Is free will compatible with the clockwork universe?

 

The thinking in physics is that the world is either deterministic or random.  It’s random (so far as we can tell) at the quantum level, but deterministic at scales larger than the nanometer.  

As a side note, deterministic doesn’t mean predicable.  Complex systems don’t have simple equations that can tell what the position or other parameters of an object will be at any time in the future.   As a practical matter, there are situations where it is possible to predict some result, but they are the exception, though ones that are of great interest to us.  In general, while there are known rules for how a system can evolve, predicting the future state requires stepping a simulation forward in time.  That’s why it isn’t possible to predict the weather far in advance.

Why free will seems impossible

If every event is either determined or random, then isn’t any choice a human may make subject to the same constraints?   Doesn’t that mean that any person doesn’t really have a choice in a situation, even if it feels like they do?  Is free will just a useful illusion that helps us manage in the world?   Maybe, but there are people who argue that there is another level in the mix, which is information.

 

Minds as patterns of infomation

I could, I suppose, go look through stacks of books and journals in the library, if I had time and easy access to the library stacks, but I don’t. I went to the AI and asked it what the thinking is on how free will can be real in the physical world.   It gave me back a list of five different avenues of thought.   I’ll attach the summary at the bottom, but when I looked through them, the common thread seems to be that of the mind as a locus of information.

I followed my original question up with this comment & question:

You could think of any set of physical arrangements as being a pattern, which has its own kind of logic & being a form of information. By that logic, the mind is a kind of pattern, presumably embodied in the brain, nervous system & the rest of the body of a person. It sounds like the common thread to the arguments is that the mind, as embodied in the body, produces consequences that are an effect of its information that are neither random or deterministic.

Part of the response said:

Your intuition—that a mind is a complex, self-maintaining pattern embodied across the brain, body, and environment—aligns closely with recent work in neurobiology, information theory, and physics

This is a more complex idea than just the determinism/randomness of the original question, but it does match what we observe.  

The game board of physics 

I moved on to consider the idea that while the laws of physics presumably determine the boundaries of what can happen, the consequences of their evolution are vast and non-obvious.  In particular, I asked:

so far as i can tell, if you think of the laws of physics as being basic, with everything else (e.g. chemistry, biology, society) as evolving from them, then in general, we observe (somewhat) simple rules giving rise to an immense variety of outcomes. As an analogy, one can think of the rules of a game (e.g. Go) as being simple enough to explain quickly, but subtle enough to give rise to an almost endless variation of possible games. The laws of physics seem like that kind of rulebook that can give rise to a huge number of possible outcomes.

It replied by telling me that there are more possible moves in Go than there are atoms in the universe.   I guess that’s why people love playing it.  [Go is a game that is played by placing black or white stones on a grid.  The goal is to capture territory, defined as empty grid points surrounded by the players stones.]

More to the point, game theorists make a distinction between the rules of the game and the game/state space.  The latter are all the possible states that the rules can give rise to.

In the context of free will, the state space provides a constraint on the options, which must be navigated by the information processing unit, aka the mind.  Because the mind is actively evaluating the options and directing the response based on that evaluation, while at the most basic level, the result obeys the laws of physics, the effect includes the patterns of the mind over and above simple determinism.  In other words, it acts with free will.

An analogy

Saying the mind evaluates options is fine, but abstract.  I decided a way to get a feel for what it means could be to visualize it in a concrete way, even if my analogy is somewhat fanciful.  Suppose one visualizes the mind as a pinball machine, where the machine itself controls the flippers.  The arrangement of the flippers represents the model the mind holds of the world.  

An incoming situation, something that might require a choice, for example, is represented by a ball entering the machine from the top.  When the ball reaches the bottom, where ever it arrives represents the final outcome.  

In my imaginary pinball machine, unlike a real one, the position of the flippers themselves is part of the programming.  They would be set in place as the person learns, but might be resistant to moving after childhood.  The position of the flippers can symbolize this aspect of the minds programming, something particular to each person that can change, but not easily.  In real life, the term for this is neuroplasticity.

If there were no active input from the mind, the ball would just descend to the bottom, possibly hitting some flippers and being deflected, but it would be totally deterministic.  For a mind as an active agent, the flippers do act, throwing the ball in different directions according to the way they are arranged and the underlying connections that govern the speed and force with which they move.  Moreover, the connections can change on the fly, as the system learns from the results of any situation.

While this is a simple analogy, the point is that because the system is capable of acting using memory and goals, while it is still subject to the laws of physics, the system can produce effects that go beyond simple determinism and enter the realm of self-directed action.

Progmatic free will

That’s the theory anyway.  As a practical matter, whether free will is “real” or not doesn’t matter.  We act as if it is and in that sense, it is real.   Karl Popper argues that thoughts have autonomous reality and justifies this idea by saying that ideas have consequences even if their existence is “only” as patterns in some mind.  By that logic, free will is real.

Appendix

The various formulations of how free will can happen

Framework	Core Mechanism	How Free Will Survives
Top-Down Causation	Macro-level patterns constrain micro-physics.	Mind alters physical trajectories via boundary conditions.
Kane’s SFAs	Quantum chaos during mental deliberation.	Indeterminism provides open paths; effort resolves the choice.
Ismael’s Physics	Agents as localized information aggregators.	The internal architecture of the self is the primary cause.
Computational Irreducibility	Complex algorithms cannot be predicted early.	Choice is inherently irreducible and unpredictable in practice.
Dennett’s Evolutionary Model	Biological feedback loops for avoiding outcomes.	Free will is a real, evolved capacity for self-steering.