Quarterback A. J. McCarron, in play, weighing options 

                                     (credit: Keith Allison, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Freedom Grants A Sporting Chance

As promised, in this post we will begin to discuss free will and how sports can enlighten us on what freedom is and whether we have it. This discussion must be broken up into two pieces. Today, we will settle for clarifying the moral realist position on free will. In my next post, I will then apply what is said today to the realm of sport.

A major question in Philosophy that has stayed unresolved for centuries is whether humans have free will. Do we have the freedom to change the flows of events around us in our environments? Or are we caught up in flows of events that are already locked in place by forces we don’t have any power to change?

   

                                                   Soccer ball with no humans around 

                                   (credit: Peter Glaser, via Wikimedia Commons)

The view of the universe believed by philosophers during the Enlightenment assumed that all events that have happened, that are happening, and that will happen were, are, and will be, shaped by earlier events. Thus, the very idea of humans having free will is a delusion. We’d like to think so, but we really don’t have free will. This was the view in the heyday of Newtonian Physics.

That view is called “determinism”, and in formal terms, it says that if  …if …a person could know all the data about all the particles in the universe, and all the laws of Physics, then s/he could predict all of the future and retrodict all of the past of the whole universe. The collisions of stars in space and the moment when life sparked into existence on our planet, Napoleon’s orders to his officers at Waterloo and Dickens’ deciding to write a Christmas story rather than a report on data that he’d been given on the poverty in the England of his time – all these events were directly caused by events that came just before them, and those earlier events were caused by even earlier ones. The sequences go right back in chains of cause-effect to the origins of the universe.

   

                                      Napoleon watching a battle unfold 

                       (credit: James Alexander Walker, via Wikimedia Commons)

Even our so-called “choices” are shaped by chemicals reacting in our brains and those chemical reactions occur in response to sense data coming in through our eyes, ears, etc. into our brains from events, objects, live things, and people around us as we move through our day. We are robots programmed by our heredity and upbringing to react in predictable ways to what is happening around us. Unfree events outside of us cause unfree events inside of us. There is no room in that picture of reality for human freedom.

On the other hand, modern Physics is very different from the Newtonian kind of Physics. Quantum theory says that at the tiniest levels of matter (sub-atomic particles like electrons and quarks), particles move in jumps and not in fixed chains of cause and effect. All the way up to the events that happen at our level of resolution (“medium-sized dry goods” is how one philosopher put it) and then to the stars, events are connected in chains that are not locked into one fixed sequence. All events that have happened, are happening, and could happen are only more or less likely, in varying degrees. They are never certain.

Quantum uncertainty does not tell us how free choices may be coming from the insides of human brains (or the insides of any other living things), but quantum uncertainty does break the back of classical determinism. The events of our lives are not set into an unshakable sequence by the forces of the universe. In fact, no matter how much data we might have at any given moment, or how well we understand the laws of Physics, no mathematical calculations can tell us with certainty what is going to happen in ten million years or in ten seconds. We can list a whole range of possible events to come and give estimates of the odds for each of the possibilities on our list, but we can’t know for certain that any of those possible outcomes is going to be what will happen. And no list is ever perfect and complete. The possibility that we may see an event for which we have no precedent – a total surprise, in other words – is always there. 

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your Philosophy, Horatio." (Hamlet) 

In the moral realist view of the universe, we assume free will and we assume that there are programs in living things that enable those living things to detect events around them and calculate the odds of their, for example, getting buried in a landslide or swept away by a rogue wave on the beach. The wave coming in may only be visible ten seconds before it hits the beach, and that may be just enough time to run up to the second floor of your hotel before it hits. But you have the capacity to see, think, and do, i.e. to perform that action. 

Living things can intervene in the event flows driven by Physics and change the odds of some of those events happening. We can increase the odds of the ones that look like they'll bring us good things (health, pleasure) and decrease the odds of the ones that threaten to bring us bad things (illness, pain, death). We're free. 

Is that action you do in your hotel "free"? We can say this for sure: the lamp in your hotel room is not going to run away from the oncoming wave. But you may. 

   

      CSIRO computer image of rogue wave hitting a semi-submersible platform

                       (credit: James Alexander Walker, via Wikimedia Commons)

On the other hand, if you are already on a ninth-floor balcony looking down at the beach, you will probably calculate that you are safe. You’re ninety feet above the level of the sea at this time of day and your hotel is made of reinforced concrete. The wave is only ten feet high. You might even hurt yourself if you panicked and dashed for the hall and the stairs. Probably, the smart move is to stay put. You are calculating odds for various possible responses to what your senses are telling you about what’s happening around you. 

Similar calculations tell most of us not to drive rapidly through parking lots. Lots of cars. Small spaces between them. Limited vision. Many kids, dogs, and old folks going into the mall. What are the odds? How can we improve the odds that all of us will return home safely?

With even a little education, we soon make washing our hands a regular part of our everyday routine. We’ve learned that there are lots of germs, some of them virulent. Washing hands is easy to do in our culture. I can choose to make hand-washing a regular practice for myself and my children and in under ten minutes total out of my day, reduce the odds of my getting sick by over 95%. 

And I avoid vicious dogs and I study before my test in Math and so on. I act to improve my odds of enjoying health and happiness all the time.

Humans especially have spent the last 200,000 years getting better and better at controlling not just the things around them, but also the things in them. We have spent much time in writing and re-writing the programs in our heads that make us react to events in our environments. In other words, we strive to learn how our world works, and then to pass that knowledge on to our kids. We keep re-writing our programming. In just the last century, we have gained the power to re-write our heredity as well. 

By studying our environments and how we act in them, we can change both the genetic codes used to build the computers inside our bodies and the “apps” (the knowledge) we put into those "computers" once they’re built. Heredity and environment can be met and handled by genetic engineering and education.  

So, in the first place, moral realism says as a starting assumption that all living things have at least some free will. The evidence in the real world indicates that this is so. Every living thing has a capacity to follow the situations happening around it that are likely to aid it to stay alive and avoid the ones that are likely to destroy it. Or, sometimes, to react with nothing more than a glance. A butterfly is no threat to me. I can notice it, look more closely, and then just smile.

   

                        Child and butterfly (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In the second place, moral realism claims that humans have the greatest degree of freedom of all living things we have discovered so far. We aren’t “free” to flap our arms and fly away, but we have the degree of freedom that let’s us move out of the wind and toward food, shelter, and our loved ones. And we have the capacity to investigate the reality around us and learn more and more about how it works. Maybe even study the curve of a bird’s wing in the wind and figure out how to build a machine that can fly us through the air much faster than any bird has ever gone. We can then pass on what we have learned to our kids. 

Over time, we have learned to plant crops, store grain, build canals, vaccinate our kids, and so much more. We pass on to our kids the practices that work and the knowledge that explains why and how they work so the kids can learn even more. Or to characterize our ways of life over the millennia, we can say we have worked hard to become freer and freer with each generation that passed. 

Now the really determined determinists scoff at this way of describing what living things are doing in the real world. They argue that all of these choices on the parts of human beings, and all other living things, are just subtler and subtler interactions of forces that are still beyond anything like those living things' control. One wonders what would constitute proof of free will to such thinkers. 

In the scenarios in which a living thing is sensing, and reacting to, events around its body in ways that improve its odds of surviving intact (not in smaller and smaller pieces, which is what the forces of pure Physics would normally do to it), there is no entity, force, or field in that scene that could be steering that living thing out of the path of destruction other than that living thing itself. There it is, defying what, by Physics alone, we would say are the odds. To make sense of its behavior, we are going to have to attribute a quality or trait to it that enables it to do that steering. That trait we see in all things that dodge or fight the destructive forces in their worlds could be given many names. But the simplest choice is just to use a term we already have, namely the term "free will". 

To repeat: the physical universe is providing only forces that should destroy that life form. Forces that, with anything that has clear boundaries around itself, normally work to burn it, freeze it, or smash it into pieces. That is what happens to rocks, icebergs, planets, and stars. 

But there that living thing is, defying all the odds of its surviving in its harsh and dangerous surroundings. If we don't call it "free", at least in some degree, we render ourselves incapable of talking about what we see in life. What makes life is free will, in at least some degree, even in protozoans, and what has free will is only things we call "alive". The one is the other. That irreducible core concept of "free will" is essential to our being able to talk about life at all.    

On this site, we try another approach. We postulate as a starting point that living things have a quality that is easiest to just call "free will" and we develop that concept to see where it can take us. 

Anything that can get out of the way of the events in reality that would damage it can be said to be, in some degree, “free”. 

A planaria worm can swim to the side of the petri dish that is out of the direct sunlight, and, in fact, it will do that because direct sun will kill it. A grain of sand in that same petri dish is not going to swim anywhere. Even trees are, in a degree, free. They maintain themselves against destructive forces in their surroundings. They even warn each other of a pest moving through the forest toward them.

All life is "free" in some degree. It can act in some ways to preserve itself. 

But no other living things are free in the degree that humans are free. Lions see gazelles and, if the lions are hungry, they stalk those gazelles in ways that are fairly limited. But we, over time, have learned to make weapons, so that even though we are not sprinters, we bring down those same gazelles with arrows and spears, and in the end, feed our kids more reliably than the lions feed their cubs. 

   

             Wolves stalking bull elk (credit: Doug Smith, via Wikimedia Commons)

We have multiplied many more times than the lions or gazelles or wolves or deer because we have got better and better at spotting patterns in the events happening around us, calculating what is likely to happen in a minute or a day or a year, then planning and acting to intervene in that anticipated flow of events so that we improve our odds of surviving in greater numbers over the long haul. We plant, rather than merely gather, the seeds of grasses; we tame, rather than merely hunt, the goats living in our part of the world. We remember which herbs ease a fever and which ones heal cuts. Other animals do some behaviors that indicate thought and planning, but they are small achievers next to us. 

It is worth stressing again that none of the foregoing description of real things in the real world proves for certain that humans have freedom. It gives evidence that indicates that it is reasonable to assume that all living things have free will, then follows that assumption to see where it leads.

In our time, the free will option has been made plausible by Quantum Theory. If we simply assume that we have it, for the sake of argument, we can follow that hypothesis to see whether it leads to conclusions that are consistent with more and more of our observations of the world.

That is how Science proceeds. Study reality. Form a hypothesis about how some part of it works. Then, investigate to see whether the hypothesis is supported by the evidence in the real world. 

Choosing to make the assumption that we do have free will is a leap, but that is all any theory in Science ever is. Every scientific theory begins by someone’s making a guess, then investigating further to see whether it works, whether believing it leads us to useful results.

Finally, even if all the complex responses we engage in as we react to events (i.e. as we act to dodge or enhance the things we encounter in reality) are still just the results of our genetic and cultural programming, it makes far more sense to assume we’re free, and then plan to make the most of the opportunities that likely will come our way, than the determinist alternative does. It makes more sense to assume we can do something about our circumstances, no matter what they are, than it does to cower and stare at the dark, which is what we are enjoined to do if we don't embrace the idea of our own freedom. When we assume we can influence events around us, and try to learn more about how to do so, we get on with life. 

The question is not: “Do we have free will?” The real question is: “If we assume that we do have free will, what results does this hypothesis get us?” 

Belief in our own free will "gets us" a capacity to face and handle the patterns we see in events in our environments. Over the long term, that belief has given humans who take it as their starting point better odds of survival.

So this is why the idea of free will has survived: it enables its carriers to survive. 

For millennia, the folk who believed implicitly that they had free will survived and spread. Those who didn't ...didn't. It has turned out to be a good gambling strategy in the cosmos casino. We aren’t fearful hominids cowering and clinging together in caves anymore. Someone got the idea that s/he wasn’t powerless to affect the flows of events around her/him, then watched, thought, and acted.

   

                               National Museum of Mongolian History diorama 

                              (credit: Nathan McCord, via Wikimedia Commons)

Therefore, even if we can’t prove with inescapable logic that we do have free will, we can say this: if we provisionally adopt the view that we have free will, and then act in ways that are suggested by that starting assumption, we get good results. We live. In greater and greater numbers. To say that may not seem like much, but it is enough to let us get on with …everything else.    

Next time, we'll look at the evidence of free will that we see in sports. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, have a freely chosen day.