Q&A: The Illusion of Free Choice Even According to Dualism
The Illusion of Free Choice Even According to Dualism
Question
Hello, honorable Rabbi,
Thank you for taking the time to answer questions.
Regarding free choice: in your book The Science of Freedom you mainly attack the materialist-determinist approach. I would like to argue—or more precisely to ask—whether perhaps there is no free choice even if we have a soul, there is a second dimension of reality, dualism, etc.
When you read this question, you read and understand it; you have no choice but to understand it. That means you do not choose when you understand things in reality. Likewise, when you desire something, you simply desire it—you did not choose to desire it—and therefore you did the thing you desired. (A desire can also be the desire to go on a diet, not only to eat cake.) The same applies to all emotional actions as such: the sum of your data led you to perform one action and not another, and the thing simply appeared to you in consciousness afterward. My claim is that first comes the will, some inner force arising from the sum total of the circumstances of your life, and then comes the “choice” to do that thing. This is regarding mental actions.
Most motor actions are done without our being aware of them (driving, etc.), and Libet’s experiments and other experiments done since then show that even in simple motor actions it is possible to predict a person’s choice at least a few hundred milliseconds in advance.
So if motor actions are deterministic, and mental actions of emotions, understanding, desires, etc. are also deterministic, what is left for us as free choice?
Answer
I answered all of this in great detail in the book. I explicitly wrote there that dualism does not mean libertarianism. In other words, deterministic dualism is possible. The point is that if you assume dualism, there is no reason to be a determinist anymore (because then there is no longer any commitment to the laws of nature/physics). Therefore it is more reasonable to remain with the libertarian intuition.
Everything you described here consists of tendencies. The libertarian does not deny the existence of tendencies; he only argues that tendencies influence but do not determine. Bottom line, everything depends on your initial intuitions. There are no arguments one way or the other (but in the last chapter I suggest several thought experiments that may help you examine what your intuitions are).