On one of my countless walks amongst the stunning nature of Cumbria, I was sitting by a river on a glorious summer’s day (imagine a regrettably ‘emo’ scene) in a very pensive mood. Perhaps ‘pensive’ is the wrong word. Rather, it was a state of stillness, of listening – ‘receptive’, so to speak. I was not attempting to formulate thoughts, but was rather facilitating the peaceful stillness necessary for knowledge to emerge. After all, there is nothing new under the sun. Knowledge is not invention; it is discovery of something already created.
This conception of knowledge is one that ties in nicely with the subject of this blog. Sitting by the river, a slight breeze was moving the trees. The river itself was flowing. I was struck by the ‘randomness’ of these movements. Then the wisdom ensued. Was it really random?
I had just finished reading ‘The Black Swan’ by Nicholas Taleb, a terribly mediocre ramble about our misconceptions of randomness (specifically, our attempts to ‘rationalise’ randomness and our consequent inability to forecast or adequately explain extreme outliers, the very events that really ‘make history’).
I began to realise that nothing is in fact random. The movement of the trees was caused by specific forces of gravity and wind, which emanated from the earth’s orbital rotation and collisions of hot and cold fronts. Likewise, the flow of the river was in fact dictated by the shape of the river bed, the momentum built up over time, the height of the source as compared to its estuary, etc. A virtual diagram superimposed on reality would reveal an indecipherable system of incalculable physical equations for any given moment of movement. The fact that we cannot account for all of these forces does not mean that they are random; only that they are complex (specifically, that they are too complex for our brains to synchronise).
Can this idea be applied to the problem of Free Will? There are many variants of this ‘problem’ (‘If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, how can we have choice?’ being the most pertinent). A commonly heard phrase when playing football is ‘unlucky’, usually declared upon a narrow miss of some sort. In fact, there is no ‘luck’ involved. Even if a sudden gust of wind carried your shot wide, the fact that the ball did not hit the back of the net is explained by very (unpredictable) rational forces.
Chaos Theory may have something to say on the matter. A butterfly may flap its wings on one side of the world, initiating a series of events that may eventually result in an earthquake thousands of miles away. It is unpredictable, but it is not random. We can trace the path of causation using our understanding of physical forces. They key point is that it is explicable, but not predictable. For this reason, history books are easier to (accurately) write than prophecy.
When somebody makes a decision, there are usually forces that influence that choice. I chose to wake up late this morning because I had no deadlines or appointments. But I could have just as easily woken up earlier, If I had so chosen. In economics, I find this logic ubiquitously: Player A chose Option A because the value of Option A exceeded that of Option B. Economics often runs into problems when Player A instead chooses Option B (‘the narrow path’?).
I assert the following. The fact that we can attribute decisions to rational motivations and influences does not negate our free will. Rather, it makes our free will all the more important. Would you rather have choice that is blind, i.e. based on no evidence or value, or one that allows you to weigh up expected benefits and costs, and proceed accordingly?
I am not saying that trees are hit by a gust of wind and then face a decision whether or not to sway in the breeze. I am saying that humans are faced with counteracting forces. Unfortunately for us, a decision of indecision will lead us to ‘default mode’. Likewise, a decision to go against all forces (acting on our own understanding) will also condemn us to the default mode, as there is no wind to carry us. We will be reduced the deterministic sequence of trees and rivers. Moreover, our default mode is one of sin. So inaction and ‘going our own way’ both result in the forfeit of our free will, and for this reason, the actions of most human beings is regrettably predictable.
The value of free will is that it allows us to betray our human nature and follow a different force. We can ‘go against the flow’, but to do so, we must still submit to another.
Either way, the paradox of free will is that we are too weak to act on our own strength. We can serve one of two masters. Either way, the choice is between to countervailing forces. When Robert Frost faced a fork in the road, he chose the ‘Road Less Travelled By’. He could not walk through trees – he had to follow one path or the other. Nevertheless, he had the choice.
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