Deterministic (disambiguation).

Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. No mysterious miracles or wholly random events occur. If there has been even one indeterministic event since the beginning of time, then determinism is false.

Contents 1 Philosophy of determinism 2 The nature of determinism 2.1 Determinism in Western tradition 2.2 Determinism in Eastern tradition 3 Arguments against determinism 3.1 Argument from morality 3.2 Determinism, quantum mechanics and classical physics 3.3 First cause 4 A multi-deterministic position 5 Modern perspectives on determinism 5.1 Scientific determinism and first cause 5.2 Determinism and generative processes 6 See also 7 External links 8 References

Philosophy of determinism

The principal consequence of deterministic philosophy is that free will (except as defined in strict compatibilism) becomes an illusion. It is a popular misconception that determinism necessarily entails that all future events have already been predetermined and will necessarily happen (a position known as Fatalism); this is not obviously the case, and the subject is still debated among metaphysicians. Determinism is associated with, and relies upon, the ideas of Materialism and Causality. Some of the philosophers who have dealt with this issue are Omar Khayyám, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and, more recently, John Searle.

With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man's knead,

And then of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed:

  Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote

What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.

(Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, LIII, rendered into English verse by Edward FitzGerald)

The nature of determinism

The exact meaning of the term "determinism" has historically been subject to various interpretations. Some view determinism and free will as mutually exclusive, whereas others, labelled "Compatibilists", believe that the two ideas can be coherently reconciled. Most of this disagreement is due to the fact that the definition of "free will," like determinism, varies. Some feel it refers to the metaphysical truth of independent agency, whereas others simply define it as the feeling of agency that humans experience when they act. For example, David Hume argued that while it is possible that one does not freely arrive at one's set of desires and beliefs, the only meaningful interpretation of freedom relates to one's ability to translate those desires and beliefs into voluntary action.

Determinism in Western tradition

The idea that the entire universe is a deterministic system has been articulated in both Western and non-Western religion, philosophy, and literature. The Ancient Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus were the first to anticipate determinism when they theorized that all processes in the world were due to the mechanical interplay of atoms, but this theory did not gain much support at the time. Determinism in the West is often associated with Newtonian physics, which depicts the physical matter of the universe as operating according to a set of fixed, knowable laws. The "billiard ball" hypothesis, a product of Newtonian physics, argues that once the initial conditions of the universe have been established the rest of the history of the universe follows inevitably. If it were actually possible to have complete knowledge of physical matter and all of the laws governing that matter at any one time, then it would be theoretically possible to compute the time and place of every event that will ever occur (Laplace's demon). In this sense, the basic particles of the universe operate in the same fashion as the rolling balls on a billiard table, moving and striking each other in predictable ways to produce predictable results.

Whether or not it is all-encompassing in so doing, Newtonian mechanics deals only with caused events, e.g.: If the original position of an object is x, y, z, and if it is hit dead on by an object moving along some vector V, then it will be pushed straight toward another point x', y', z'. If it goes somewhere else, the Newtonians argue, one must question one's measurements of the original position of the object, the exact direction of the object moving on V, gravitational or other fields that were inadvertently ignored, etc. Then, they maintain, repeated experiments and improvements in accuracy will always bring one's observations closer to the theoretically predicted results. When dealing with situations on an ordinary human scale, Newtonian physics has been so enormously successful that it has no competition. But it fails spectacularly as velocities become some substantial fraction of the speed of light and when interactions at the atomic scale are studied. Prior to the discovery of quantum effects and other challenges to Newtonian physics, "uncertainty" was always a term that applied to the accuracy of human knowledge about causes and effects, and not to the causes and effects themselves.

Determinism in Eastern tradition

In the East, determinism has been expressed in the Buddhist doctrine of Dependent Origination, which states that every phenomenon is conditioned by, and depends on, the phenomena that it is not. A common teaching story, called the Net of Indra, illustrates this point. A vast auditorium is decorated with mirrors and/or prisms hanging on strings of different lengths from an immense number of points on the ceiling. One flash of light is sufficient to light the entire display since light bounces and bends from hanging bauble to hanging bauble. Each bauble lights each and every other bauble. So, too, each of us is "lit" by each and every other entity in the Universe. In Buddhism, this teaching is used to demonstrate that to ascribe special value to any one thing is to ignore the interdependence of all things. Volitions of all sentient creatures determine the seeming reality in which we perceive ourself as living, rather than a mechanical universe determining the volitions which humans imagine themselves to be forming.

In the story of the Net of Indra, the light that streams back and forth throughout the display is the analog of karma. The word "karma" does not mean anything like "the result of a past good or bad action." "Karma" refers to an action, or, more specifically, to an intentional action, and the Buddhist theory holds that every karma (every intentional action) will bear karmic fruit (produce an effect somewhere down the line). Karma is the only thing that is fundamentally real. Volitional acts drive the universe. The consequences of this view often confound our ordinary expectations -- much in the way quantum physics has results that are strongly counterintuitive. Fritjiof Capra has written extensively on the parallels and differences among western physics and other systems of thought in his book The Tao of Physics.

A shifting flow of probabilities for futures lies at the heart of theories associated with the Yi Jing (or I Ching, the Book of Changes). Probabilities take the center of the stage away from things and people. A kind of "divine" volition sets the fundamental rules for the working out of probabilities in the universe, and human volitions are always a factor in the ways that humans can deal with the real world situations one encounters. If one's situation in life is surfing on a tsunami, one still has some range of choices even in that situation. One person might give up, and another person might choose to struggle and perhaps to survive. The Yi Jing mentality is much closer to the mentality of quantum physics than to that of classical physics, and also finds parallelism in voluntarist or Existentialist ideas of taking one's life as one's project.

The followers of the philosopher Mo Zi (or "Mo Tzu" if you prefer the earlier Wade-Giles Romanization) made some early discoveries in optics and other areas of physics, ideas that were consonant with deterministic ideas, but the vine that produced this early fruit quickly withered and died.

Arguments against determinism

Argument from morality

Some critics of determinism argue that if people are assumed incapable of independent choice (free will) there can then be no rational basis for morality, and therefore some aspects of criminal and civil jurisprudence and legislation appear irrational and unjust. How, they ask, can one be punished for an involuntary action? In order to maintain the integrity of social institutions that rely in part upon holding people responsible for their actions, it becomes necessary in their eyes to deny determinism, at least as far as it applies to what we ordinarily call voluntary actions.

Determinists have responded to this critique by distinguishing between normative and positive claims, arguing that statements of fact can and should be made independently of their consequences. Thus, even if determinism is inconsistent with the idea of a moral universe, that does not necessarily invalidate its conclusions. The presumed social utility of ideas of crime and justice should not be permitted, they argue, to override questions of truth.

Contemporary U.S. philosopher Donald Davidson, among others, has argued that if people behaved in an uncaused way then one would describe their actions as insane, not as free. His view is consonant with the philosophical position advocated by Mencius that maintains that one's innate characteristics are the result of deterministic causation, that among these innate characteristics there exists a set of drives (analogous to other drives such as the sex drive) that are axiological or moral in nature, and that factors external to these moral drives can act to inhibit their operation. Inhibiting their action is tantamount to a loss of freedom, which is something one instinctively seeks to avoid. In Western terms, Mencius would say that human beings are born with a conscience, that they are acting in accord with their own natures and inclinations when they guide their actions by their consciences (along with their other drives such as hunger), and that we all experience a loss of freedom when we realize that we are being controlled either directly or indirectly by outside forces -- whether those forces are the lingering effects of conditioning or the imminent threat of death posed by a pistol held to one's head. In short, self-determination is freedom and other-determination is loss of freedom. Morality depends on the exercise of what one's nature has determined one to be and on being de facto responsible for all the consequences of what one decides to do. If one is free of external control one is an entelechy; to the extent that one becomes determined by external factors, one loses one's individual identity and becomes merely the extension of another entity.

Determinism, quantum mechanics and classical physics

Since the beginning of the 20th Century, quantum mechanics has revealed previously concealed aspects of events. Newtonian physics, taken in isolation rather than as an approximation to quantum mechanics, depicts a universe in which objects move in perfectly determinative ways. At human scale levels of interaction, Newtonian mechanics gives predictions that in all respects check out as completely perfectible, if not perfect in practice. The dependability of predictions turns out to be reliably improved by refinement in our knowledge of initial conditions. Poorly designed and fabricated guns and ammunition scatter their shots rather widely around the center of a target, and better guns produce tighter patterns. Absolute knowledge of the forces accelerating a bullet should produce absolutely reliable predictions of its path, or so we thought.

Contrary to what Newtonian mechanics would predict, at atomic scales the Newtonian paths of objects can only be predicted in a probabilistic way. In double-slit experiments, electrons fired singly through a double-slit apparatus at a distant screen do not arrive at a single point, nor do they arrive in a scattered pattern analogous to bullets fired by a fixed gun at a distant target. Instead, they arrive in varying concentrations at widely separated points, and the distribution of their hits can be calculated reliably. In that sense the behavior of the electrons in this apparatus is deterministic, but there is no way to predict where in the resulting interference pattern an individual electron will make its contribution.

On the macro scale it can matter very much whether a bullet arrives at a certain point at a certain time, as snipers and their victims are well aware; there are analogous quantum events that have macro- as well as quantum-level consequences. It is easy to contrive situations in which the arrival of an electron at a screen at a certain point and time would trigger one event and its arrival at another point would trigger an entirely different event. Whether such events are significant in nature may be open to question and empirical investigation. What is clear, however, is that proof of the occurrence of such random events would not address the broader claim determinists make regarding moral responsibility. If the difference in human choices is not due to predetermined occurrences, as determinists argue, but rather to the random movements of an electron, as some free will advocates argue, this would not seem to address the question of individual moral responsibility. Rather than an internally determined force leading the criminal to his crime, an entirely random, almost external, force determines his course. This would be akin to a stranger's hand moving one's hand to perform an action, or injecting one with a truth serum to provide accurate testimony. In neither case would traditional morality find the acted upon individual to be responsible for his actions.

If probabilistically determined events do have an impact on the macro events such as whether a person who could be historically important dies in youth of a cancer caused by a random mutation, then the course of history is not determined from the dawn of time. But some authorities argue against the reality of such probabilistically determined events and/or argue that events on the atomic scale cannot influence the course of events on the macro scale.

Some people have argued that in addition to the conditions humans can observe and the rules they can deduce there are hidden factors or hidden variables that determine absolutely in which order electrons reach the screen. They argue that the course of the universe is absolutely determined, but that humans are screened from knowledge of the determinative factors. So, they say, it only appears that things proceed in a merely probabilistically determinative way. Actually, they proceed in an absolutely determinative way. Although matters are still subject to some measure of dispute, quantum mechanics makes statistical predictions that would be violated if some local hidden variables existed. There have been a number of experiments to verify those predictions, and so far they do not appear to be violated although many physicists believe better experiments are needed to conclusively settle the question. See Bell test experiments. It is, however, possible to augment quantum mechanics with non-local hidden variables to achieve a deterministic theory that is in agreement with experiment. An example is the Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The well known experimental physicist Dr. Herbert P. Broida [1] (1920-1978) taught his statistical mechanics class at The University of California at Santa Barbara that the probabilities arise in the transition from quantum to classical descriptions, rather than within quantum mechanics, as sometimes supposed. The time dependent Schrödinger equation gives the first time derivative of the quantum mechanical state. That is, it explicitly and uniquely predicts the development of the wave function with time.

So quantum mechanics is deterministic, provided that one accepts the wave function itself as reality (rather than as probability of classical coordinates). This is true also in more advanced cases. Since we have no practical way of knowing the exact magnitudes, and especially the phases, in a full quantum mechanical description of the causes of an observable event, this turns out to be philosophically similar to the "hidden variable" doctrine.

According to some, quantum mechanics is more strongly ordered than Classical Mechanics, because while Classical Mechanics is chaotic, quantum mechanics is not. For example, the classical problem of three bodies under a force such as gravity is not integrable, while the quantum mechanical three body problem is tractable and integrable, using the Faddeev Equations. That is the quantum mechanical problem can always be solved to a given accuracy with a computer of predetermined precision, while the classical problem may require arbitrarily high precision, depending on the details of the motion. This does not mean that quantum mechanics describes the world as more deterministic, unless one already considers the wave function to be the true reality. Even so, this does not get rid of the probabilities, because we can't do anything without using classical descriptions, but it assigns the probabilities to the classical approximation, rather than to the quantum reality.

First cause

Intrinsic to the debate concerning determinism is the issue of first cause. Deism, a philosophy articulated in the seventeenth century, holds that the universe has been deterministic since creation, but ascribes the creation to a metaphysical God or first cause outside of the chain of determinism. God may have begun the process, Deism argues, but God has not influenced its evolution. This perspective illustrates a puzzle underlying any conception of determinism:

Assume: All events have causes, and their causes are all prior events.

The picture this gives us is that Event A_N is preceded by A_N-1, which is preceded by A_N-2, and so forth.

Under that assumption, two possibilities seem clear, and both of them question the validity of the original assumption:

(1) There is an event A₀ prior to which there was no other event that could serve as its cause.

(2) There is no event A₀ prior to which there was no other event, which means that we are presented with an infinite series of causally related events, which is itself an event, and yet there is no cause for this infinite series of events.

Under this analysis the original assumption must have something wrong with it. It can be fixed by admitting one exception, a creation event (either the creation of the original event or events, or the creation of the infinite series of events) that is itself not a caused event in the sense of the word "caused" used in the formulation of the original assumption. Some agency, which many systems of thought call God, creates space, time, and the entities found in the universe by means of some process that is analogous to causation but is not causation as we know it. This solution to the original difficulty has led people to question whether there is any reason for there only being one divine quasi-causal act, whether there have not been a number of events that have occurred outside the ordinary sequence of events, events that may be called miracles. The extreme philosophical position in this line of development was held by Leibniz, who held in his monistic philosophy that all seemingly causal interactions between two (or more) entities, A <-> B, are actually interactions mediated by God, A<->God<->B.

Immanuel Kant carried forth this idea of Leibniz in his idea of transcendental relations, and as a result had a profound effect on later philosophical attempts to sort these issues out. His most influential immediate successor, a strong critic whose ideas were yet strongly influenced by Kant, was Edmund Husserl, the developer of the school of philosophy called phenomenology. But the central concern of that school was to elucidate not physics but the grounding of information that physicists and others regard as empirical. In an indirect way, this train of investigation appears to have contributed much to the philosophy of science called logical positivism and particularly to the thought of members of the Vienna Circle, all of which have had much to say, at least indirectly, about ideas of determinism.

A multi-deterministic position

One approach to determinism is to argue that materialism does not present a correct understanding of the universe, not because it is wrong in its general picture of the determinate interactions that occur among material things, but because it ignores the souls of human beings. The soul is understood to be an autonomous agent of choice that has the power to control the body but not to be controlled by the body. Therefore it stands to the activities of the individual human body as does the creator of the universe to the universe. The creator of the universe put in motion a deterministic system of material entities that would, if left to themselves, carry out the chain of events determined by ordinary causation. But the creator also provided for souls that could exert a causal force analogous to the primordial causal force and alter outcomes in the physical universe via the acts of their bodies. No events in the physical universe are uncaused. Some are caused entirely by the original creative act and the way it plays itself out through time, and some are caused by the acts of created souls. But those created souls were not created by means of physical processes involving ordinary causation. They are another order of being entirely, gifted with the power to modify the original creation.

The question of how these immaterial entities can act upon material entities is deeply involved in what is generally known as the mind-body problem. It is a problem which has as yet received no answer within the universe of discourse related to the physical universe.

Modern perspectives on determinism