Dispatch from Orcas Island: Breaching the Barriers of Sam Harris's 'Free Will-y' Determinism

A novel argument for Compatibilism

I think maybe everyone my age who has spent enough time online has heard one of the Podcasts. There’s an image on your computer, or iPhone, or Tablet, and it’s an image of a man with impeccable eyebrows peering intelligently out from the screen. He speaks in a very dry, monotone voice. He has written books, interviewed numerous intellectuals, and one time when he was young he got really high in India for a long time. What he has to tell you is that this moment right now, where you’re reading this substack article, was already written at the moment of creation.

You have no choice but to continue reading.

You hear that? You owe me your goddamn eyeballs for the next several minutes.

You see, everything that happens depends on what has happened before. From the motion of billiard balls on a pool table to the orbits of planets around distant starts. Every cause has an effect that goes on to become the cause of another effect. That includes all of your choices. The whole universe has been running like clockwork since the moment of creation.

Focus on how you even come up with thoughts or ideas. Meditate on it for like fifteen minutes. You’ll realize there’s an almost random murmur in your head that simply spits things out at you that you had no direct hand in forming. They just appear as if from nowhere. In fact, now that you wasted fifteen minutes, meditate even more. Meditate for an entire hour.

Do you really even exist?

The conclusion is inescapable.

There’s no such thing as Free Will.

And there’s a bit of your that thinks “yes, of course he’s right. When I had that blueberry waffle with chili infused maple syrup, that was all a chemical slurry in my brain reacting as it was always going to react. The whole part where I put extra whipped cream on and felt guilty about it was a sort of parlor trick of the self. I don’t even exist to have felt guilt about the extra whipped cream or to have enjoyed eating the waffle.”

Sam Harris is right.

It’s all bullshit.

Except… if you even read some of the philosophy around this outside of Sam Harris stuff then it’s all bullshit that it’s all bullshit.

You have Free Will and what you do matters so long as you don’t define any of those two things in a way that doesn’t even make sense.

If you don’t believe me, may I dare you to tentatively accept that Some Guy has an argument for that is pretty convincing Free Will and Determinism don’t have a lot to do with one another? Or even that you couldn’t really have Free Will if there wasn’t Determinism?

I don’t have good eyebrows that wiggle all over my forehead and I don’t have a super monotone voice. My eyebrows look like two black caterpillars fell asleep on a caveman’s forehead and I have a very distinctive Western Washington accent. I sort of look like Shrek. If you want to talk about schooling I didn’t even graduate college. I did get a scholarship from NASA and a Nobel Laureate in Physics but the first was kind of a reverse affirmative action thing and the second was because we both came from the same small town. Most people think I’m mentally handicapped or something when they first meet me until I fix something they couldn’t fix or solve something they couldn’t solve. So if you listen to this argument, I’m not asking you to trust me because of who I am. I’m asking you to trust the argument because it makes sense because I’m good at sticking after things until I say “Oh, huh. Shit. Look at that.”

There’s a television show called Devs that touches on this thought experiment. In this show, a crazy computer scientist with a dead family builds the world’s first super powerful quantum computer. He has so many qubits that he can simulate all of reality inside of it. This means he can see infinitely far back into the past and infinitely far into the future.

Some of the bigger computer nerds may be objecting with reasons why this computer could not exist, and for what it’s worth I agree.

Some quantum physicists may be objecting that there’s more than one possible future and for what it’s worth I kinda sorta agree with that, too.

For our thought experiment, however, we’re just going to assume that this computer exists and is real. You can look at the whole entire universe anytime, anywhere.

So you’re going to do something really disorienting and look at your own future a few seconds into the future. Apropos, this clip from the film Spaceballs.

Think about the conundrum this viewing would put you in. This computer for our thought experiment is completely causal. What it shows to you will happen. It must happen. And yet you don’t know what it will show you until you see it pop up on the screen, then whatever it is you are definitely going to do it.

So the question then becomes, what would it have to show you?

Let’s take a brief aside from this thought experiment to talk about how your brain works. In your day to day life your brain takes inputs from your environment, interprets those inputs and creates models that will explain their behavior, then feeds you from moment to moment a prediction about what will happen next. You get thrown a ball? Your brain will project where it’s going to be next so you can put your mitt in place to catch it. Shooting a weird alien in a video game? Your brain will give you advice on where to point based on how it’s tracking across the screen.

Your brain already has something like a little world-model inside of it that functions similarly to how the super computer viewing screen functions. Your brain is just much more limited and not based on perfect physics or infinite computer power. You have to guess and make updates on those guesses but each time you do you are always moving into a future that you prefer.

I’ll have to save the useful definition of “you” for a later post but when I write that it will be called “I think therefore I am. WTF?!? Therefore you exist.”

You are basically a bundle of predictions about everything around you that is being constantly updated based on feedback from the environment and propagating you through space to the next desired future. Except now that feedback loop of information is including a perfect level of information about your personal future.

So, return to the question, what must the screen show you?

We know because the computer is perfect whatever it shows you must happen.

We know because of how your brain works right now that you make predictions about the possible futures you might inhabit and move toward the ones that you prefer.

So, whatever the computer shows you must take into account what futures you want to move into and then show you a future that you will definitely, certainly want to move into.

Again, for the computer scientist and physicists caught up in the how of the computer showing you this information… that isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is that your predictions of the future already created a limit about what futures could possibly come to pass. As a simple for instance, there is no future where I would ever willingly harm my son. It just wouldn’t happen. Therefore, the computer cannot show me such a future because I would take steps to avoid it coming to pass. Seeing the future would cause me to change the future. However, because the computer in this scenario is truly perfect it can only show me things where this kind of recursive “see the future, change the future” event cannot occur.

My personal preferences limit the futures that can happen, and even if there is only one future that does happen it proceeds based on my participation.

As another for instance, let’s say my son contracts some terrible disease. I would of course use this computer to scroll ahead to find the cure. Then I would see what avenues the doctor’s explored and try to accelerate them. Except because the computer is truly perfect, it can’t give me cause to change anything that I see it simulating so even if my son did have cancer it would have to somehow just magically go away because if it didn’t and I looked into the computer I would start undertaking some action to change history.

The imperfect future map in your head being replaced by an external perfect map throws a wrench in the whole conceptualization of what it means to have Free Will.

Did you think having Free Will meant you should be able to change the Laws of the Universe by mere thought? If it did, what environment would you be having your Free Will in? Would you even exist to exercise that Free Will because you are in a real sense made of the physics of the world you inhabit?

Looking at it this way we settle on the idea of Compatibilism, an age old idea, as the only way to reconcile these two belief systems. Yes, the universe proceeds in a chain of cause and effect. However, one of those causes is your own actions based on your interpretation of the future. As such information becomes more perfect your actions become smarter and again limit the ways the future can unfold.

So you, by reading this, have already had a grand influence on the entire universe by exercising your Free Will.