What's free in free-will
And how best to measure it
We are taught to take personal responsibility for our conduct and the big outcomes in our lives. Is personal responsibility all there is to it, or is the complexity of our lives shaped by way more than our choices. And even then, what are choices really. Are they pre-ordained commands we obey like bio-chemical cyborgs, or we can be an instrument of change and divert from the script to explore territories of our liking. How should a conscientious individual, on a journey to explore life, learn and improve, should reason about this very difficult idea of choice vs destiny, and all the cascaded issues that it engenders.
A BBC documentary referred by a good friend became an inspiration for this article. It explores this very important question of whether free -will is really free. And its so important to understand this question, because it goes into the heart of left vs right debate. Government intervention versus individual responsibility debate, and thousands of different forms of social safety net, vs individual risk mitigation debates.
Red and Blue
As the quantum scientists have pointed out, a particle at the smallest level has a certain cloud of probabilities surrounding it. Where it lands, in that cloud, is a probabilistic outcome. The physical universe around it, is the one which has defined that probability cloud. This is a very useful analogy for an individual too. An individual, is a particle, with a cloud of probabilities around it. Whether I should study engineering or law. Whether to use hardcore drugs during teenage years or not. To max out my credit cards, or live within the means. BUT, and its a very important but, the range of these probabilities is dictated by the physical universe surrounding him. A black boy in a poor neighborhood has a much higher probability of falling in for drugs.
An individual is free to the extent that he can sample a probability distribution, but is not free to the extent, that the probability distribution has been pre-assigned to him.
A poor kid with no financial education, suddenly finding himself with a job and wanting to enjoy things held from him, is much more likely to go into debt. Our physical world dictates the probabilities surrounding our lives, but just like a particle, every individual journey is free to sample those probabilities and land on one of the outcomes. A short way to say it would be, An individual is free to the extent that he can sample a probability distribution, but is not free to the extent, that the probability distribution has been pre-assigned to him. In other words, imagine a bag of red and blue balls. Blue balls are very slightly heavier than red balls. You are supposed to get more points for picking blue versus red, and have 10 attempts to pick balls. You insert your hand , try to feel a ball , and decide to pick out or go to the next ball. Slowly you train yourself in recognizing a very slightly higher variety. But you are not in control of the how many red vs blue balls are in the mix. Someone with a bag of a large number of blues vs reds, will invariably end up picking more blues. And vice-versa. So we are free to sample (pick up a slightly heavier ball) a probability distribution, but the distribution is given by the physical nature of circumstances.
Who prepares the candy bag
So an individual cannot decide which bag of blue vs red candies is he handed. Who decides that then. One answer sure seems like : ‘society’. An excellent high quality school in a poor neighborhood with dedicated well paid teachers is certain to attract students and keep them away from falling into harmful pastimes. The community by building that school can change the probability of a kid falling in for drugs. But can a society really do it ? Is the society free to do it ? Building those schools and equipping them with best teachers is not easy. First you have to fund, then maintain them amidst what could be a hard neighborhood. Second, you are faced with a daunting prospect of finding teachers, that are high quality and still willing to go work in that area. There are tremendous costs associated with the maintenance of such project, and maintenance of multiplicity of such projects. Multiple projects will be needed when one low-income neighborhood gets a school like that, and other areas with similar challenges are deprived and they demand one too. The society would not always have resources to spend towards all of them. But it does have the capability to design these probabilities for a lot of individuals.
A single organic package of an individuals consciousness cannot quite manufacture the probabilities.
I would like to think that a society can design the physical universe, in ways that changes probabilities for different individuals. And that brings us to a very important point. Freedom has to be seen in the context of consciousness. A single organic package of an individuals consciousness cannot quite manufacture the probabilities. It can sample them (somewhat intelligently). But a blob of consciousness, a city, a neighborhood, an organization, can endeavor to design/shift those probabilities.
Measuring freedom
Can a society shift probabilities arbitrarily. Of course not. We must not fool ourselves that shifting those probabilities is easy. And that’s the argument against going too far into liberal humanism. Very often, the progressives have a giddy instinct of being happy interventionists, who can change anything and everything for the better. The designer of probabilities has to understand : the dynamics of physical universe are complex. Very very complex. Many things have second, third, fourth order effects. Designing interventions is therefore not easy. Because the model of how the complex system will behave is simply not available. We can design interventions (aka shifting probabilities) in few and rare situations where the results will resonate with desires/objectives. What we can say from this analogy though, is that cumulative consciousness is somewhat free-er than individual consciousness. The broader the consciousness, more it can change the physical structure of the universe, to design probability outcomes for individual particles. And hence for itself as a whole. We can extend this ‘measure’ of consciousness in either direction. Take it low to the level of an individual family, and yes they have power to shape the children of the family and the probabilities of outcomes of their lives. Extend it to a small county, and further to a city and further more to a country and so on. Every extended level of consciousness is slightly more free-er in the sense of not just being relegated to sample probabilities, but to be able to shift them around, if only slightly.
Are we free then
I wont be able to answer that question for you. There is some freedom to be had in playing the cards you are dealt with. But is that freedom enough. Thats for an individual to decide and convince himself/herself. What I think is helpful is to think of free-will as a continuum. I can practice some free will, to sample a probability distribution. And in the act of sampling, steer towards greater consciousness. A meta blob of consciousness, of friends, family, community, colleagues. A blob that has higher freedom. Freedom to change the structure of the physical universe, if only ever so slightly. Higher the consciousness, higher the freedom.
Happy free-ing ….. !!
