Locating Free Will in a Deterministic Universe

The Category Error Behind the Free Will & Determinism Debate

Free will is real. And it is deterministic.

Humans have been tripping themselves over this debate for as long as humans have been formalizing an understanding of agency, morality, and natural order. While the specific, modern vocabulary of “determinism” is only about 150 years old, this conflict has been a central feature of human intellectual history for at least 2,500 years. Well, I am happy to report. I’ve solved it. You can thank me in advance. You’re welcome.

At the base level of reality, nothing is truly separate from anything else. What we colloquially see and describe as separate “people” and “things” are expressions of the energy of the universe taking specific, temporary forms. An organism, is a replicating pattern of energy. It intakes energy from its environment, stores some of this energy, and uses some of that store to produce a highly compressed, reductive model of the universe (and itself) that it can use to gain more energy and avoid having its structure damaged, so it can continue existing.

No one argues with cause and effect. No one argues that some constraints an organism faces put restrictions on what it can and cannot do. These forces are clearly deterministic. And yet the experience of

choice is also trivially observable. We can pull a twenty dollar bill out of our pocket and set it on fire. We can leap off a bridge into oncoming traffic. We can turn on and off the lights in the bathroom and say, “Bloody Mary.” To argue against behavior having a truly “free” component fails even the most basic test of believability. Choice is trivially true. But is it ontologically true? And if so, in a universe of cause and effect, where do we locate free choice?

The answer is simpler than the 2500 years of hand-wringing might suggest:

The organism performs a calculation: it checks its available store of energy (its metabolism) against what it believes to be true about its survival context, bounded by physical reality and its thermodynamic history, within these constraints, the organism deploys a portion of its stored energy to produce a vector for its approach behavior based on the output of this unified metabolic process. The choosing is real. The organism does not need to choose the optimal path, irrespective of optimization target. It’s exactly like how putting gas in your car does not tell you where you must drive, only how far you can go before you run out. But once the organism makes a choice, both the thoughts and the action they produce are part of deterministic causality. Free will is deterministic. It is the organism deploying stored energy, after modeling its context, and selecting a vector for action. In this sense, “life” is the universe finding an energetic pathway that allows for causality to be modified from strictly following the strongest local gradient. It does this because the organism’s model creates an information gradient that redirects behavior. The choice is real, but bounded. The cause and effect relationships are real, both as input and output constraints. The output is what we often call “stochastic” which is really another word for chosen.

The question as we have grappled with it for millenia presupposes a tension that is an artifact of language and an ontologically false subject/object duality we impose, by imagining the organism as a stand alone entity, that is separate from the rest of reality. When we look at the organism as a distinct “thing” separate from its environment, we are making a useful distinction. But this is a logical operation, a utility of our compressed model, not a feature of reality as such. From the perspective of the totality of existence, there is no separate chooser — it is at this level that the strict determinism of the Laplace demon holds. But by viewing the organism as a separate entity, and observing its behavior and processing, we can locate a temporarily stable pattern of energy, that is processing gradient topology, and deploying stored energy. Making a choice, by any measure: philosophical, scientific, or otherwise. By choosing, the organism plays a part in authoring the chain of unbroken deterministic causality. The separation was always an artifact of our compression. Not of the field.

You really are free — in the libertarian philosophical sense — bounded only by thermodynamics and stored energy.

At the same time, the universe really is deterministic.

You are an axiomatic force generator — altering the path of universal causality through your choosing.