Thoughts on Determinism vs Free Will

God doesn’t play the dice

9 min readMay 31, 2022

Introduction

What if you are a mere robotic agent consisting of tinier biological or physical components: organs, cells, genes, atoms, particles, and so forth instead of being yourself with free will?

Given the assumption that biological and physical elements in your body only function based on the law of physics, cause-and-effect, like all other phenomena and things do in the external world, it’s by no means insane to think that your behaviors also should play out in the same manner.

Then, a proper question arises: Isn’t everything about you such as your past or next actions and current thinking already determined by the causality and there is no wiggle room to have your own choices? This way of thinking is called determinism in general.

If you never knew the concept of determinism, now you might’ve felt baffled a bit or suffered a subtle existential crisis because effectively, it sounds like there is no free will and you are not the person who controls yourself.

No worries. Eventually, you will likely end up thinking that whether or not determinism is correct doesn’t affect your everyday life so badly. Rather, it’s just so intriguing and fun to think it through.

If it’s interesting to you at this point, please continue reading. I hope this article could be a comprehensive 101 of determinism for those who currently have no idea about this topic or a good revision for those who’ve already known this concept.

*I’m not a religious person but an Atheist in the sense that I don’t follow any instructions and believe in God in any conventional religion.

What is Determinism

Determinism is a philosophical concept that all events like real world phenomena and human actions are completely determined by prior existing causes and therefore they determine subsequent events accordingly. The premise is that there are chains of cause-and-effect based on the law of nature/physics.

Here I’d like to cite a useful thought experiment called Laplace’s Demon proposed by a French scholar, Pierrce-Simon de Laplace.

Laplace’s Demon is an imaginative demon capable of knowing everything about the universe, such as the positions and velocity of every single particle and matter, the law of physics, and it has infinite computing power. It could predict the future and retrodict the past with perfect accuracy.

To put it simply, if there were a super-computer, Laplace’s Demon and once it takes an accurate snapshot of data of the world at the present moment, it can calculate the past and future with the data since the universe is a clockwork. So, the hypothesis of determinism would be successfully tested and proven.

The implication of determinism is so deep and mind-blowing that it doesn’t only change one’s perspective about how the world works but also should shake the perception of how themselves or their inner elements like brains and bodies work, leading to a controversial conclusion that free will actually doesn’t exist.

Determinism vs Free Will

One of the most important objections of this article is to provide a better explanation of an ongoing unsolved debate as to determinism vs free will. From my perspective, free will is utterly incompatible with determinism in the sense that it is a philosophical concept that humans have the freedom to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or divine intervention.

Scientifically speaking, it is impossible to ensure that free will really exists because it is a metaphysical concept, illusion, or social construct that is only existential in our minds. Rather, the law of physics which is the basis of determinism perhaps is more reliable to explain human behavior.

If there was Laplace’s Demon, the reasons you did certain things over the course of your entire life could be completely explicable and what you are gonna do in the next moment or a fifty years after also should be predictable by accumulating the whole causalities such as existing experiences, one’s biological configurations and external events, and calculating them perfectly.

In this sense, frankly speaking, free will is an illusion. It looks like humans are biological robots returning particular outputs given constantly-flowing external inputs.

An eminent atheist philosopher Sam Harris argues that the idea of the self is effectively an illusion let alone he refutes free will. Humans’ thoughts and actions are not determined by one’s inner self-emerging motives, desires and needs whatsoever because there is no such thing as self in the first place.

Taxonomy and Compatibilism

On the other hand, some people counter-argue that free will can be compatible with the idea of determinism.

The actions are determined. But when the action of an agent is self-determined or determined by causes internal to themself, The action should be considered free.

It doesn’t add up to me, to be honest. What does ”self-determined” actually mean when the self can be infinitely divisible and hard to define? How is it possible to draw the line between internal and external?

Here is the Free Will — Determinism Matrix just to provide a clear understanding of this binary opposition.

https://www.rationalrealm.com/philosophy/metaphysics/free-willing-robots-page2.html — Source: Rational Realm

A confusing word in determinism is Libertarianism which advocates that free will exists and the world is undetermined. But this has almost nothing to do with the political ideology of libertarianism. Hence, it’s possible that one is a politically libertarian as well as a hard-determinist.

Hard Determinism is my current stance in this matrix and I believe that is where the vast majority of determinists fall under given untenable claims of compatibilists.

Two sides of the same coin?

I’m still not so sure why I’m so passionate about figuring out whether determinism or free will is more legitimate since it doesn’t really matter to live a normal life. I like how a physicist, Sean Caroll put this kind of puzzling into words.

I don’t care. I think it’s boring to be honest... There is two questions. One question is how the world works. The other question is what words should be attached to how the world works. The first one is interesting and the second one is kinda boring… Thinking of a man as a collection of atoms/particles isn’t a fruitful way to go through your life. When you meet somebody for the first time and you say what do you do? who are you? They don’t give you the list of their atoms.

LMAO. I like this take and seriously, most people probably think as he does. For the sake of social interaction, it’s way more efficient to think of us as independent humans instead of as an agent of tinier components. Maybe we are talking about the two sides of the same coin or just one side…

Criticism: Quantum Mechanics and Randomness

Albert Einstein as a strict determinist insisted that the universe is based on the casualty and that human behaviors are determined by causal laws. He famously said “God doesn’t play a dice with the universe.” and denied the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics.

Unfortunately, given the current consensus in the physics field, he was wrong about that. It seems like quantum mechanics actually provides a better explanation of how fundamentally the world works on a micro level. This article doesn’t dive into physics deeply but basically, it seems clear that uncertainty or randomness does exist in the world on some level as the Double-slit experiment shows, for instance.

That being said, just because the existence of randomness may disprove the perfection of determinism doesn’t mean free will can exist. It’s not you but God plays the dice with the universe.

Implications

I agree that talking about this isn’t practically worth that much. That said, whenever I contemplate what is the implication of believing in the existence of free will, I actually end up thinking that people are better off accepting determinism as reality instead of sticking to the dogma of free will, all things considered.

Benefits:

Firstly, this is because I reckon that taking free will at face value discourages people to learn about scientific, physical, and biological ways of understanding how things work in the world and instead, promotes dogmatic indoctrination which is harmful to further progressive activities in science and technology.

Secondly, verdicts and rehabilitations could be largely improved in fairer and more efficient ways if the legal system and society understand that on certain occasions, the responsibility of one’s crime can’t be fully attributed to the individuals or their free will but treatable biological errors or external environmental factors that shape their experiences.

Can we really blame criminals with damage or diseases in their brains who committed horrible crimes? For instance, in the case of paedophiles, the degree of punishment might be softened since the urge and behavior can fade away just by removing a brain tumor.

To put it this way might sound ethically controversial but society could think of every criminal as a part of software code with bugs and errors. Apparently, there is neither good nor evil in the program. Hence, metaphorically speaking, we can punish and treat them more rationally and effectively by removing, rewriting or reconstructing them.

Lastly, understanding uncontrollable and external factors, such as genetic influences and environmental effects, that form one’s personality and fate could give them a reasonable excuse to comfort and stop cursing themself by getting rid of the misconception about equality.

“There is despair after hope.”

Western meritocracy, especially in the US, forces everyone to think that their fate is dependent on their motives and efforts. If they fail to succeed in competition, it’s their fault and there is no one to blame besides themself. This culture put huge responsibilities on individuals so much that some of them suffer serious mental health problems.

Drawbacks:

No one would be happy to be said that you don’t actually exist, don’t have any ability to decide by yourself or change your fate considering the deterministic nature of the world. Believing in it can be an excuse for them to lose motivation and convictions about their life and goals.

Furthermore, here are two interesting experiments that proved that encouraging a belief in determinism contributed to increasing cheating.

In Experiment 1, participants read either text that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., that portrayed behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors) or neutral text. Exposure to the deterministic message increased cheating on a task in which participants could passively allow a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that they had been instructed to solve themselves.
Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, participants who read deterministic statements cheated by overpaying themselves for performance on a cognitive task; participants who read statements endorsing free will did not.

These studies suggest that a loss of belief in free will could be harmful in the way that reduces people’s morality and responsibility and fosters their negligence.

Despite a lack of legitimacy in the light of science, I have to admit that the benefits of being delusional to a sense of free will or demerits of losing it seems indeed pretty significant.

It seems to me that the role of free will in the societal context is to be a social interface that abstracts the fact that humans are biological or physical objects and brings good and evil up to enhance their morality and self-responsibility.

Conclusions

My current conclusion is that determinism at this point is the most reasonable and convincing framework that fundamentally explains how the world works and free will is effectively an illusion but the illusion as a social interface is morally important and helpful for people to behave socially.

Given a few theses and experiments in quantum mechanics, determinism is still disputable in many ways. It will never be anything more than speculation since whether or not the universe is deterministic can’t be tested with irrefutable scientific evidence even though the assumption in and of itself is strongly aligned with the scientific way of thinking.

From the perspective of neuroscience and the law of physics, it is unquestionable that there is no such thing as free will. However, it has been playing a crucial role in human societies in ways that grant people a sense of the self and responsibility and enable them to think and act in a more principled way.

Here is a weird and baffling contradiction. Determinism seems closer to the truth but meaningless to accept and understand, and even morally detrimental for people. On the other hand, free will technically seems false but is more pragmatic to adopt.

Maybe, it’s inappropriate to compare and discuss them at the same level. The former is more about a concrete, fundamental and rigid way of figuring out how the world works. Contrary, the latter is an abstract, normative and uncomplicated way to interpret it.