The Real Nature of Free Will
One thing should be understood. If value changes things, that is not the same as what most people call “free will,” but it might be what they really should mean. That requires a bit of explanation. Free will is a rather confused concept, but it is usually understood as something opposed to determinism. If value determines action it is obviously not non-deterministic. The difference is not between determinism and non-determinism but between mechanistic determinism and teleological determinism.
Value is not usually capricious and probably is never capricious. It comes from within us, but does not appear to come by chance. Pain and pleasure certainly would appear to be imposed on us; that is, they appear to be caused by specific circumstances that we may then seek or avoid.
The essential thing to understand is that value is clearly an integral part of the universe. This is a momentous insight. Science at present is utterly incapable of understanding it, yet it is the most important thing in our lives as we live them. Indeed, without value, nothing can be important; “importance” is a value-based concept.
Understanding this clearly will help to clear up some of the confusion that exists about the concept of free will. It makes no sense just to reject determinism. Marvin Minsky, a stout defender of the idea that the brain is nothing but a computer made of meat, and the mind is nothing but a computer program, neatly demolishes the anti-deterministic, pro-free-will argument in book on computers and minds, The Society of Mind.
This is how he put it: Everything that happens in our universe is either completely determined by what's
already happened in the past or else depends, in part, on random chance
(306). Everything is either
determined or random. People find both of these unacceptable, so to save our belief in the freedom of will
from the fateful grasps of Cause and Chance, people simply postulate an empty, third alternative
(307).
This is a forceful argument. Indeed, if you accept that free will is incompatible with determinism, it is
unanswerable.
The American philosopher, Brand Blanshard, argued in
1958 that
determinism was inevitable, but that what the advocates of free will really want, if they could only think
about it more clearly, is a higher level of causation. The will is indeed free in that it is not determined
by mechanical causation, but by its own rules and laws, and that in the realm of reflection and choice
there operates a different kind of causality from any we know in the realm of bodies.
The higher
levels of causality may supervene on the lower levels and when causality of the highest level is at work,
we have precisely what the indeterminists, without knowing it, want
(11).
Blanshard does not specify the nature of that higher level of causation
, thereby weakening his
argument through vagueness, but we can supply that want: it is purpose, guided by values. We do not know
whence those values spring, but they are essential to who we are and what we do.