A Brief Tribute
to
Freedom of Will
1.The First Heritage
In a remote past it happened that man got conscious of his reflexive thinking. Once this was a fact, a truth-race began, which is still going on today and well as tight as ever. I'm referring to the duel between reality and imagination. For instance, we acquired a hallucinatory representational power, which provided us with an unprecedented advantage over all our earthly concurrents, at the time we learned to foresee what could happen and proceeded with future planning.
But it didn't remain that simple. This new freedom contained also risks, unavoidable side effects, which lead, as so often, to poignant confusion. During the whole following “rational” period we remained chased by a heritage of the preconscious era, when we still had the greatest difficulty to differentiate between real things and the symbols we created to represent them. And as if it wasn't difficult enough, very soon symbols were devised, opposed to no material things at all, as such, master pieces of abstraction. But the threshold to project, on those, our very own consciousness was quickly crossed and from it originated the primeval confusion, which has been the first lead to the even today uneradicable ghosts, still dulling many's minds. Already the first thinkers have appointed extraordinary forces to the immaterial, the mysterious and impervious, which they then charged with the task to ground everything that was unexplainable.i A rich pallet of mythical (creation) stories arose, crowded with on, under or above the earth ruling gods, which made everything happen. So it was, is and will be, became the evidence, because:
“The Gods told us by themselves!”
2.The Second Heritage
When the Greek ennobled thinking to philosophy, it was Plato, in an attempt to put things in order, who had the honors to formally divide man in two more or less independent parts, the body and the mind. From the start conceptual fragmentation has been decisive for the western development race, in which far going analysis became possible by systematically reducing (too) big questions into manageable sub-problems.
Centuries later, in the long row of tentatives to describe our world more accurately, Newton showed, in his book “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” (“Mathematical Principles of the Philosophy of Nature”), that what had been philosophy till then – i.e. a discourse – could be represented in a mathematical form. This genius mathematician and physicist formalized the philosophical concept of fragmentation by inventing (practically simultaneously with but probably independently of Leibniz) differential calculus, one if not the most important calculation tool of contemporary theoretical science. This “mathematization” of philosophy is what we nowadays call physics.ii The application of such new theoretical tools together with technological developments for observational improvement, resulted, during the Enlightenment, in completely new insights: all physical phenomena seemed to happen lawfully, as in a mechanic watch.
This Newtonic worldview appeared to have a strong intuitive base, experiences thought us that events always have a cause. This kind of if-then relationship, of causality, was generalised to the statement that an actual state would always be fully determined by its preceding states: the glorious advent of determinism. From then on, the vision became that, in order to explain and predict the whole universe:
“It would be sufficient to discover God's laws!”
3.The Third Way
1.Fundamental Mathematics
In 1931 Kurt Gödel opened a monumental gate to freedom: with his famous “Incompleteness Theorem” he made an earthshaking end to the search for the “perfect” formal system. It turned out that, if a logical system is interesting, i.e. rich enough to allow the formulation of non-trivial statements, then it will always be possible to propose unprovable statements, i.e. statements from which the validity can never be ascertained.iii In fact absolute formal determinism had to be abandoned definitively and replaced for eternity by:
“Abstract Nature is richer than any pure logic could ever grasp!”
2.Fundamental Physics
More than hundred years ago scientists, involved in exploring ever more remote parts of our universe, discovered such astonishing realms of nature, that even today the theoretical implications are way off to have been carried out to the bottom and integratediv, which is mandatory to overcome the actual fragmentation. For the big scales of nature relativity theories have forced us to redraw our whole worldview and for small scales, at atomic and sub-atomic sizes, it has been quantum mechanics, which turned out to be even more mind boggling. The interpretation of its results is still matter of animated discussions between experts today.
But famous experiments have revealed the contra-intuitive properties of nature and proved the unescapable probabilistic behavior of many fundamental microscopic phenomena, which are at the root of our macroscopic world. Most macroscopic phenomena behave pretty deterministically, and what a luck, because they are the result of the grouped interaction of countless sub-parts, whose grouped behavior means out to a stable and predictable process, notwithstanding their often probabilistic individual behavior.
Moreover did complexity theories explain us how some “deterministic” processes can be extremely sensitive to initial conditions, which means that very small deviations at the beginning can result in totally different outcomes in the end. In such cases macroscopic determinism is also lost, so that classical determinism has to be understood as an idealization of reality, appropriate for application in some limited specific cases.v
Fundamental physics teaches us that its “laws” are rather open:
“In Nature some possibilities are ruled out,
but what remains is a vast plenitude of inherent freedom!”
3.Cybernetics
It's only in the middle of the 20th century that cybernetics paved the way to the next great step, based on the concept of feedback, see figure below.
The considered phenomena are represented as a process unfolding in time, during which the observation of the result is used continuously for adjustment. For such a system linear relationship between input and output is lost, but it allows the realization of a control system, see figure below.
Such control systems can achieve dynamic control, i.e. steering the system towards a goal (setpoint), while counteracting external disturbances. Essential to the operation of a feedback function is the measurement of the result, for which adapted sensors are required. In this way a new kind of:
“Goal oriented relative dynamical determinism emerges!”
4.General Systems Theory
Simultaneously general systems theory was developed, describing systems as interactions of agents, making abstraction of the agent’s internal structure. Then, hierarchies can be constructed, where agents themselves can be seen as systems on their own, consisting of sub-agents and this can be repeated downwards but also upwards, since a whole system can be seen as an agent, constituent of a super-system, see figure below.vi
The most versatile systems, metasystems, are integrating control functions, which allows them to adapt for ever changing environmental conditions. Evolution led to successive metasystem transitions, progressively improving adaptability and evolvabilityvii by selective increase of control levels.
Biological evolution has realized such complex control system hierarchiesviii, especially in neural networks:
Simple reflex (= control of movement)
When muscle contracts after a stimulus: unconditionally and static (invariant) response.
Complex reflex (= control simple reflex)
When the reaction follows a combination of stimuli. Conditional, and static (invariant) response.
Learn or associating (= control of complex reflex)
New reactions are quickly developed for new stimuli and are stored and adapted to changes. Flexible and dynamic.
Thinking (= control of associating)
The memory is developed at such a level that situations can be foreseen and analyzed. Abstract symbols are manipulated according to combination rules. Very high level of freedom, leading to creativity. No direct coupling with the physical world anymore: virtualization.
Culture (= control of thinking)
The language, concepts and rules of reasoning, which allow us to think but restrict it at the same time, are mainly determined by the societal culture we're embedded in. New concepts and rules are developed in a social and cultural process, which individuals cannot control:
“Free Will has constraints from reflexes up to culture!”
5.Memory Evolutive Systemsix
This tool, in which category theory is applied to model MES, is very well suited but not limited to deal with autonomous anticipatory systems, such as biological and more specifically neural systems.
In this way of the category of neurons lead to the emergence of higher and higher cognitive processes, including the development of a general memory with a classification of its records in a semantic memory. Further one can show that true emergence (i.e. new properties at higher organizational levels, which are not reducible to combinations of properties at the lower levels alone but have to take all levels into account simultaneously, including the highest) arises, through successive complexifications originating from quantum randomness at the root, all the way up in the structural hierarchy from elementary particles via molecules to brains and even consciousness.
Then conscious control systems are characterized by having developed more or less powerful means of retrospective causal analysis and prospective complex planning, processes which take into account the whole experience of the subject, with its multiple aspects, and integrate the temporal dimensions:
“Consciousness gradually emerges
closely coupled with an increasingly ‘holist’ worldview!”x
6.Evolutionary Systemics
Step by step the cornerstones of a new paradigm to frame our worldviewxi have been put in place. Progressively axiomatic certainties have lost their untouchable status and are replaced by variable, adaptive, evolutive and non-deterministic relations, “laws”, statements and values. Following Occam's Razor, dogmas make place for increasingly self-explanatory modelsxii, based on as less and as trivial and emptyxiii as possible assumptions. Those intrinsically flexible and open descriptions of our world all constitute foundations allowing for emergence of self-organizationxiv, where freedom as well as “governance” rules are essential to maintain the system's integrity and consistency: from quantum mechanics up to human cooperationxv cheating is possible but not forever and not without limits:
“Self-organisation requires freedom as well as governance!”
4.Freedom of Will
1.Hard Times for Freedom
It were controversial times, when man loudly screamed: “Arbeit macht Frei!”. Although this aphorism has mostly been interpreted literally and perversely, it has something mythical and universal. To grasp this, the interpretation should be widened to the actual context: albeit vital, work is not only physical energy anymore, but for humans it is shifted towards mental power in order to persevere in acquiring, process and use of knowledge. This demands considerable efforts, which cannot be achieved without difficulty. If, in our actual society, we don’t position ourselves always open and critical minded again and again, we will soon decline to slaves of the omnipresent misleadingly simplifying temptations. Freedom of thinking and thus of acting is only possible by permanent assimilation of knowledge to useful concepts. Only relevant knowledge allows us to generate sensible statements about the processes in the world. Therefore everything that has meaning will increase our knowledge and, from a cybernetic viewpoint, knowledge is a model of reality, which we should apply to determine and keep our course. The price to pay, once conscious freedom is acquired, is ethical responsibility for all the actionsxvi performed. The modern concept of freedom is inherently dynamical:
“Freedom implies work!”
2.On the Phenomenon of Free Will
Human actions, observed from an external point of view, have a limited degree of predictability, due to the actual psychological condition, specific historical experience, varying social backgrounds and so on.
Once observed from within, by the person itself, do those actions apparently respond to the commands of free will.
In complex situations it is mostly impossible to have complete information to take fully rational decisions. The behavior of the human control system is thus often guided by essentially incomplete information: this aimed feedback through reflection forms a control loop, in which choices are impacted by unavoidably incomplete knowledge.
Thus, as a property of complex goal-directed control systems:
“Free Will manifests itself as
a behavior between pure randomness and perfect predictability!”
3.Measuring Free Will?
Recently published articlesxvii state that our brains often have decided what to do, (measurably) "long" before we get aware of the choice consciously, undermining the concept of free will.
An example out of everyday life can clarify that, in fact, the problem arises from a lack of distinction between levels of operation with sometimes huge cybernetical interdistances in highly hierarchical control systems. For convenience, imagine a manufacturing company.
The actions of assembling parts by a technician on the work floor can be considered as reflexes when observed from the level of the CEO. The latter has no idea of, nor direct control on, all (immediate) actions that are performed in his company. He is thinking long in advance and his actions will only have effect after a relatively long while. So, if one would subject the workshop to a sudden change (e.g. an accident), the technician will react immediately and hopefully according to the long term policies of the company (e.g. trained safety programs) and the CEO will be informed later. All of this has nothing to do with lack of free choice: the confusion is due to messing up different time scales and control hierarchy levels.
“Free Will is a matter of hierarchy and relative scales!”
4.Catechismus Animalisxviii
Early spring was going to its end, the thriving sun would soon rise in all its glory. For the young Jumbo the great day, which he had be looking out for since such a long time, finally had begun. All adult animals from the wood had brought him, in a solemn procession, to the secret location. Now he stood there, on the edge of a deep precipice, with all the Elders in wide arc around him. Should he be able to dare the big jump into life, or was it death?
They all stood there looking at him so quietly and gravely, that he was on the verge of running away in panic. Just then Big Gnu made a few steps in his direction. Stately did he hold a marvelous black feather in the height, pronounced some apparently very ponderous words in a bombastic jungle language, which most animals didn't understand anymore since la ong time anyway, and then gave the black feather, excessively solemnly, to Jumbo, who, while shaking on his little legs and completely under the impression, took it into possession. And then Big Gnu said, in a honorable tone: “Jumbo, this Holy Feather will protect you. As long as you keep hold of it, you will not fall down. So you can learn to fly with a quiet heart. Go now and jump!”
A raven, who had followed the proceedings, bent towards his neighbor and whispered: “But that's all nonsense, it's not a holy feather at all, whole my body is covered with them! Why is that Gnu cheating our Jumbo?”. After which his neighbor quickly and severely forced him to order: “Shut up! More of this and Jumbo could become confused and not jump at all!”.
A series of ideas flashed through Jumbo's head, in an uncontrollable flow of memories and afterthoughts. His destiny was now for a moment fully in his hands, he thought. But was he really ready for this irrevocable act. At stake was everything he had ever learned and processed to what he had become. Rather he felt that this was amply insufficient for a completely rational decision. Precisely because he was aware that he would never know “everything” and even less understand “everything”, this ultimate step would be one of trust. But could he really trust the “Council of Sages”? Or would they, in a whim of unimaginable cynicism, have done all of this effort to finally let him fall down ceremonially? No, from this point of view he had to trust them, although he didn't really have faith in the power of the feather.
And so it happened that Jumbo spread his ears and, with a wide swing, dived into the unknown. The breath taking acceleration deformed his face and stirred up his belly. He still firmly clamped on the feather with his trunk and attempted to get control upon his fall, by steering with his ears, which, after a while, succeeded pretty well.
It didn't last for long and he already was enjoying floating through the intensely blue sky, making wide circles, high above the staring crowd. Very soon he felt his self-confidence grown that much, that he didn't hesitate to let loose the feather, so that he could exhibit even more graceful figures on the firmament:
“Now he was Totally Free!”
References
iTurchin, The Phenomenon of Science - A cybernetic approach to human evolution, p146: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/posbook.html
iiNottale, in La Complexité, vertiges et promesses, p338: ISBN 2-7465-0281-X
iiiHofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p547: ISBN 90 254 1794 9
ivSmolin, The Throuble with Physics, p5: ISBN 978-0-141-01835-5
vPrigogine, La fin des certitudes, p34: ISBN 2-7381-0578-4
viHeylighen, Complexiteit en evolutie, p25: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CLEA/CompEvCursus.html
viiStewart, The Evolutionary Manifesto, p14, http://www.evolutionarymanifesto.com/man.pdf
viiiTurchin, The Phenomenon of Science - A cybernetic approach to human evolution, p26-84: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/posbook.html
ixEhresman & Vanbremeersch, Memory Evolutive Systems – Hierarchy, Emergence, Cognition: ISBN 978-0444-52244-3
xiDiederik Aerts et al., Worldviews, From fragmentation to integration: http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/pub/books/worldviews.pdf
xiiNottale, Derivation of the postulates of quantum mechanics from the first principles of scale relativity, §9: http://luth2.obspm.fr/~luthier/nottale/arJPhysA07.pdf
xiiiNottale, Relativité, Être et Ne Pas Être, p7: http://luth2.obspm.fr/~luthier/nottale/arGreen.pdf
xvStewart, Evolution's Arrow, §6: http://users.tpg.com.au/users/jes999/6.htm
xviGoossens, Developing a Worldview to Conduct Global Evolution, p14: http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/82
xviiE.g. Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze & John-Dylan Haynes. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080414145705.htm
xviiiInspired from Dennett: Freedom Evolves and Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach
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