Continuing the series debunking Egnor’s nonsense, I’ll respond to Egnor’s case for free will. I will say that this is the least bad of Egnor’s articles so far, yet it’s still egregiously awful.
Pigliucci argues that belief in free will is incoherent. Coyne isn’t so sure about its coherence — he seems not to understand what Pigliucci means by “incoherent” — but Coyne most assuredly does not believe that free will is real. Pigliucci is a biologist as well as a philosopher and I’ll address his argument here:
“Free” will, understood as a will that is independent of causality, does not exist. And it does not exist, contra popular misperception, not because we live in a deterministic universe… Free will doesn’t exist because it is an incoherent concept, at least in a universe governed by natural law and where there is no room for miracles.
MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI, “CONSCIOUSNESS, DECISION MAKING, AND “FREE” WILL” AT MEDIUM (FEBRUARY 7, 2022)
For reasons that are difficult to fathom, Pigliucci believes that if the universe is governed wholly by natural law, as he supposes, and there are no miracles, the issue of free will is settled. Of course, Pigliucci is simply stipulating that materialism and atheism are true and therefore that free will cannot exist.
Well, Egnor seems to agree that if one is justified in being an atheist, they shouldn’t believe in free will. Atheism is justified for reasons I’ve already explained. Yet even with god, how do we have free will. For one, god knows what we’ll do in advance, so how are we free? Additionally, for any choice we make it’s either random or predetermined, neither of which leave room for free will. What’s the third option?
Pigliucci gets this wrong too. The existence (or nonexistence) of free will is fundamentally a metaphysical question, although it is undoubtably a difficult question to frame logically. Philosophers have struggled with this challenge for millennia. But, because metaphysics is the study of existence per se and natural science is the study of things that exist, free will can indeed be addressed by the methods of natural science. After all, if you can’t say anything meaningful about existence, how can you say anything meaningful about things that exist?
Natural science presupposes metaphysical truths, so we can use it to evaluate metaphysical assertions. It is certainly true that the capacity of natural science to meaningfully address the question of free will depends upon the ability to frame the question about free will in a way that makes sense. I believe that the most cogent definition of free will was that offered by Thomas Aquinas (1225– 1274), who opined that free will is the capacity to act without either internal or external compulsion.
The question as to whether free will is real turns then on whether there is always compulsion in nature. And that question turns whether every physical event has a physical cause — a cause dictated by the laws of nature, as understood by physicists. The answer to this is clear: it is not true that every physical event has a physical cause. There are at least four categories of physical events that do not have physical causes:
1) The Big Bang had no physical cause. The Big Bang was the primordial physical event that could not have had a physical cause, because the Big Bang itself was the origin of the “physical.” In other words, the whole universe — i.e., everything that is physical — did not have a physical cause, which would seem to be the ultimate negation of the assertion that “every physical event has a physical cause.” The truth is that no physical event ultimately had a physical cause.
Even if god exists, I think free will doesn’t for reasons explained above. Egnor is wrong that the big bang had no physical cause. We don’t know what caused it. There are numerous candidate explanations relating to quantum physics. This is clearly question begging. However, even if there are uncaused causes outside of spacetime, that doesn’t mean there are within spacetime. Every physical effect within spacetime that we’ve seen has a physical cause.
2) The effects of the singularities at the centers of black holes have no physical cause because a singularity is not physical thing. It is undefined in modern physics and thus, whatever it is, it is not a physical cause.
What? A singularity is one in which our current models break down, not in which they’re determined by non physical things. No physicist thinks that black holes are controlled by spirits in the absence of our models working.
3) All gravitational effects in curved space time have no physical cause, for two reasons. First, space time is not physical. Second, energy is not conserved in curved space time according to general relativity. All materialist understandings of physical cause entail an exchange of energy, so if energy is not conserved then there is no justification for arguing that all physical effects have physical causes.
Why is space time not physical? Also, why does the violation of conservation of energy in general relativity negate physical causes?
But even if there are non physical causes, that doesn’t rescue free will.
4) Quantum entanglement is not physical causation. Entangled particles can be billions of light-years apart and yet the waveform collapse of one particle can instantaneously determine the state of the distant particle. According to special relativity, causation of a physical nature cannot exceed the speed of light. Thus quantum entanglement is not an example of a physical cause.
It would depend on what one means by physical. Obviously things exert gravitational effects on other things without needing ghosts to pull on those things. Quantum entanglement seems probable enabled by physical things.
But I’m perfectly willing to grant some non physical things. I think that the laws of nature are probably non physical and mathematical and moral truths aren’t physical. However, this doesn’t rescue free will.
But the most difficult problem that free will deniers like Pigliucci face is not merely their fundamental misunderstanding of 21st-century science and the metaphysical framework in which it is practiced. The most difficult problem is that free will denial is self refuting, and obviously so.
Consider: If Pigliucci is an “extremely complex and efficient decision making machine” (as he confidently asserts), then his decisions are governed by the laws of physical machines. But the laws of physical machines are laws of physics and chemistry, which lack propositional content.
When Pigliucci makes an argument — any argument — he states a proposition, “X is true.” But if Pigliucci is a machine then this “proposition” is the physical result of a wholly materialistic physical process. How can a machine, a physical process, be the source of a proposition?
Propositions are assertions that can be true or false — and there is nothing whatsoever in Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, biochemistry, or physiology that can or does ground any proposition. They aren’t material and there is no intelligible framework in which physical causes can make propositions.
Our ability to reason is real and is an emergent property. To say that we can’t reason because we’re made up of atoms which can’t reason would be the fallacy of composition. AI’s aren’t sentient and lack free will, but they can play damn good chess. Our brains can have propositional content and be about things, just like a flash drive or photograph can. Another flop from Egnor.