Free Will: An expression of true randomness?
Searching for the home of free choice.
“That’s so random!” has become something of a common phrase in recent years, referring to something unexpected or strange. However, what people are referring to in these instances are anything but random.
Among his many wonderful exploits, Derren Brown, through his impressive ability to manipulate the human mind, has demonstrated on multiple occasions how fragile and formulaic our decision-making procedures are. Crucially, he appears to demonstrate that we are far from random in our choices. Indeed, his work seems to undermine the very foundation of free will itself, but we’ll come to that later.
I vividly remember an episode where Derren told a participant that she could visit Hamley’s toy store in London and choose any item that she wanted. So, through central London she walks, up Regent’s Street to the famous toy store. Floors upon floors, shelves upon shelves, more toys than you could possibly play with in a hundred lifetimes.
She walks in, he shows her around and then sends her off to mentally select a toy which he’ll later identify as though possessing supernatural psychic abilities. Like most people, she probably has a rebellious streak. She’ll try to choose something at random, suddenly changing her mind at the last second to throw him off. We don’t like to be predictable, it makes us feel vulnerable, stupid. Up and down she goes, back and forth, browsing the aisles, shuffling through the bustle of London shoppers.
Eventually she chooses. After all her browsing, after all her efforts to throw off the scent, she chooses a stuffed toy giraffe. Surely, he couldn’t have predicted that? What sort of wizard is he? Well, as it turns out, he’s the sort of wizard that can predict exactly what you’re going to do, because he put the thoughts into your very mind. Even your own thoughts aren’t safe from him!
It turns out, that he knew all along that she’d choose a stuffed giraffe. Unbeknownst to the participant, he’d been unsubtly signalling that she should choose a giraffe for some time. In the debrief, he shows her all the ways she was manipulated, all the things he did so that what felt like her free choice was actually him. Her decision was made not from free choice but from a series of subliminal hints and suggestions that she was completely unaware of.
So, we’re human, and we’re awful at behaving randomly. Or at least, our decisions are determined by a whole host of other factors, most of which are external and beyond our conscious awareness. In the case of Derren’s participant, the unconscious factors were powerful enough to overcome the strong conscious desire to be unpredictable. Even when we try to be random we can’t achieve it.
Is it even possible?
Defining random
To decide whether randomness is something we can even achieve, we first need to define it. I don’t think the definition from modern parlance will do us much good here. So, what does it mean to actually be “random”? Are there any examples of truly random events? I suspect that many would jump to a quick conclusion.
“Yes, of course there are. Random stuff happens all the time,” they say, shaking their head, ready to lay down the law with a tirade of anecdotal evidence of some rare, but not random, event. “I tilted my head to shake the water out of my ear after swimming the other day, and a bird pooed right down my ear canal! What are the chances of that?”
What are the chances, indeed. In asking that very question they undermine their claim to the randomness of the event. Yes, the chances of that happening are extremely low, but there were still chances, there were still a multitude of different causal chains that could have led to that outcome. Of course, there were infinitely more that wouldn’t have led to it, and yet, dividing one by the other we get our “chances”.
What I mean by random, and the definition I propose is more useful is this:
Random events are those which have no cause.
A rather strict definition you might say, but by any definition in which a random event has a definable cause one could investigate the cause and therefore predict the random event, thus undermining its supposed randomness. I submit that truly random events have no cause at all.
Claims to randomness
As we’ve discussed, human actions aren’t random. Even when we try. We’ve accepted this. Random sampling in psychological experiments is done by allocating potential participants a number and relying on a random number generator (RNG) to choose which participants are selected. Likewise, in ecology, sampling locations are not selected by researchers “randomly” choosing locations, but by using RNGs to generate coordinates within which animal/plant populations can be investigated.
As much as these RNGs are an improvement on the pitifully un-random behaviour of humans, they aren’t actually random either, they only emulate randomness.
RNGs begin with a single number known as a seed. They input the number into a series of mathematical calculations, producing a “random” number. This ostensibly random number is used as the seed for the next iteration.
Modern attempts at achieving true randomness for the use in cyber security systems include a computer taking measurements of some physical phenomenon outside of the computer, for example atmospheric noise or the exact moment in time a user chooses to press a key.
These cases, however, don’t generate truly random numbers. There is significant unpredictability in the systems, but a causal chain still exists. These are not causeless events. They are pseudo-random. Random enough for our purposes, but not truly random.
In discussing my thoughts with colleagues I’ve often been told that radioactive decay is truly random, quantum theory says so. In radioactive decay, atomic nuclei that are too heavy seem to spontaneously break up into smaller pieces. Those small pieces, often helium nuclei, are what we refer to when we talk about radioactivity.
As it is claimed, we can know that a nucleus is too heavy and that it is susceptible to radioactive decay, but it is apparently impossible to know whether or when any individual nucleus will decay. It is completely random, so they say.
Ironically, as apparently unpredictable the single decay of an atom is, the overall rate of decay events amongst a population of nuclei absolutely is predictable. We can look at it and the quadrillions of other over-heavy nuclei around it and track the rate of decay. As it turns out, radioactive decay is very predictable, it follows a very simple pattern.
To me, this seems like insufficient evidence of a truly random event. Are we really claiming that there is no cause to the decay of a particular nucleus? Is there nothing in the sub-atomic, perhaps quantum, environment of the protons and neutrons that could demonstrate when an atom is about to decay? Perhaps we should wait until we’ve finally found a way to reconcile quantum theory and general relativity before we start using the word “impossible”. I submit that, given sufficient understanding, we would be able to predict when a nucleus is about to decay.
So, that’s the usual suspects accounted for. Where does that leave us?
Implications for free will
I’m a believer in libertarian free will, although I find arguments against it compelling. I confess, the delusion of subjective experience drives this one belief of mine. For now, it feels expedient to believe that I’m not an automaton, driven only by inputs, my outputs predictable.
As discussed above, Derren Brown has demonstrated on many occasions the power of suggestion, the importance of prior conditions on human decisions. As much as his participant in the above example likely considered herself a free being of free and unfettered choice, her actions suggest otherwise. Even if we suppose free will exists, the power of the external world on our decision-making is massive, perhaps even eclipsing our own innate freedom.
The issue we face here, in this debate of free will and determinism, is that any choice we make inevitably has causes. Hunger, tiredness, fear, anger, past experience, prior knowledge, expectations, everything sits on the scales of our decision-making, driving the outcome. Our nature and our nurture both conspire to provide causes for even the most mundane of choices. So what is the domain of free will? Where is there room in all this determinism for it to exist?
Free will: An expression of true randomness?
Think of a decision you made, any decision, as minor as you like. Chicken or beef? Left or right? Dance a random jig or keep walking like a normal person?
For any of these decisions, the common challenge against libertarian free will stands:
Could you go back to the exact same moment, into the exact same conditions and change the outcome? Could you ever have made a different choice, or did the conditions of that singular moment determine your choice just like Derren Brown’s unwitting participant who “chose” the stuffed giraffe toy? Did you even really make a choice at all?
Without the existence of something to interrupt the deterministic causal chain, it seems to me that the answer must be “No”. Given the exact same conditions I would “choose” the exact same meal, the exact same direction and the exact same style of poorly executed Riverdance parody.
Unless there is something that allows us to actually choose, something that exists outside of causal chains, something random. The Will. If the Will could generate true randomness then, in returning to any specific moment in time, we would be able to change the outcome, because not all of the conditions would be the same. There would, in that moment, be another roll of the dice, something that would inject into that moment a new variable that could produce a new outcome.
This Will would perhaps need to have broken away from the arrow of time itself, escaping the grand causal chain that links everything we do now to The Big Bang, when physicists say time itself began. Indeed, being timeless may the be the only way for it to be causeless.
A spark of the divine?
Timeless, causeless, these are words I’ve often heard religious apologists use to define God. These are words used to explain why “what came before God?” is a nonsense question. He/It/They existed “sans time”, not just outside of time but without it. It seems an unnecessary distinction, perhaps even a clever piece of casuistry, but it remains true that to say “before time” is meaningless since “before” refers to a period in time. There can be no before time, just existence when time just wasn’t.
For the religious, the origin of true free will may therefore be God. As a being sans time, it would make sense that the divine spark granted to Man was this capacity for Will since it too must be sans time. Indeed, stories of Promethean fire stolen from the divine and granted to Man, lifting us above the beasts of the field, may in fact refer to the gift of Will, a tiny piece of the timeless at the core of us all.
For those scientifically-minded, in a world where time itself had a beginning, where multiple spatial realms clutter our perceived three-dimensional universe, in all the majesty and wonder of the quantum it seems nevertheless plausible that some fragment of the timeless could exist within us, an artefact of our true origin sans time.
Thanks for reading! As ever, I’d love to hear your thoughts, be they in agreement or abject disagreement.
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Have a great day.