Proof for the absence of free will?

Question

EDIT (17/08/2022): I have answered this question with an evolution of the argument. See accepted answer below.

There are a number of arguments which aim to prove the impossibility of free will.

The Standard Argument (incorporating the Determinism Objection and the Randomness Objection) is well known and powerful, although subject to a variety of criticisms.

I seek here to provide an argument immediately testable via personal investigation.

Is the following argument sound?

Note: here, an 'act' is defined as 'a thing done', as per Oxford Languages definition #2.

1. In order for an act to be voluntary, a person must decide to perform it.

2. A decision is an act. Therefore, in order for a decision to be voluntary, a person must decide to decide it.

3. This leads to an infinite regress of prior decisions, in which any voluntary decision requires an infinite chain of prior decisions.

4. Insofar as free will requires the ability to make voluntary decisions, free will is impossible.

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Related reading:

• Spinoza, Free Will & Infinite Regression

• Google Talks: Mark Belaguer

Answer 1

Seems like no one brought up Frankfurt and hierarchical compatabilism.

• First-order desires: desires that are directed to objects or states of affairs.
  We desire things like being healthy, being well-informed, and being paid.

• Second-order desires: self-conscious beings are not only aware of the first-order desires, but can have desires about those desires.
  A smoker can have the desire to not desire to smoke.

• Second-order volitions: second-order desires we want to act on.
  There are second-order desires we don't wish to act on, like a priest desiring to know what it's like to be married.

To act freely, says Frankfurt, is to act on a second-order volition. If you do not formulate second-order volitions, or do not act on the ones you do form, your actions are not free - you are a slave to your first-order desires.

According to Frankfurt, free actions are caused by second-order volitions that one decisively identifies with. "Decisively identifies with" is a necessary condition to forestall an infinite regress. We may formulate a third-order desire and so on, but a second-order desire that we decisively identify with, claims Frankfurt, "resounds" throughout the potentially endless array of higher orders, halts the regress, and brings coherence to our preference structure.

Note that traditional compatabilism maintains that you cannot act freely if your actions are externally constrained. Frankfurt denies this. As long as you act on your second-order volitions, you are responsible for you actions, whether or not you could do otherwise.

^{From Doing Philosophy 4th ed.. Theodore Shick Jr, Lewis Vaugh. 2010. Pp. 220-225}

Answer 2

This argument constructs a paradox of the type popularized by Zeno, i.e.:

• one cannot do x until one has done x^'
• one cannot do x^' until one has done x^''
• one cannot do x^'' until one has done x^'''...
• therefore one can never do x

This is how Zeno argued that Achilles could never finish a race because — logically speaking — Achilles could never begin a race. There is always some minuscule distance he must traverse before he can traverse any distance at all.

Of course, this logical argument never actually stopped anyone from finishing a race, much less Achilles, which is why it's normally referred to as a paradox. It doesn't point out a flaw in the universe; it points out a weakness in our system of logic. Nor does the given argument prevent anyone from having the experience of making a free choice. If I choose to run a footrace, I will (most likely) cross the finish line; all the arguments to the contrary won't change either the choice or the outcome.

Answer 3

You are always free to decide what you wanna decide to decide what you decide about what you wanna decide about what you wanna decide about to decide your final decision what to decide how you decide the decision of making a free decision about what you wanna decide so the decision will not be decided by others who wanna decide for you what you are supposed to decide if you have to make a decision what to decide if you wanna decide what the others have to decide if they wanna make you decide what decision to make about a decision how to decide the decision they want you to make about you deciding how they should decide deciding your decision to make a decision how every one should make decisions about decisions that in general decide how to make decisions for them for deciding a decision.

It's your decision.

Answer 4

The infinite regress argument does not work because it stops after two steps. "They must be able to decide what to decide what to decide" is not valid English grammar for a reason.

You have said that they must decide what to decide, and that's the end of it.

Task: Decide what to decide.
Result: What to eat.
Task: Decide what to eat.
Result: Pizza.

Answer 5

Apologies, our discussion of what you mean has been cut short. So here is my best shot.

You write:

In order for a person to be in conscious control over their decisions, they must be able to decide what to decide (otherwise, the decision becomes involuntary...

But you said in the deleted discussion that you are not proposing a chain of meta-decisions distinct from the causal chain. This appears to contradict your notion to "decide what to decide", as there is no such prior decision.

It seems to me that you are conflating "decisions about decisions" with prior causes.

There is no prior decision event to require free will; the regress of decisions never gets started.

There is however a chain of prior causes, and this "regress" of causes is of course valid.

All this sheds no light on whether the one actual decision is free or not.

Answer 6

The Stoic position would be to reject premise 2. Someone may be in conscious control of their actions as the determining factors of their decisions are "internal rather than external", even if their own internal range of choices is narrowly conceived. The causal physical/chemical workings of my brain and that relationship to the biological system that is my body may reasonably have established, predictable and even exploitable input-output relations, but they are nonetheless my behavioural functions, and their operation is my responsibility and my means of positive liberty.

The reason this is conceptually useful is in attributations of moral responsibility. We might reasonably say I was coerced, deprived of my free will to act, if someone else outside the boundaries of my person was holding me hostage, and this is the difference that makes a difference when it comes to understanding my freedom to choose whether to do something that would otherwise be deemed morally judgeworthy. However, that same justification would not be available to someone who, independently of outside coercion, simply did that morally wrong thing and held that physical causal determinism deprived them of moral agency.

Answer 7

Here is a Libertarian answer, referencing empirical pragmatism vs analyticity.

This sort of logic argument has serious flaws when applied to claims about our world. For example "we can't have an infinite regress of causes" is shared between this argument and Munchausen's Trilemma. The resolution of this can be achieved the same way Munchausen's Trilemma can be resolved pragmatically -- by admitting that logical soundness per classical logic is not sufficient to establish reality in our universe, as the universe does not always follow classical logic.

With Munchausen, we DO have knowledge, so three sound arguments as to how we cannot are -- refuted in their applicability to this world by observation. For Free Will -- we experience, and observe, free will in operation every day. As with our acquisition of knowledge, this is primary data. The THEORY that classical logic somehow trumps primary data, is an effort to prioritize theory over empirical observation, and is readily rejected by any empiricist.

Note, the applicability of logics to this world is as much an empirical question as the applicability of any other science hypothesis, and the plethora of alternative logics means that none of them have any presumption of validity. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/guide-to-logical-pluralism-for-nonlogicians/EDFDFA1C9EB65DB71848DABD6B12D877

Answer 8

I suggest that the proposal is unsound. While it may or may not be the case that one must decide to make a decision, the same applies to a non-free will decision and so the paradox in fact says nothing about free will. Given that we clearly can make decisions, whether or not by free will, it follows that the infinite recursion proposal must be incorrect.

Answer 9

I'd already attack you're premises. Like what does that mean:

Note: here, an 'act' is defined as 'a thing done', as per Oxford Languages definition #2.

And henceforth:

A decision is an act.

Like what thing have you done with a decision? Is it really an act? Isn't that already a circular logic in that it implies that a decision changes an internal state of the body and is therefore deterministic? So isn't that hiding the conclusion as a premise? Do we know sufficiently how decisions work and that this is actually the case? Isn't it, at least as a hypothesis, also possible that a decision is not an act but something else that doesn't need a deterministic chain of effects that causes it?

Also isn't this a definition of "free will" that requires god like powers, that would invalidate free will but also be a fallacy of equivocation when it comes to what people mean by "free will"?

Like most of your decisions aren't perfectly free. Your actions are limited by the physical reality and also your thoughts and world view are limited by your direct and indirect experiences and on top of that most of the decisions that you make are forced upon you by having to deal with sensory inputs that you don't control.

That all being said, you still experience consciousness, you still experience the ability to choose between options or even if there is no choice and only one path to take; to value your action as good or bad. So you still experience an agency to make decisions, that is heavily restricted by outside forces but not ultimately determined. With all these limitations you still have a sense of agency. You can't control the world but you can control how you interact with it and how you feel about it, even to the point of deliberate physical and mental self-destruction.

Answer 10

The most glaring problem, here, in my eyes at least, is a "bad company" objection. Premise (3) is meant to be the kicker, in that (though this is not explicitly stated) an infinite regress of choices is supposedly impossible. However, if we accepted the idea, we might wonder:

1. Suppose that every effect has a cause, and every cause is an effect of another cause, and so on. So, for there to be any effects, every effect must be preceded by infinitely many causes.
2. In normal epistemic logic, for kS, k = "it is know that" and S = some sentence, it is also true that kS → kkS, and so on down the line.
3. Not only the k-operator, but a proof operator, can face such a regress. Indeed, this is where rejections of foundationalism or advocacy of infinitism come into play. Another similar case would be for an understanding logic, such that uS → uuS.
4. Modal logic can encode such a regress, though the prevailing assumption is that iterated modal operators are trivially reducible such that ◊◊S → ◊S, for instance.

So let's consider (4), here. Strong free will is the kind that depends on alternative possibilities, so it would have to connect up with modal logic. If singular possibility encodes for infinite possibility, and this unobjectionably enough, why would strong free will not work similarly? You are effectively claiming a decision operator such that dS → ddS, etc. I don't see a problem with a reversed collapse as such, from infinitely many decisions to one decision.

Another problem, though, is the idea that if ddS is involuntary, then so is dS. Inasmuch as we do not make choices in a vacuum, it is safe enough to say that the very fact that we face a decision problem can be caused by the historical environment (though per Kant (see below) this claim that transcendental freedom's "presence" is discernible in the physical world, might be rejected). A fact with a conditional structure, whose metaphysical antecedent is one subfact, but whose consequent is a disjunction of possible future subfacts, seems to be the kind of fact "inside of which" free will (or choice, rather) would occur. In other words, ddS (or dddS, etc., for that matter) might well be strictly determined by what came before, and yet dS itself would still be disjoint in effect, hence "free."

It is a mistake to think that belief in the possibility of free choices, or even the actuality of a faculty with such power, is necessarily a belief that every act that an agent with said power does, is a result of free will/choice. Kant thought that, per our phenomenal character, it would be possible, with an advanced enough science, to know all the empirically strict causes of our tangible behavior; but for all that, he located transcendental freedom and its causal spontaneity, then, in the noumenal realm. Sometimes people think this means that Kant is suggesting that our noumenal choice involves manifesting, or at least entering into, specific possible worlds, as though our souls could survey these worlds "from on high," and the implicit freedom of our empirical actions is the freedom to choose which set of empirical actions to incarnate in. That's fairly exotic a claim, and Kant might have looked for other abstract descriptions of how this procedure is actually supposed to work; but as far as his bold (and paradoxically, but epistemologically, modest) claims in his known work go, he openly admitted that he did not know, and could not know, much less more deeply understand, how transcendental freedom selects from the empirical possibilities, such as to allow us to be noumenally independent of physical causation and yet, in the phenomenal realm, predictably subject to the same.

More pointedly, though, right now, I would ask: why believe that either all our actions are determined or all are freely willed (in the strong way)? And mightn't some of our actions be random, no less, too?

So I don't know that your argument is unsound in the normal sense of that term, but it doesn't seem sound, either. Abstract, and obscure, philosophical premises are hard to judge on this kind of score.

Answer 11

1. Conscious control over decisions seems to be a strange way to put it. I would recommend either of the following: "conscious control over one's actions" or "the ability to make decisions".
2. I don't exactly see what you mean by "able to decide what you decide" or "involuntary non-free decision". We only decide our voluntary actions and all decisions are free by definition. Voluntary actions are decided by the agent alone.
3. Decisions are not past causal, there is no infinite regress. Decisions cannot be caused, decisions are the first causes of new causal chains of events. There is only forward causality.
4. You may have disproven your own strawman version of free will, but you have not disproven our ability to make decisions.

Answer 12

Phyics, which is in an extremely refined state today, has never found any phenomenon in the universe that is not ultimately the interaction of aggomerations of elementary particles strictly following the laws of physics. And people do not have access to the chemical and electrical phenomena that take place in their own minds.

Therefore it is not the least bit surprising that although we generally have the impression of being able to make our own decisions independent of everything else, in fact our decisions are as determined as would be a computer making a decision based on a complicated algorithm after some amount of data has been input. The computer likewise doesn't "know" what its decision will be until it has been made, but it was nevertheless determined.

Answer 13

Suppose I make a cup of tea, and the question is whether I did so voluntarily. Before I made a cup of tea (act 2), I decided to make a cup of tea (act 1).

What is wrong with saying that act 1 was involuntary (I have no choice about making a decision - either I make a cup of tea or I don't. There is no third option.) but act 2 was voluntary?

You appear to be making an unstated assumption that being forced to make a choice is the same thing as the choice being forced. That a voluntary decision can only arise from voluntary precursors.

This sort of makes sense for 'first cause' arguments, which are clearly related to their precursors, but I don't think the same can be said for the 'voluntary' property. If a voluntary decision can only arise from voluntary precursors, you need to say why.

Perhaps the problem is that the phrase 'voluntary decision' is ambiguous as to its referent - is 'decision' referring to (act 1) or (act 2)?

Answer 14

What I follows is not meant to be a definitive answer, but to offer - after consideration of the answers and comments both here and to linked questions I have asked on this stack - an evolution of the proposed argument which addresses what I believe to be the most important challenge to date; namely that the claim that a 'decision is an act' is philosophically controversial.

As Strawson (2003, p. 244) points out in his response to an imagined question:

"What about choices and decisions? These are clearly mental actions?"

Some are, but the case is far from clear... Very often there is no action at all: none of the activation of relevant considerations...It simply happens, driven by the need to make a decision...There is no direct action in the actual issuing of new content, any more than there is in the growth of trees one has planted.

With this in mind, I have added three premises which attempt to accomodate this challenge, although these additions do contain another assumption which be addressed below the argument.

As previously, an 'act' here is defined as 'a thing done', as per Oxford Languages definition #2.

1. Decisions may be either voluntary or involuntary.

2. Insofar as free will requires the ability to make voluntary decisions, those decisions which are involuntary cannot contribute to free will.

3. Any voluntary decision would constitute an 'act'.

4. However, in order for an act to be voluntary, a person must decide to perform it.

5. Therefore, in order for a decision to be voluntary, a person must decide to decide it (perform it).

6. This leads to an infinite regress of prior decisions, in which any voluntary decision requires an infinite chain of prior decisions.

7. Insofar as free will requires the ability to make voluntary decisions, free will is impossible.

Clearly, this argument depends on an assumption that a voluntary decision is always an act; that a dichotomy exists between voluntary decisions-as-actions and involuntary decisions. Or can a decision be a non-act and retain volition?

I would like to post this reformulation as a new post. Feel free to comment as to whether or not this would be appropriate. In the absence of any reasonable objections, I will do so.

I have 'accepted' the answer provisionally, but I will un-accept it in the face of any critique which establishes that it constitutes no improvement upon the original.

Reference

Strawson, G. (2003). Mental Ballistics: the Involuntariness of Spontaneity. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, pp. 227-256. DOI: 10.1111/j.0066-7372.2003.00071.x

Answer 15

Your argument fails. The mistake in your logic is that you assume for there to be free will, every free decision x must be preceded by another free decision x-1 to take free decision x, leading to an infinite regression. Instead it is entirely possible that the triggers for making decisions are involuntary but the decisions themselves are free.