Complex Numbers

Free Willy-Nilly

I've ranted at length in here about things that people think are illusions being real, such as time and consciousness. Today, you get treated to the opposite.

PROMPT May 12th

Write about a fork in the road in your life, and how you made the decision to go the direction you did. What would have happened if you chose the other path?

Sure, I hit a fork in the road once. It blew out my tire and I got stuck there.

Humans put a lot of stock in decisions. A popularized interpretation of the Many Worlds Hypothesis in quantum theory is that for every decision we make, the universe splits. This is not only a mischaracterization of the actual hypothesis, but it puts sapients back into a special place in the cosmos. After all, no one seems to believe that a cat's decision splits the universe; at best, the cat's a victim of radioactive decay, alive in one universe and dead in the other, with its actual status a superposition of the two until a (human) observer checks on it.

I won't be convinced of the MWH in general until someone explains to my satisfaction how it's compatible with conservation of something. But that's not really relevant to the larger question, which is: Do we really make decisions? That is, who's the "we" in that question?

It's unlikely that free will exists   in the form that most of us believe it does. I can't pretend to understand all of the science behind it, but based on my understanding, we tend to make decisions even before we're consciously aware of making the decision, and then find ways to justify them afterward. In this sense, we're not rational - we're rationalizing.

There's significant pushback to this idea, because as a whole, we're kind of wedded to the idea that we consciously make decisions. It's the basis for most of our systems of government and justice. But there's growing evidence that, if it were possible to replicate the exact set of circumstances leading to a perceived decision, we could not have made a different one.

I realize this goes against the grain of everything we've experienced. After all, if you're playing a video game, for example, you can always go back and make different choices that lead to different outcomes. But that leaves out the fact that you've already played through the simulation once, and you know what happens.

Arguments for free will rely on the idea that consciousness is a sort of ghost in the machine, guiding our steps. You can choose, the argument goes, whether to put your emptied shopping cart into the corral or leave it in the middle of the parking lot; you can decide whether to return a lost wallet, and with or without its contents. And it certainly seems that we can make these choices. But that turns out not to be the case.

The philosophical pushback to this usually takes some form of "Well, if we can't make the decision, then why even bother? Just leave the shopping cart for someone else to deal with." This misses the point. You know you should put the shopping cart away, and if you don't, you've marked yourself as unfit for society. You know this, so you return the shopping cart, right?

Yes, free will is an illusion. But it's an important one. We need to feel we have some agency, that we're not just automatons or instinctual creatures like beetles. By doing so, we can feel good about our choices. Or, alternatively, feel bad about them and try to do better next time. "But Waltz, you just said you can't act any differently." Yeah, but future actions are determined by an entirely different configuration of matter and energy; the exact set of circumstances cannot be replicated. You're always changing, and so is your environment. As I've said before, not only can you not step into the same river twice, you can't even step into the same river once -- because by the time your foot hits the bottom, the river has changed. Hell, even putting your foot in it changes it. Which is true for any antecedent of "it," including one's mouth.

I should also mention that determinism doesn't imply either predestination or predictability. Plenty of things are deterministic but, to a greater or lesser extent, unpredictable -- the weather past a week or so into the future, for example. Same for our decisions. They spring from configurations of neurons, atoms, electric fields, chemistry, and so on, but that doesn't mean you can know exactly what's going to happen at some point in the future. The best we can do is come up with scenarios and think about what we'd do in them.

The point of all of this digression -- and no, I don't expect people to agree with me -- is that it does me no good to put past (illusory) choices under a microscope. What if I'd overcome my hatred of cold weather and gone to MIT instead of UVA? Or accepted the spot at Annapolis and joined the Navy instead of staying in civilian life? I'd be a different person, or at least the same person with different experiences, and likely done more with my life than designing parking lots for assholes to leave shopping carts in. Going back, knowing what I know now, I probably would have gone to MIT (Virginia has a slightly shorter winter season, but not significantly so), but I don't think I'd have joined the Navy (ships get cold). Nor would I have married my first wife, which would be a moot point if I hadn't been living in this town, where I met her. But I didn't know then what I know now, and those choices were the only ones I could have made at the time.

I'm not saying these things are mistakes, or that I wish I hadn't done them. But what's done is done, and the best I, or anyone else, can do is learn from the past. Such learning affects our illusory decision-making, and, ideally, improves it. Knowledge is part of the equation, and that's one reason I seek it out. Or, maybe, the desire for knowledge is just part of my particular configuration of matter and energy.