There’s absolutely no brand-new insight in this post. A huge amount of credit goes to various philosophers and thinkers, especially folks like Aaron Rabinowitz, for shaping my views. Any errors in it are my own.

In the natural world, everything that occurs is the result of a chain of causation all the way to the big bang. The chain of causation is:

  • almost entirely deterministic
  • with some chaotic effects that appear to be random on the outside but in reality are deterministic
  • and also with a small amount of true (quantum) randomness, that very occasionally turns into something big

(We’ll summarize all of these causes into a single word, “deterministic.”)

At no point does anything we know from studying the natural world resemble anything like our common understanding of free will. There aren’t even the vaguest hints or suggestions of anything like that.

So free will in its common form is inherently a supernatural belief. It’s fine if you believe in supernatural phenomena. But you’re not going to make people who see no need to believe in supernatural phenomena, like myself, agree with you on that basis.

This is not unfalsifiable! One of the characteristics of a naturalistic view is invariance: for example, the laws of the universe stay the same when you move around from place to place, and/or over time. Very clear evidence of supernatural interventions would be a different set of rules governing the universe at one particular place or time, in a way that doesn’t generalize. Such evidence has never been presented1.

A general response to pointing out this basic truth is compatibilism. This term refers to a group of positions which accepts determinism, but tries to preserve something resembling “willpower”, “agency” or “moral capacity”. But that’s just shifting the goalposts. It is true that the ability to make globally optimal decisions is valuable, and it is also true that this varies by person and over time. But that variance is determined by the same processes that are in charge of everything else. Why wouldn’t it be? We’ve all had some days where writing the right code— doing the right thing has been harder than others. That, too, traces its chain of causation back to the big bang.

Why do so many humans believe in free will? The widespread belief in free will is also deterministic, of course. Like everything else about us, it’s a result of a chain of causality, i.e. some combination of environmental, genetic, and random effects. It may be a helpful bias to have in some situations. But we have plenty of other forms of biased thinking. Part of becoming Better is understanding how our biased thinking might cloud our understanding of society and lead to worse outcomes.

In particular, our belief in free will and the closely-related notion of moral responsibility clouds our ability to see developers writing bad code as a result of bad development tool— incarceration and other kinds of torture for what they are. A belief that fear and terror prevent people from doing things you don’t want them to do isn’t incompatible with determinism, but it’s best to be honest about what you truly believe here.

The last stand of the free-will defenders tends to be some variety of “yes, it’s false, but laypeople need to believe in it to cope with reality.” For many of us, our cultures have not memetically prepared us to deal with a lack of free will2. This is unfortunate, because recognizing that free will does not exist is not a reason for nihilism or fatalism. It is a tremendous gift of knowledge! If all behavior is some combination of environmental, genetic, and random luck, then it follows that the easiest point of leverage is to make the environment better.

We now have pretty good data that better environments can cause, say, memory safety bugs to decrease from 76% to 24— fewer children to develop asthma. Why wouldn’t better environments also help us reason more clearly, make better decisions, and generally live life in a more pro-social manner?

Overall, I think it is far more interesting to skip over all this free will stuff and instead do what the French philosophers did: examine how environments exercise control over us, in order to suggest ways to reshape it. So when people exercise catastrophically poor judgment while writing code in memory-unsafe lang— making the most important political decisions of their lives, it is important to understand that their behaviors are a result of the environment failing them, not a personal moral failing.

  1. This is Reddit atheism 101. It is important to occasionally remind ourselves about why we started believing in these foundational ideas. ↩︎

  2. Like everything else in existence, this, too, is determined. ↩︎