Free Will vs Biological Determinism

I want to briefly address a recent RadioLab episode “Revising the Fault Line”, which raises a solid question regarding free will.

As we learn more about neurology, psychology and genetics, is it likely that we can predict the actions of individuals?

If the answer to this is yes, then it requires a rethinking of what it means to have free will. According to Dr. Robert Sapolsky, the arc of knowledge is moving strongly in that direction.

[Jad at 36:45]
“500 years ago, we would have said the epileptic seizure was a bad, demonic possession. Then we learned that it’s biological.

Up to the mid-1950s, if your adolescent child suddenly started having hallucinations, and hearing voices and felt disordered, the mother of this child would say, ‘Where did this disease come from?’ and the best of science at the time had an answer. They would say, ‘You! It’s your fault! It was called schizophrenogenic mothering, a mothering style that generated schizophrenia. You caused your child schizophrenia.

And then in the mid-50’s, the first anti-psychotic drugs were developed, and emptied out the psychiatric wards all over the country, and everybody in the field said, ‘Oh my god! It’s a biochemical disorder!’”

And he says the same thing happened with dyslexia, we used to think that it was just kids that were lazy. And his contention is that this is just gonna keep happening.

As science progresses, one-by-one, all of the things that we think are under our control, that we should control, that if we don’t, can be blamed for. One-by-one, all of those things are going to get chalked up to screw-ups in our biology.

In other words, what was once seen as free will is gradually getting replaced by predictable psychological patterns.

Yikes. Does this mean that free will isn’t even a thing?

No, because…

In the voice of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing:

The mind is a chaotic thing,
Livin’ in a chaotic world,
It took a random synapse, going anywhere.

For example: Why did I feel the need to reference a Journey song just now?

When I wrote the original explanation, its slight similarity to Journey’s song triggered that song to play in my mind. That song playing in my mind convinced another part of me to take action and actually type it out.

But there are millions of songs out there! If it had been a Limp Bizkit song, or a Drake song, I probably would not have typed it out (because Limp Bizkit is quite vulgar, and Drake sounds like a fire alarm). My action was determined by an essentially random outside input (the song) as well as the various properties of that song.

Could theories be applied to predict the parody lyrics above? Perhaps. But the number of them required, and the amount of data required, would be so unrealistic that at its limit, it practically becomes a poem from the Tao Te Ching.

Free Will vs Psychohistory

To extend this point even further, let’s turn to Isaac Asimov’s science fiction Foundation Series.

To generate the predictions of the universe that he did, Hari Seldon would need to have mapped out every synapse and every action of every organism now and up to 1,000 years in the future.

But not just organisms. Every molecule, meteor, energy wave, and black swan event would need to be accounted for, as they are also inputs into these chaotic organisms.

And all of these variables would need to be known for objects discovered and undiscovered, from the point of initiation. Thus, psychohistory is essentially a catch-22.

TL;DR — Free will could be redefined as the output of a chaotic mind livin’ in a chaotic world. And there’s plenty of chaos to go around.