Whence our intuitive notion of causal determinism?

I’d assumed that determinism began to take its contemporary shape with the new mechanistic explanations of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But recently I have begun to wonder if determinism were not older and deeper in our psyches—a feature of explanation per se, not mechanistic explanation specifically.

Rather than coming about because of early science’s impressive discoveries of the clockwork-like laws of cause and effect, maybe the first threat to humanity’s sense of autonomy and dignity came from deterministic stories—that is to say, from Fate.

Narrative paths and story arcs, imposed on us by gods or divine forces, were taken to undermine something important to us: happiness or meaningfulness, if not also autonomy. Fate, oracles, curses, and the like preoccupied the ancient Athenians especially—as evidenced by their invention of the genre of tragic theater. At Oedipus’s birth, a divine oracle prescribed the inescapable story of his life, its end and its lasting meaning, as clear and unchangeable as if chiseled in the firmament.

During the Scientific Revolution, Medieval explanations (which had been Aristotelian, teleological, purpose-based, and qualitative) began to lose esteem and were replaced by quantitative and clockwork-like explanations, as in the mathematical equations of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.

But the success of scientific explanations from the 1600s up until the advent of quantum mechanics (around 1900) only cemented a deterministic understanding of the world that was already conceivable without the walloping, world-historical success of Newton.

Indeed, the kind of determinism that could threaten humanity’s sense of agency would have been conceivable by a caveman observing the regular trajectory of his spear. He would have found that if he threw it with a certain effort, it reliably flew a certain distance; if he added some amount of effort more, then it would go some amount of distance farther.

There were regularities to be discovered everywhere. Our prehistoric ancestors saw the repeating paths across the sky of their projectiles, the sun, the moon, and the stars. They endured the relentless repetition of the seasons. Any regular pattern—physical or narratological—could take root in the early human imagination and begin to seem like a prison of the endless repetition of the same.

“Gronk, we sit around this campfire, as we have always done, and you say you are stronger than our clan leader, Thogson, which is what so many untested youngsters have always said. Upstarts like you are destined to try and fail. You are like Snarp from legend, who challenged the dragon and was killed. Thogson is like Thog of legend, who challenged the dragon and defeated it. But you cannot help yourself. It has always been thus.”

“Most people say that when they first try it, it feels like they’re playing a strange game,” the narrator says, “one where the goal is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it’s easy to play. But when you try to break the rules, you find that can’t. If you try to press the button without having seen a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed.” If you don’t press the button, the light doesn’t flash. “No matter what you do, the light always precedes the button press,” by one second exactly.

The way the device works, according to the fictional science in the story, is that when you press the button you activate “a negative time delay circuit” that “sends a signal back in time one second,” turning on the indicator light one second in the past. The narrator of the story is from the future, when negative time delays of greater than one second have been achieved. He is sending us this message from one year into our future via a one-year negative time delay communication device.

It’s a clever idea for a story.

The Predictors become a societal menace because they “demonstrate that there’s no such thing as free will.” How do they do that? (And would it really be a menace to society?) Remember the delay is always one second exactly. If you see the light and quickly try to press the button faster than a second, you would feel frozen, unable to do so. (Because the only reason the light illuminates is because you have “already” pressed the button one second into the future.) And then when you inevitably press it in exactly one second, you would feel caused to do it, like a puppet on a string. But feeling frozen or like a puppet is not the strongest deflation of free will.

According to the time travel science aspect of the story, the light’s being lit up has already happened and so things cannot be otherwise. And in a sense that goes for your coming button press too. The light has lit up now only because in the future one second forward you must have or will must have pressed the button sending the signal back one second in time to illuminate the light. The one-second negative time delay conceit shows what believers in causal determinism have been saying in the free will debate, namely that if an action is determined, that is no different from it being pre-determined.

“There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic,” the narrator says. “Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule. What it takes is a demonstration, and that’s what a Predictor provides.”

The effect on the population is devastating. “A third of those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won’t feed themselves. The end state is akinetic mutism, a kind of waking coma… The ability to move remains, but the motivation is gone.” The affliction spreads “like a cognitive plague,” says the narrator. “People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable Lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we’ve all encountered: the idea that free will doesn’t exist. It just wasn’t harmful until you believed it.”

The narrator wishes to warn us that we must continue to believe, or at least pretend to believe, in free will. “It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t… Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”1

And yet the narrator admits that he knows who among our population will descend into akinetic mutism and who won’t. “And my sending this warning won’t alter those proportions,” he says. “So why did I do it? Because I had no choice.”

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Socrates never mentions free will and it does not appear in the works of Plato or Aristotle, or so says classicist and philosopher Michael Frede. In his book, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought, Frede writes, “[I]f we look at Greek literature from Homer onwards, down to long after Aristotle, we do not find any trace of a reference to, let alone a mention of, free will.”

Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind popularized the hard-to-believe idea that the pre-Homerian Greeks heard what we would call the inner voice of conscience as if it were a god’s voice in their head. In Homer’s Iliad many significant moments, for example, actions that turn the tide of a battle—but also insignificant moments of quotidian agency between husband and wife—are described as caused not by the Homeric heroes themselves but by the gods acting through them. It was as if the gods played puppeteer standing over the scene like over a game board, pulling the strings connected to Hector and Achilles.

For the moment, we may put Jaynes aside as overly speculative, if still evocative. According to Frede, the reason Plato and Aristotle do not have a concept of free will is because, “[n]either Plato nor Aristotle has a notion of a will.” That’s right. They did not make use of the concept of will, much less free will.

Frede: “[N]either Plato nor Aristotle has a notion of a will.”

Plato and Aristotle’s famous “tripartite view of the soul” is grounded in the idea that there are distinct forms of motivation which often come into conflict with each other and therefore “must have their origin in different capacities, abilities, or parts of the soul,” Frede writes.

According to these ancient Greek thinkers, the collected parts of a human soul can be thought of metaphorically along the figure of the horse-drawn chariot. The charioteer is Reason, gripping the reigns of two horses, Desire and Passion. As a metaphor, this strikes us as not so bad today. It looks a lot like our preferred folk metaphor of a homunculus at a control panel patched into the central nervous system. But the ancient view is more complicated than the metaphor suggests, and stranger too. Frede says the ancient thinkers had “a highly specific form of wanting or desiring, in fact, a form of wanting which we no longer recognize or for which we tend to have no place in our conceptual scheme.”

In other words, we don’t think of ourselves, of our agency, in the same way as the ancient Greeks did. And we may never be able to. But the way they thought can be made understandable from the outside, if not usable, so to speak, from the inside.

Frede says it’s safe to assume that Plato and Aristotle thought human beings at least sometimes acted voluntarily, or because they desired to so act, that they “willed” certain actions, et cetera. The ancient Greek “folk” (non-philosophical layperson) had a commonsense psychology in which they attributed intentions and so on to each other. But the philosophical theory which Plato and those other philosophers posited to explain this commonsense folk psychology is what the modern mind does not, perhaps cannot, share in.1

Aristotle does not share our notion of a will as essentially spontaneous, an uncaused causer.2

Consider the Latin velle, the German wollen, and “to will” in English. They all mean something like wanting or willing. The ancient Greek word boulesthai is closely related and yet, Frede says, should not be translated as “willing” because it signified a very specific form of wanting conceptually distinct from our sense of “willing.” Nevertheless, we lack any better term to translate it into.

According to Frede, boulesthai is “a form of desire which is specific to Reason.” “It is the form in which Reason desires something. If reason recognizes, or believes itself to recognize, something as a good, it ‘wills’ (boulesthai) or desires it. If Reason believes itself to see a course of action which would allow us to attain this presumed good, it thinks that it is a good thing, other things being equal, to take this course of action.” And, if it thinks that it is good to do something, then Reason does it. Or Reason makes us do it.

The ancient view assumed that “reason by itself suffices to motivate us to do something. This is an assumption which is made by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.” But it is an assumption that is incommensurate with how we think about motivation and agency today. We are all followers of David Hume today insofar as we think that between reason and desire only desire is motivating on its own.

We are all followers of David Hume today insofar as we think that between reason and desire only desire is motivating on its own.

In our understanding today, my reason can recognize something as good to do and yet I will not do it unless I also want to do it, or unless I desire to be reasonable. Hume wrote that “it is not irrational to prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my little finger.”

Hume wrote that “it is not irrational to prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my little finger.”

Let’s unpack that double negative. Hume is saying it’s possible that I’d rather avoid a little pain than prevent the destruction of half the world. It’s conceivable I would not switch one for the other; that is, I might let half the world be destroyed rather than endure a little pain in my finger. Preferring is a key notion here. What we prefer is a matter of taste in our schema today. For the ancient Greeks, what was preferable was a dictated by reason.3

My reason can recognize something as good to do and yet I will not do it unless I also want to do it, or unless I desire to be reasonable.

My reason can recognize something as good to do and yet I will not do it unless I also want to do it, or unless I desire to be reasonable.

That is our modern intellectual inheritance. Those preferences would sound like nonsense to the ancient Greek philosophers. The difference is Hume has limited “rational” to mean only instrumental reason. Being rational can help you instrumentally to achieve your goals, your values, your desires. But establishing what is valuable is not a part of rationality when the latter is conceptually limited to be only instrumental reason.

What, then, is value in our post-Humean paradigm? For us, value is just a matter of desire or preference, with all the subjectivity and relativism that this implies. If value were arrived at via reason instead of desire, value would be objective—it would be something you could be wrong about instead of being something which depends as it does today on subjective desire wherein if you think it’s good then it’s good.4

Two things separate us most remarkably from the ancients. One is that they lived in a time 1500 years before the moral relativism we embrace today was even conceivable. The other is their lack of an important role for will in their understanding of human action. We, by contrast, have made an apotheosis of will; we’ve turned it into the end all be all.

Socrates’ view is especially foreign to us because he specifically denied the conceptual possibility of “weakness of will,” or akrasia, that is, situations in which we act against our (better) judgment. In cases of weakness of will, like bad habits or procrastination, our reason tells us a task is important or urgent but when we do something else instead, we demonstrate, according to Socrates, that we actually believed the other thing—the thing we actually did—to be more important, more valuable.

A student going to a party rather than studying the night before a test demonstrates he values the party more than studying. Socrates would categorize procrastination as a failure of rationality, an evaluation5 of what would be good to do, an evaluation which was objectively false. His reason or reasoning was wrong (indeed, his rational evaluation of the pros and cons of the various options open to him was wrong) because it motivated him to do the less objectively reasonable thing.6

Contrariwise, after Hume, we say the student’s reason was correct (he reasoned that he should not go out but instead study the night before the test); he just didn’t want to do the reasonable thing. Acting against your better judgment was impossible according to Socrates, because Reason does what it views as best done. In those case where it might appear you acted against your better judgment, you were in fact judging what you did to be better—best all things considered—but, Socrates would say, you were simply wrong about that.

The paradigm we live in today describes the case differently. It says: our reason did indeed evaluate the undone course of action (about which we procrastinated) as the most valuable, and therefore the thing we ought to do, but we did not want to do it, and so we did not do it.7

Let’s now compare the figure or trope each epoch or paradigm prefers to describe human agency. The two-horsed chariot for the ancients and the homunculus at the control panel for we moderns.

The first task is to understand the chariot metaphor in the way the ancients did rather than how we are inclined to. Frede says, “modern readers apparently can hardly help thinking of cases of acute mental conflict,” when thinking of the charioteer metaphor. That is, we project our homuncular conception of the mind onto Aristotle and the two-horse chariot setup. “We sit there anguished, tormented, torn apart by two conflicting desires which pull us in opposite directions, while we try to make up our mind which direction to take,” (italics added).

But that’s not what Plato meant with the charioteer metaphor when he introduced it in The Republic. Standing in for Reason, the charioteer, according to the ancient understanding, himself has a desire; he desires the good. (His task is to train his horses to also go in that direction. Horses do not act on the basis of reflection or wisdom; they act out of habit or instinctively; but they can be trained to act in line with what Reason judges proper.) The ancients understood that to cash out the italicized “make up our mind” a few sentences above, we would have to invoke another metaphorical charioteer inside the first charioteer. The ancient paradigm avoided this infelicity by giving Reason a desire of its own, capable of motivating us on its own. The charioteer has a telos or drive of its own, which is sufficient on its own to succeed in motivating action.

According to the ancient Greeks, when we do what we believe is best, it’s because we saw it was best, and not because we saw it was best and also had this other thing, a will, which decided to do it. The addition of a mental event, an extraneous willing, is what gets the homuncular regress going. Aristotle’s view makes sense at just the point ours starts to go awry. Indeed, Aristotle was the first to oppose the notion of a homunculus as leading to an infinite regress, although he opposed it in biology as a bad theory of the life force a sperm brings to an egg.

Conceiving of the mind in the homuncular manner is to conceive of self-consciousness as an autonomous monitoring and control system and conscious will as an uncaused causer. The ancient conception of the mind was different. The ancient’s conceived of the mind as a collection of desires or motivating drives (that is, the rational charioteer and nonrational horses are all drives, drives of different kinds), each in competition with the other drives to get the creature to do what each drive innately wants the creature to do. No uncaused causer anywhere. No “spontaneous will” as uncaused causer. And so no problem of free will in the way we moderns understand it, which is as a conflict between belief in an uncaused causer and the truth of causal determinism. QED.