Determinism 3 – Who Is The Illusionist?

[This is a part of a series of posts on free will and determinism. It starts here.]

So assuming for a moment that we are determined creatures in a determinist universe, why would we persist in the assumption that we have free will? As the thought experiment suggests, clearly it wouldn’t be enough for us to just become convinced by the weight of evidence that we can’t have free will. We would still have the same experience of ourselves as people who have choices and make choices. Anything that would count as evidence for determinism, any argument that would have a chance of leading to a proof that we don’t have free will, would still be something that we would grasp only intellectually. I doubt that it could overturn our felt subjective experience in a moment. Any argument about free will and determinism – to be meaningful – would have to make sense of the way it feels to us to live our lives.

There is a slogan that free will is an illusion. But how does it come about? Who is the evil illusionist? If there is an illusion, then I’d say that we are each our own illusionist.

There are a number of faulty modes of thinking that are apparently systemic in the way we think. They are not the matter of anecdotal slip-ups but of series scientific study and behaviourist economics. They are the subjects of recent best-sellers, for example Thinking, Fast and Slow by Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman or The Art of Clear Thinking by Swiss author Rolf Dobelli (to whom I owe the descriptions below). There is not just one, but there are three such systemic patterns of faulty thinking that could be involved in creating the free will illusion:

  • Overconfidence Effect: This is the tendency to overestimate our knowledge, our understanding of a situation and our abilities. Economics experts massively over-estimate their ability to forecast market performance. According to Dobelli, 84% of French men say that they are better than average lovers (the relevant interpretation of average would only allow for 50% to be better than average) and the same effect can be observed if you ask people to rate themselves as drivers. Why is this relevant to free will? We may be systematically over-rating the extent to which we know what has contributed to our behaviour and our actions. We may also be over-confident in our ability to choose what goes on in our life? (Do you think you are more in contol of your actions than the average person, or less?)
  • Illusion of Control: This is the tendency to believe that we exercise control or influence over things over which we have no power whatsoever. It was observed in experiments where people were in a room with two light switches and a lamp that was either on or off. The experimenters decided to what extent the light was correlated to the switches. But people thought that they were influencing the lamp by manipulating the switches even where it switched on or off completely randomly. If this illusion is in place in our lives generally, it is quite easy to see how it could add up to giving us the feeling that we are in control of things that are really just happening while we are just flicking unconnected switches.
  • Fundamental Attribution Error: This is the tendency to look for a person behind events. A chief executive gets blamed for the bad performance of a business, or praised for its success, when in fact there are macro-economic forces and wider trends in place. The manager gets sacked if a football team doesn’t do well. Dobelli also gets upset when, as an author of novels, he gets asked to what extent his work is autobiographical. Why would readers assume that it has to be at all, when it is really about plot and language? (Though as far as I can tell, Donelli wrote a book called Thirty-five – a midlife story at the age of thirty-five which to be fair could lead his readers to think that it was a little bit autobiographical). Dobelli explains our tendency to look for people in charge of events from our evolutionary history where we are quite simply completely reliant on other people and therefore have to understand who is up to what. And so, he says, we think about people for about 90% of the time and only spend 10% thinking about the situational context. Freedom of the will could then be the fundamental attribution error of fundamental attribution errors. It could cause us to see ourselves as the people behind events in our lives, when in fact the wider environment is far more of a causal factor. It could also lead us to judge others to be more in charge of what they are doing and how it impacts on us than they really are.

When it comes to really difficult problems like free will and determinism it is helpful to be a like the fox and not too much of a hedgehog. We shouldn’t look for a single big explanation, but for a number of factors and perspectives that might contribute. Our cognitive biasses might just be some of the pieces of this puzzle.

[The next post in this series is here.]