I somewhat belatedly realized that my little essay on free will would benefit from a short discussion of predestination, how it is different from foreknowledge, and how free will can be imagined in a deterministic world.
It seems that the current free will debate within scientifically accepted worldview is mostly about definitions and feelings. Someone like Dennett says, free will is X, and we all possess it. Someone like Harris replies, yes, I possess X, but this is not really free will. Therefore, the core of this disagreement is not scientific: you either perceive X as free will or not, and certain arguments might change your point of view. Some (if not most) arguments in this case take a form of "intuition pumps", or mental models designed to make our intuition work. Intuition pumps are easily abused by appealing to emotions or portraying distorted images, but I’ll do my best to avoid much subjectivity.
Dennett calls the "intuitive" understanding of free will "this bonkers sense", because, indeed, it is nearly impossible to reconcile our own perception of our decision-making system with the scientific view of reality, which forces us to accept that our decisions are made by incredibly complex yet physical brains, relying on natural processes and devoid of any "mysterious" components. In his view, the opposite of "free will" is "made under duress", which is a perfectly established notion: do you sign this document on your own free will or because someone forced you to do it?
Departing from the "intuitive" view of free will, we have the following options: (a) accept that it is the only "real" free will and believe we have it; (b) accept that is the only "real" free will and concede we don’t have it as it contradicts scientific evidence; (c) reject this notion and look elsewhere.
Option (a) perhaps looks natural for religious thinkers who are comfortable with the notion of supernatural powers (interestingly, Martin Luther thought we don’t have free will), and for people like Penrose who believe that "quantum dice" somehow should make our decisions more ours. Some less mystically-oriented philosophers like Robert Kane also tried to defend it to a certain degree. I understand this view follows a great tradition, and yet don’t see how it can be tenable. Our mind, with all its complexity, exists in the context of other animal minds — all the way down to rats, frogs, and worms. A frog is not as nearly sophisticated, and yet it also can do a lot of things, and can exhibit its own "free will", albeit to a lesser extent. I agree that we cannot (yet) grasp our own thinking, but why should we presume it works radically differently for our species than for everyone else? We see how degrees of freedom expand from species to species. No animal is entirely predictable, and no animal is entirely free from its environment, us included.
Option (b) is where the people like Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky (and Paul Bloom, Wolf Singer, and many others) are. I’d say this view is rational, and I can easily imagine myself taking it, but I’d perhaps agree with Dennett on its somewhat amateurish flavor. Professional people understand that the "folk" notions of their trade are often off: we all know how hackers or medical doctors or other specialists are shown doing their job in movies. However, distorted folk images don’t make the reality less real: when we discover that the job of a programmer or a doctor is much less cinematographic than we though, we do not proclaim it meaningless. Arguably, most of us (and even world-class neuroscientists or psychologists) are not really specialists in "free will" (whoever they are), and, rejecting its folk version, we, rationally speaking, should dig deeper into interpretations of free will instead of proclaiming its nonexistence.
Option (c) can be interpreted as "free will is something different yet we don’t have it either", but I am not even sure someone explores such a direction. A more common notion would be a compatibilist "free will is something different, and we have it", such as Dennett’s view that exercising free will is merely making decisions while being not under pressure. This notion is clearly counterintuitive, but intuition is a poor guide here. Without advocating the compatibilist view, I think it would be helpful to discuss or even remove some common hurdles that make our intuition rebel.
I think the hardest piece to swallow, which nearly always underpins any "scientific" critique of free will, concerns perceived incompatibility of free will with predestination or foreknowledge. The argument goes as follows. Science tells us that having a "snapshot" of our world at the moment t, it is theoretically possible to predict the "snapshot" of our world at the moment t + 1, if we live in a deterministic universe. If our universe is stochastic, then there is a certain number of possible "snapshots" at the moment t + 1. This list depends on certain random factors beyond our control, and we can calculate the probability of each scenario.
In either case, there is no room for free will. A deterministic world is something like Conway’s Game of Life. We can examine the evolution of the same configuration as many times as we wish, always obtaining the same results. A stochastic world is something like Rabbits and Wolves: it is kind of predictable in broad strokes, but unpredictable in details. In any case, the source of unpredictability is inherent randomicity of the environment rather than any mystic "free choice" powers of its inhabitants, able to bend random factors at their will.
Is it possible to reconcile this view with any intuitively appealing notion of free will? Ironically, there is a great religious tradition behind such a compatibilism. Abrahamic religions deal with "moralizing God" who is constantly watching whether we the people are up to the standard. Clearly, there is a certain friction between the "no free will" arguments and the notion of sin: if we don’t have free will, how can we be blamed? On the other hand, Almighty God "knows everything in advance", so for God our world is essentially deterministic.
One way out of this contradiction is to distinguish predestination from foreknowledge. Predestination is a concept stating that everything happens according to God’s will. Then it was God’s wish that a volcano erupted or a man robbed a bank. This would sound just right to Martin Luther. An alternative view is based on a concept of foreknowledge: God merely knows what is going to happen, but does not will it.
Imagine someone in the past videotaped his all life. You can fast-forward to any location of the tape and see what is going on with the man in any given day. You can watch something that happened on Thursday and rewind it back to Monday. You see what’s going on, but you already know in advance what is going to happen. However, this is foreknowledge, not your will. Now comes the argument that God exists "out of time", and in a sense can watch our life tapes till the end while for us they are still being recorded.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying that this example shows how free will is compatible with determinism, because we can watch a fully recorded sequence showing people exercising free will. There is still some intuitive difference between recorded past and the sequence of events we watch unrolling. However, it shows that under "free will with Almighty God" view, what really makes the difference is agency: do people do what they want to do or what God wants them to do? Ironically, scientific "no free will" position does not presume anything like God’s will and yet pumps the same kind of intuition as Luther’s arguments, potentially confusing predestination with foreknowledge.
Why, then, "free will" in a godless mechanistic universe feels not enough real? I think intuitions can be very subtle. Consider a popular teleportation example: you enter a capsule, your whole body is scanned, information is transferred to another capsule, where it is recreated. Your previous body is destroyed and you leave the capsule.
This scenario pumps completely different intuitions when we change certain details of its description. Imagine your body is fully scanned, and a clone is produced. Then the operator tells you: okay, now when your identical twin is ready, please proceed the annihilation device. This doesn’t feel like teleportation at all. Your twin can have his own life, while you are about to die, and there is no way out of this. Yes, you realize your twin will identify himself as you, but does it really matter to you? Now imagine you chose your eyes in the first capsule, and open them in the second capsule. Behind the scenes, your original body is destroyed, but subjectively this whole process would indeed feel like real teleportation. Just a blink of an eye or a quick nap — and you are ready to go. Not much different from our nightly experiences.
While we are here, just a quick note. Our intuitions are malleable. I can imagine that in some distant future we’ll treat our bodies as disposable containers for our "software", in the same way we treat physical data media now. There is evidence that our mind is quite closely tied to our bodies, so we won’t be able to "jump bodies" without restraint, but at least jumping to an clone container body should not be an issue. In this case, we won’t really have qualms about the fate of the container to be disposed. However, this is a completely unrelated topic, and I don’t hold any strong opinions, so let’s back on track.
The "deterministic world" scenario works differently under different notions of free will. One may insist that there is nothing "free" in a world where all choices are bound to happen from the very beginning, because free will is exactly the ability to change the course of history (whatever it means). This intuition is quite powerful, and many people find relief in the idea that our world is stochastic. Alternatively, one may propose that "free will" of an agent means the possibility for an agent to think and decide while not being hard pressed or unreasonably constrained with time. In this case, it is not really important whether our world is deterministic because it is essentially stochastic for a decision-making system of any individual agent. Nobody has access to the internals of the whole universe when making decisions.
Coming back to the beginning, there seems to be no chance to reconcile the wish to be able to "freely change the course of history" with the way how the world works. If this free will is the only free will worthy of the name, we don’t have it. What we do have is the ability to make decisions, which differs from individual to individual. If this ability does not feel powerful enough to be called "free will", it is due to our intuitions rather than some hard realities, and it worth thinking why our intuitions lead us one way or another. "True" free will is a bit like "true" love. This term is loaded only with the meaning we ourselves put into it.