Wikipedia defines 'free will' as “the purported ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints”. Historically, debates on whether we truly have it have swung largely on how these constraints are defined. In other words, the answer depends on one's conception of the source of determinism, be it metaphysical (ie., inviolability of God's foreknowledge of the future), physical, or political. The concern over physical determinism may in principle lend itself to scientific inquiry, but for the moment physics seems a bit flustered with quantum randomness, and is at least temporarily inclined to keep silent on the matter until the Theory of Everything is finally attained. Recently, the “cognitive revolution” in psychology has revealed the specter of cognitive determinism. This conception tends to treat free will as an illusion created by extremely complex patterns of interaction, which however complex, are in reality reducible to a comparatively simple and finite set of rules. Behavior is in this view an extremely complex, mathematical fractal. The pattern is so complex, however, that to any sub-omniscient observer is likely to appear as if there is no pattern at all. Thus, giving way to an illusion of free will, at least insofar as decisions to not appear to be predetermined.
Disappointingly (or perhaps thankfully?), my goal for this section of the paper is not to elucidate a new construction of determinism based on the latest cognitive psychology and neuroscience. For me, the more interesting (or at least more answerable) question is not whether we have it, but why we think we have it. By asking the question in this way, we avoid the trap having to define 'free will' arbitrarily, as Wikipedia and so many others have done. Instead, I will build upon the previous discussion of the behavioral role of emotion, and present a novel theory of free will that treats it not a cognitive, or spiritual faculty but a functional form of cultural technology, invented in the context of early civilizations in order to subdue the influence of social emotions, which while sufficient for resolving social problems at the level of bands and tribes, are less fit to the task at the level of states.
According to evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, the cognitive faculty for generalized intelligence was an adaptation allowing individuals to more successfully interact with “evolutionarily novel” things. For Kanazawa, something is evolutionarily novel if it is something too newly introduced into a creature's environment that it is not possible for a physical or psychobehavioral mechanism facilitating an optimal response to have evolved by natural selection. For example, greater intelligence may facilitate tool-building or with the application of new jobs to put those tools to in order to enhance one's adaptive advantage. In other words, it allows individuals to respond more readily to environmental changes that the slow pace of evolution would ordinarily permit by means of understanding and innovation.
Undoubtedly, the transition from bands and tribes of hunter-gatherers to centralized, agrarian civilization introduces an immense quantity of novelty into the human environment. This transition amounted to a fundamental socio-economic restructuring of society. Bioarchaeological evidence and ethnographic studies of extant hunter-gather groups suggest that humans have persisted in comparatively small groups of 150 or so since at least the late-mid Pleistoscene (approx. 150 thousand years ago). For primates, relative neocortex size is a linear function of group size (Aiello and Dunbar, 1993). According to the Aiello-Dunbar model, the expected value of the mean human group size is, indeed, 150. Yet it has been only 5000 years or so Sumerian civilization first began to coalesce around the ancient city of Uruk. In what was quite “sudden”, at least from the perspective of evolutionary time, humans found themselves living in societies numbering in 10s of thousands. At the time of Plato's tenure at the Lyceum, the population of Athens is estimated to exceed 250 thousand (Cartledge estimate), including Athenian citizens, women and children, aliens, and slaves. Throughout the primate world, the relative size of the neocortex positively predicts social group size. Suffice it to say, humanity entered the era of urban civilization with the same intellectual equipment that saw them through the last 150 thousand years, and no more.
Suddenly, they are compelled to interact on a daily basis with more individuals than they could ever hope to recognize. With each additional denizen, the number of dyadic relationships (as a measure of social systemic complexity) increases exponentially. The division of labor into food-producing and non-producing sectors necessitated the exchanging of goods in markets. Market exchanges, by design, facilitate anonymous cooperation. In other words, individuals now found themselves involved in sometimes inscrutable social networks consisting of large numbers of unknown others. The terms of such exchanges may be determined by imperceptible forces, such as the supply and demand for primary and secondary goods.
It is my contention that the social emotional system humans had theretofore relied upon failed within the new urban environment, placing far greater demand on intelligence as the capacity to resolve novel problems. Social emotions such as trust were no longer adequate to inform an individual of the risk associated with a given, anonymous cooperative exchange. Whereas the lines between communities, or societies, were sharply drawn and largely coextensive with kinship ties in the realm of hunter-gatherers, we were suddenly immersed in imagined communities of nations, bound not by kinship or even mutual recognition, but by national songs, symbols, and religions. Increasing social distance rendered obsolete evolved social emotional tools for resolving social dilemmas. For example, shame became less useful as a means to enforce contributions to public goods, such as collective security, resources management, and civic order (i.e., the free-rider problem). Accordingly, it was necessary to develop more complex and more capable governmental institutions and political processes for decision-making. Perhaps best analogized in John Locke's conceptualization of the social contract, the urban imperative to resolve social dilemmas demanded that individuals subdue anger and forgo their natural right to exact their own justice in response to perceived transgressions, and grant this authority to a disinterested third-party, i.e., a government who would administer justice impartially according to a set of (notionally) agreed upon procedures, or laws.
New social institutions were necessary to keep up with evolving political and economic institutions. If individuals cannot be kept track of by name and face, then they must have a legal identity to which novel forms of property, such as holdings of gold or lands, may be legally attached. Succeeding in this environment takes more than strength and agility; to be the greatest hunter is no longer check and mate under the new rules of social chess. Whereas passions such as love, infatuation, fear and intimidation were once adequate indicators of the a potential mate's suitability, it now became more important to make such decisions as strategic agreements joining the wealth with of families fiercely competing for favorable position in a stratified politico-economic empire. At the level of high-politics, feelings of disgust or love must be swallowed and reason should light the way.
Recalling from the previous discussion, philosophers going back at least to Plato wrestled with the challenge emotions presented not only for the individual, but for society as a whole. For Plato, establishing a rationally ordered and governed society could only be achieved if a philosopher became king; further, this could not be any philosopher, but one who was isolated from the rest of society at birth, cared for, and specially trained in the art of pure reason. From The Republic, Plato writes:
“You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life. Whereas if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after the' own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State.” - Book VII
Citing Bechara's experiments on patients whose conditions prevented them from experiencing emotions, Marcus explains how emotion is necessary to motivate action. According to Bechara, even when his subjects were able to rationally identify the best course of action, they could not act upon it. It may have been precisely this characteristic that Plato believed made a true philosopher uniquely qualified to be king. Having no motivation of his own, his perception of the good would not be biased in the direction of self-interest; in other words, he would be free from the affliction of motivated reasoning (more on this later).According to Marcus (2003), “civilization is … the achievement that results when humans find the institutional means of removing the passions and their power”. This is precisely the conclusion I aim to unsettle. On the contrary, it is my contention that civilization is not the consequence, but the cause. In sum, social emotion was frequently as much of a hindrance as an aid for ancients city-dwellers navigating unnaturally large, post-tribal, social hierarchies, defined by organizational complexity, Machiavellian politics, and anonymous economic transactions. To succeed in this novel environment, it was necessary to subordinate emotion to the practice of dispassionate, logical reasoning. In the primordial environment of evolutionary adaptation, such a capacity would have been superfluous and not selected for. Thus, this was a skill, or tool, that needed inventing.
At Plato's Lyceum, the camp of Pythagoras, and the porch of the Stoics, logical reasoning was developed as a technology to extend the utility of general intelligence, in the same way a hammer extends the utility of a fist. This was a direct, cultural response to the new demands of urban civilization. Indeed, scores on the modern standard for the measurement of one's capacity for logical reasoning, the IQ-test, show higher average IQs urban areas than in rural. Over the past 100 years, the term Flynn Effect has been used to describe a global pattern of increasing IQ scores as a linear function of development. In order to facilitate success, children in developing and developed societies attend many years of schooling, well into young adult-hood, in order to cultivate their facility with the practice of reason. Their educational success, in turn, is predictable by educational quality, which correlates with IQ.
As I'd mentioned previously, free will is generally held to be capacity for agents to make decisions free of some understanding of the constraints on decision-making. Conceived thusly, the question may never be answered to everyone's satisfaction. On the contrary, I'm far less ambitious in my desires, hopes, and dreams for cognitive freedom. I contend free will is only an idea that serves as a theoretical outcome of a perfected art of reasoning. It is no more a real thing than the perfect circle or the perfect square. It is an epitome, comparable to a Platonic Form, that serves only as a guide to reason. Plato really believed that a philosopher was capable of perfecting reason and gaining True knowledge of the Forms, including the Form of the Good, or that which shines upon the Forms to make them knowable. For Plato, it was the knowledge of the Form of the Good that liberated man from his corporeal addiction to ephemeral things. This same idea can be seen 2000 years later in the pen of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1754),“Nature speaks to all animals, and beasts obey her voice. Man feels the same impression, but he at the same time perceives that he is free to resist or to acquiesce; and it is in the consciousness of this liberty, that the spirituality of his soul chiefly appears”. Though Rousseau ultimately goes a different direction with free will, he follows Plato in that he asserts free will can only exist insofar as man is aware of his animal-like condition, and thus aware of his liberty to disregard, or acquiesce corporeal impulses. Further, like Plato he holds that it is through the practice of reason that one attains the highest awareness of his nature, in principle, culminating in the true liberation of the will.
This notion of free will has given a goal toward which we may direct our education. In so doing, we are equipped with the skills to thrive in an evolutionarily novel environment where over-reliance the social emotional systems that aided our primordial ancestors' success would leave us tactless, impolitic, or otherwise disadvantaged in virtually every sphere of public life. On the basis of free will, we have built a framework of legal concepts and political institutions that facilitate a rational ordering of society as a whole, overcoming social dilemmas, and extending cooperation across unnaturally large and heterogeneous communities. Though the question of 'free will' in the traditional sense may never be found, it remains a useful concept in the same way a mathematical or geometric concept, such as that of a circle. Do we really believe that a perfect circle exists? No, but then it doesn't matter because the idea of one is enough.
Continue to Part 3: Conclusions, discussion, and implications for political science
Return to Part 1: What are emotions, and why do we have them?
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