The Journal of Loose Ends

The Journal of Loose Ends
volume 2 supplemental

Apologies for the tardiness of recent entries. We are the victims of a dispute between the Archive and affiliated institutions of higher learning. Such interruptions are not uncommon and in most cases, indicate nothing more than transient increases in job dissatisfaction among archives staff. In the spirit of post scientific improvisation we bring you the most recent supplemental to the Journal.
The following is an article written by Prof. Isaacson from the Center of Excellence for Speculative Philosophy. While Prof. Isaacson is best known for his work on causation, identity, and supervenience, he has delved into the related issues of determinism and free will, perhaps even a bit farther than it is wise. The following is material gathered during those expeditions in the depths of philosophical misunderstanding.

An Afternoon’s Thought Experiment.

Before embarking on this questionable endeavor, I wish to make my viewpoint clear. In addition, and in the spirit of fair treatment, I want to give a definitive answer to the problem of free will and determinism up front.

Untold lifetimes have gone to waste in contemplation and dispute around this single topic. The best way to examine the conundrums of free will and determinism is precisely opposite the standard approach.

. Instead of pounding out definitions of freedom and sparring over cause, I will simply grant each argument and examine the consequences.
Let’s take the example of a pair of Cardiovascular surgeons, one named Patricia, and one named Thomas. Patricia lives in a world where free will exists. That is to say she has a mental faculty that she can apply as she feels the need to help her with her decision-making. Note that this faculty is not a magical power. It works in accordance with the same rules of identity and physical principles as the rest of her brain and body do.

The same can be said for the relationship between the mental faculty and the world where it operates. The mental faculty is motivated, either primarily or secondarily, in response to Patricia’s constantly changing circumstances.

Early one morning, Patricia is repairing an aortic aneurysm. Before she can begin the repair she needs to put a clamp across the aorta. The clamp will prevent rapid blood loss and death when she cuts the diseased section of the blood vessel out. Once the clamp engages, the clock is ticking, because most of the blood flow to the lower half of the body stops.

There is another risk as well. If she applies the clamp across an section of the aorta where accumulations of cholesterol and clotted blood compromise the vessel wall, the clamp can dislodge that material, causing it to flow downstream until it reaches a vessel narrower than its diameter and it becomes impacted, occluding the blood vessel.

When this event occurs, the surgical team cannot know about it until the patient wakes with neurologic deficits in their legs and lower trunk. To mitigate the risk, Patricia uses a small ultrasound to examine the area of the aorta where she plans to apply the clamp. The case goes smoothly, but unfortunately, when the patient wakes up later that day he is unable to move his legs.

In addition to the use of the ultrasound, as she prepared to do the procedure, Patricia consulted her mental faculty to help her decide
where she was going to put the clamp in this situation. The mental faculty is not
different in principle from the ultrasound.
Both devices provide information to Patricia regarding her decision to put the clamp in one spot rather than another. During her training, Patricia has learned how to assign the value of that information in the context of her closing the instruments jaws across the vessel.

This is still a tense moment because Patricia’s information is necessarily incomplete; the ultrasound cannot tell her what’s really going on in the plaque. Its resolution is
limited. Objects or pieces of objects below a certain size are undetectable because they don’t reflect sound waves well enough to provide the resolution she needs. Furthermore, neither the ultrasound nor any other modality can tell her
anything useful about the physico-chemical status of the plaque. The only way for her to tell how crumbly the plaque is would be to crush it between her fingers. Of course, then the disrupted plaque would be sure to embolize.

The problem is intractable. The plaque will develop friability when it grows to a certain size. There is no way prior to that to know how easily it will crumble. This is the problem of emergence. The complex plaque material does not develop or display any new or hidden properties. Were that the case, it might as well be made out of cream cheese, because the components that accounted for its structure and properties would cease to do so. That would leave the task of bearing those properties up to the higher-level structure.

This is the phenomenon of downward causation which would render our explanations useless if it were true. Luckily, we find no “flocking properties” when we pull a single sparrow from the group nor do we discover a “wetness property” when we remove five water molecules from the cup on the countertop. At some point, the microstructure of a system becomes large or complex enough to alter its own context, and it begins to behave differently on that basis, meriting a theoretical synthesis if we want to continue working with it.

Now, with the machinery of free will up and running, how do things look for Patricia? An oft mentioned test for freedom of the will is the ability to choose to do otherwise in the same circumstances. In Patricia’s case specifically, that means if we roll the film back to the moment before she clamps the aorta could she choose not to clamp it.

The tricky bit is the way choice works when you roll the film back.
Certainly Patricia will choose not to clamp the artery in the same spot when we give her a second chance, but that’s a mere practicality. We only need to know in principle that she could choose to do otherwise but these two things prove inseparable.

A great human philosopher once noted that he did not will his thoughts into existence. His thoughts came to him unbidden. And yet, when those thoughts have come and gone they are amenable to explanation, and barring any severe mental illness, those thoughts form a coherent narrative. The will is much the same. No one wills themselves to will something.

The object of desire comes chained to the desire, and so, to roots in the past. In Patricia’s world, it will not do for future Patricia to push past Patricia aside and grab the clamp. The conditions preceding the moment of choice must be exactly the same while Patricia must be able to decide differently than she did. Of course she could, but the metaphysical possibility means almost nothing. From Patricia’s viewpoint, she approaches the moment of decision and consults the mental faculty that renders an intuition about where to clamp the aorta.. The intuition is precisely balanced, but as the choice engine continues to monitor the situation it receives a morsel of additional information that tips things in the direction of the decision not to close the clamp on the aorta. So, everything was the same and she decided differently.

Perhaps it seems unfair to set the decision point where we did. Enemies of free will insist on rolling the filmstrip forward slightly to the moment in her film where she closes the clamp.

But that runs past the decision. The decision occurs in the interval where Patricia halts to weigh her options, and decisions necessarily bring change, So to be fair, we must restart the movie at the beginning of the decision-making process, not the middle. In that case, it was possible for her to decide otherwise.

Now, what about Thomas? He is faced with the same circumstances as Patricia, but in his world, there is no free will. He comes to the point where he must close the clamp on the artery or not. He has no mental faculty to inform him. He can’t bail himself out with an intuition.

He feels tempted to flip a coin. That’s a consistent attitude in a deterministic universe. However, he doesn’t want to simply get past the decision, he wants to successfully repair the aneurysm. He wants the patient to walk out of the hospital free of the life-threatening condition that brought the surgeon and the patient together and to the moment of decision.

Thomas knows that since he lives in a deterministic universe, there is a best and most complete answer to the question: given my desire to have my patient walk out of the hospital with his aneurysm cured, should I clamp the aorta here, or elsewhere? He faces the same emergence related problem as Patricia did.

The ultrasound can swing the odds one way or another, but any and all diagnostic modalities will necessarily leave him underinformed. Thomas knows that he could call an emergency stop and review the magical filmstrip of everything leading up to the moment of decision, with a guarantee that he would eventually find a deciding factor in past events. Of course, the patient, the staff, the administration and Thomas himself would all be long dead before Thomas returned with a complete explanation of his decision.

Let us bring things back around to our conclusions. Whether or not we live in a deterministic world we are necessarily underinformed. We have intuitions and we use them to guide us in making decisions, but the intuitions
themselves are susceptible to explanatory reduction.

Will is not free because it has a necessary referent; it is about something that we desire, and we cannot redirect it without reforming it. What matters for moral responsibility, effective choice, and coherent narrative formation is our ability to make a best guess, build a useful story of past events, and live with the tangle of errors, practical limitations, and eternally shifting identities that come with being at points in space and time, where we are driven by a reactive will.

If we were smart, we would abandon any further consideration of free will and its surrounding issues in favor of a warm drink in front of the fire. That is, if we want to get our priorities straight.