Jacques Monod’s 1971 book Chance and Necessity was a landmark in the popular science literature for its unequivocal statement that the origin of life is purely a product of Chance.

…chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition — or the hope — that on this score our position is likely ever to be revised.
(Chance and Necessity, p. 112)

Monod correctly denies any teleological forces are needed to create life from inanimate matter, but he finds that teleonomic purposeful behavior is one of the fundamental characteristics of life, along with what he calls autonomous morphogenesis (life is “self-constructing”) and reproductive invariance (life is “self-replicating”).

Information philosophy agrees that with the emergence of life, information structures with purposes entered the universe.

But there must have been information-creating, ergodic processes at work before terrestrial life appeared. They created the informational substrate for life, in particular, the sun and the planetary environment hospitable to the origin of life on earth.

Monod says that some biologists have been unhappy with his idea of teleonomy, that living beings are endowed with a purpose or a project, but he says this is essential to the definition of living beings. His next criterion is autonomous morphogenesis. He says,

…a living being’s structure results from a … process … that owes almost nothing to the action of outside forces, but everything, from its overall shape down to its tiniest detail, to “morphogenetic” interactions within the object itself.

We now know this is only “adequate determinism“

It is thus a structure giving proof of an autonomous determinism: precise, rigorous, implying a virtually total “freedom” with respect to outside agents or conditions — which are capable, to be sure, of impeding this development, but not of governing or guiding it, not of prescribing its organizational scheme to the living object. Through the autonomous and spontaneous character of the morphogenetic processes that build the macroscopic structure of living beings, the latter are absolutely distinct from artifacts, as they are, furthermore, from the majority of natural objects whose macroscopic morphology largely results from the influence of external agents.

Crystals are one of the few purely physical “ergodic” processes, reducing the entropy locally

To this there is a single exception: that, once again, of crystals, whose characteristic geometry reflects microscopic interactions occurring within the object itself. Hence, utilizing this criterion alone, crystals would have to be classified together with living beings, while artifacts and natural objects, alike fashioned by outside agents, would comprise another class.
(Chance and Necessity, p.10)

The quantum cooperative atomic phenomena that form crystals are of course the same as form the macromolecules of life, DNA, RNA, etc.

Monod thinks there is an “internal, autonomous determinism” that “guarantees the formation of the extremely complex structures of living beings.” The “guarantee” can not be perfect as a result of statistical physics. Monod is fully aware of quantum indeterminacy. After discussing chance in terms of probability and games of chance, he says,

on the microscopic level there exists a further source of still more radical uncertainty, embedded in the quantum structure of matter. A mutation is in itself a microscopic event, a quantum event, to which the principle of uncertainty consequently applies. An event which is hence and by its very nature essentially unpredictable.

Monod identifies the key evolutionary process as the transmission of information from one living information structure to the next. Note that this is accomplished in the constant presence of thermal and quantal noise

.

Such structures represent a considerable quantity of information whose source has still to be identified: for all expressed — and hence received — information presupposes a source. He says “the source of the information expressed in the structure of a living being is always another, structurally identical object.”

[Living beings have the] ability to produce and to transmit ne varietur the information corresponding to their own structure. A very rich body of information, since it describes an organizational scheme which, along with being exceedingly complex, is preserved intact from one generation to the next. The term we shall use to designate this property is invariant reproduction, or simply invariance.With their invariant reproduction we find living beings and crystalline structures once again sharing a property that renders them unlike all other known objects in the universe. Certain chemicals in supersaturated solution do not crystallize unless the solution has been inoculated with crystal seeds. We know as well that in cases of a chemical capable of crystallizing into two different systems, the structure of the crystals appearing in the solution will be determined by that of the seed employed.
(Chance and Necessity, p.12)

Monod claims that the main distinction between crystals and living things is the quantity of information transmitted between the generations. He thus neglects the creativity inherent in the acquisition and transmission of knowledge by living things.

Crystalline structures, however, represent a quantity of information by several orders of magnitude inferior to that transmitted from one generation to another in the simplest living beings we are acquainted with. By this criterion — purely quantitative, be it noted — living beings may be distinguished from all other objects, crystals included.

In his major contribution toward an informational approach to biology, Monod goes on to make a quantitative estimate of what he calls the “teleonomic level” of a species, arranging them in a hierarchy based purely on information content. This is an important beginning for information-based biological science.

…since a structure’s degree of order can be defined in units of information, we shall say that the “invariance content” of a given species is equal to the amount of information which, transmitted from one generation to the next, assures the preservation of the specific structural standard. As we shall see later on, with the help of a few assumptions it will be possible to arrive at an estimate of this amount.That in turn will enable us to bring into better focus the notion most immediately and plainly inspired by the examination of the structures and performances of living beings, that of teleonomy. Analysis nevertheless reveals it to be a profoundly ambiguous concept, since it implies the subjective idea of “project.” [Consider] the example of the camera: if we agree that this object’s existence and structure realize the “project” of capturing images, we must also agree, obviously enough, that a similar project is accomplished with the emergence of the eye of a vertebrate.

But it is only as a part of a more comprehensive project that each individual project, whatever it may be, has any meaning. All the functional adaptations in living beings, like all the artifacts they produce, fulfill particular projects which may be seen as so many aspects or fragments of a unique primary project, which is the preservation and multiplication of the species.

To be more precise, we shall arbitrarily choose to define the essential teleonomic project as consisting in the transmission from generation to generation of the invariance content characteristic of the species. All the structures, all the performances, all the activities contributing to the success of the essential project will hence be called “teleonomic.”

This allows us to put forward at least the principle of a definition of a species’ “teleonomic level.’ All teleonomic structures and performances can be regarded as corresponding to a certain quantity of information which must be transmitted for these structures to be realized and -these performances accomplished. Let us call this quantity “teleonomic information.” A given species’ “teleonomic level” may then be said to correspond to the quantity of information which, on the average and per individual, must be transferred to assure the generation-to-generation transmission of the specific content of reproductive invariance.
(Chance and Necessity, pp.13-14)

For François Jacob, who shared the Nobel Prize with Jacques Monod, teleonomy was a basic characteristic of every cell. Jacob said that the basic purpose and desire of every cell is to become two cells

.

But Monod sees that his teleonomy appears to be in conflict with a basic tenet, the very cornerstone, of modern science.

The cornerstone of the scientific method is the postulate that nature is objective. In other words, the systematic denial that “true” knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes - that is to say, of “purpose.” An exact date may be given for the discovery of this canon. The formulation by Galileo and Descartes of the principle of inertia laid the groundwork not only for mechanics but for the epistemology of modern science, by abolishing Aristotelian physics and cosmology. To be sure, neither reason, nor logic, nor observation, nor even the idea of their systematic confrontation had been ignored by Descartes’ predecessors. But science as we understand it today could not have been developed upon those foundations alone. It required the unbending stricture implicit in the postulate of objectivity — ironclad, pure, forever undemonstrable. For it is obviously impossible to imagine an experiment which could prove the nonexistence anywhere in nature of a purpose, of a pursued end.But the postulate of objectivity is consubstantial with science; it has guided the whole of its prodigious development for three centuries. There is no way to be rid of it, even tentatively or in a limited area, without departing from the domain of science itself.

Objectivity nevertheless obliges us to recognize the teleonomic character of living organisms, to admit that in their structure and performance they act projectively — realize and pursue a purpose. Here therefore, at least in appearance, lies a profound epistemological contradiction. In fact the central problem of biology lies with this very contradiction, which, if it is only apparent, must be resolved; or else proven to be utterly insoluble, if that should turn out indeed to be the case.
(Chance and Necessity, pp.21-2)

Monod’s resolution of his “profound epistemological contradiction” is to make teleonomy secondary to - and a consequence of - reproductive invariance.

Since the teleonomic properties of living beings appear o challenge one of the basic postulates of the modern theory of knowledge, any philosophical, religious, or scientific view of the world must, ipso facto, offer an implicit if not an explicit solution to this problem.{T]he single hypothesis that modern science here deems acceptable: namely, that invariance necessarily precedes teleonomy. Or, to be more explicit;` the Darwinian idea that the initial appearance, evolution, and steady refinement of ever more intensely teleonomic structures are due to perturbations occurring in a structure which already possesses the property of invariance — hence is capable of (preserving the effects of chance and thereby submitting them to the play of natural selection.

Ranking teleonomy as a secondary property deriving from invariance — alone seen as primary — the selective theory is the only one so far proposed that is consistent with the postulate of objectivity. It is at the same time the only one not merely compatible with modern physics but based squarely upon it, without restrictions or additions. In short, the selective theory of evolution assures the epistemological coherence of biology and gives it its place among the sciences of “objective nature.”
(Chance and Necessity, pp.23-4)

Monod summarizes the history of philosophy more or less as we do (and as Karl Popper does), along the lines of the great division, or dualism, between idealists and materialists.

We see the distinction as between those who think information is an invariant and those who see it as constantly increasing. Monod’s focus on reproductive invariance may prevent him seeing the importance of novelty and creation of new information. Ever since its birth in the Ionian Islands almost three thousand years ago, Western philosophy has been divided between two seemingly opposed attitudes. According to one of them the authentic and ultimate truth of the world can reside only in perfectly immutable forms, by essence unvarying. According to the other, the only real truth resides in flux and evolution. From Plato to Whitehead and from Heraclitus to Hegel and Marx, it is clear that these metaphysical epistemologies were always closely bound up with their authors’ ethical and political biases. These ideological edifices, represented as self-evident to reason, were actually a posteriori constructions designed to justify preconceived ethico-political theories.
(Chance and Necessity, p.99)

Like many scientists, Monod regards the open search for knowledge and truth as of intrinsic value. Can he go on to make knowledge itself a value in the objective world of “value-free” science? Monod seeks an “ethic of knowledge.”

Must one adopt the position once and for all that objective truth and the theory of values constitute eternally separate, mutually impenetrable domains? This is the attitude taken by a great number of modern thinkers, whether writers, or philosophers, or indeed scientists. For the vast majority of men, whose anxiety it can only perpetuate and worsen, this attitude I believe will not do; I also believe it is absolutely mistaken, and for two essential reasons.First, and obviously, because values and knowledge are always and necessarily associated in action just as in discourse.

Second, and above all, because the very definition of “true” knowledge reposes in the final analysis upon an ethical postulate.

Each of these two points demands some brief clarification.

Ethics and knowledge are inevitably linked in and through action. Action brings knowledge and values simultaneously into play, or into question. All action signifies an ethic, serves or disserves certain values; or constitutes a choice of values, or pretends to. On the other hand, knowledge is necessarily implied in all action, while reciprocally, action is one of the two necessary sources of knowledge.

The moment one makes objectivity the conditio sine qua non of true knowledge, a radical distinction, indispensable to the very search for truth, is established between the domains of ethics and of knowledge. Knowledge in itself is exclusive of all value judgment (all save that of “epistemological value”) whereas ethics, in essence nonobjective, is forever barred from the sphere of knowledge.

The postulate of objectivity…prohibits any confusion of value judgments with judgments arrived at through knowledge. Yet the fact remains that these two categories inevitably unite in the form of action, discourse included. In order to abide by our principle we shall therefore take the position that no discourse or action is to be considered meaningful, authentic unless — or only insofar as — it makes explicit and preserves the distinction between the two categories it combines. Thus defined, the concept of authenticity becomes the common ground where ethics and knowledge meet again; where values and truth, associated but not interchangeable, reveal their full significance to the attentive man alive to their resonance.

In an objective system…any mingling of knowledge with values is unlawful, forbidden. But — and here is the crucial point, the logical link which at their core weds knowledge and values together — this prohibition, this “first commandment” which ensures the foundation of objective knowledge, is not itself objective. It cannot be objective: it is an ethical guideline, a rule for conduct. True knowledge is ignorant of values, but it cannot be grounded elsewhere than upon a value judgment, or rather upon an axiomatic value. It is obvious that the positing of the principle of objectivity as the condition of true knowledge constitutes an ethical choice and not a judgment arrived at from knowledge, since, according to the postulate’s own terms, there cannot have been any “true” knowledge prior to this arbitral choice. In order to establish the norm for knowledge the objectivity principle defines a value: that value is objective knowledge itself. Thus, assenting to the principle of objectivity one announces one’s adherence to the basic statement of an ethical system, one asserts the ethic of knowledge.

By the very loftiness of its ambition the ethic of knowledge might perhaps satisfy this urge in man to project toward something higher. It sets forth a transcendent value, true knowledge, and invites him not to use it self-servingly but henceforth to enter into its service from deliberate and conscious choice. At the same time it is also a humanism, for in man it respects the creator and repository of that transcendence.

The ethic of knowledge is also in a sense “knowledge of ethics,” a clear-sighted appreciation of the urges and passions, the requirements and limitations of the biological being. It is able to confront the animal in man, to view him not as absurd but strange, precious in his very strangeness: the creature who, belonging simultaneously to the animal kingdom and the kingdom of ideas, is simultaneously torn and enriched by this agonizing duality, alike expressed in art and poetry and in human love.

Conversely, the animist systems have to one degree or another preferred to ignore, to denigrate or bully biological man, and to instill in him an abhorrence or terror of certain traits inherent in his animal nature. The ethic of knowledge, on the other hand, encourages him to honor and assume this heritage, knowing the while how to dominate it when necessary. As for the highest human qualities, courage, altruism, generosity, creative ambition, the ethic of knowledge both recognizes their sociobiological origin and affirms their transcendent value in the service of the ideal it defines.
(Chance and Necessity, pp.173-9)

Monod took the title of his work from a statement by Democritus that he imagined or misremembered (an example of the Cogito Model for human creativity). He opens his book with this quotation,

Everything existing in the Universe is the fruit of chance and necessity. Democritus

Unfortunately, Democritus made no such statement. As the founder of determinism, he and his mentor Leucippus were adamantly opposed to chance or randomness. Leucippus insisted on an absolute necessity which leaves no room in the cosmos for chance.

“Nothing occurs at random (maten), but everything for a reason (logos) and by necessity.”οὐδὲν χρῆμα μάτηῳ γίνεται, ἀλλὰ πάντα ἐκ λόγου τε καὶ ὑπ’ ἀνάγκης

The simple and logical argument against free will is that either determinism or indeterminism is true.

If determinism is true, we are not free.

If indeterminism is true, our actions are random, so we did not will them.

We are not responsible either way. Ergo, no free will. Q.E.D.

The flaw in the argument concerns indeterminacy. Because logic is time and space independent, many philosophers assume that if indeterminism if true, randomness is significant and relevant at all times and all places, independent of scale or size.

But indeterminacy is normally important only for microscopic structures. Macroscopic structures, including our brains and bodies, are adequately determined - except when some useful indeterminacy helps us to generate alternative possibilities, or (and this is very important) allows us to be creative and bring genuinely new information into the universe.

So could you accept some chance in your own causal chain that would not make your decisions random?

I suggest seven places where even compatibilists and determinists might accept some chance in the causal chain leading up to their latest decision, which I hope they might agree is an “adequately determined” decision that is truly “up to them.”

1) Only at the original moment of the “big bang.”
(This leads us to Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument).

2) During genetic mutations that created the species homo sapiens.
(Without this chance, none of us would be here.)

3) Nine months before your birth. (It was one in a million which of your father’s sperm would win the race to your mother’s egg. Without this one, you wouldn’t be one of us.)

4) During your moral education.
(These are those rare events that C. S. Peirce calls the “fixation of beliefs,” and Bob Kane calls “self-forming actions.” These are important because they may contribute to your latest decisions.)

5) When you decided to become a philosopher.
(Again, without this one, you wouldn’t be part of the Garden. How many of you think chance might have played a part?)

6) During deliberation about your current options.
(In these sometimes extended moments, your subconscious processing of possibilities may consider thousands of input factors and evaluate enormous numbers of possible outcomes. If you are creative, you may come up with ideas never thought of by anyone before you. Thus chance and indeterminacy is involved up until a fraction of a second before your “moment of choice.” This is my Cogito model. www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/cogito/)

6) During the decision itself.
(Bob Kane, Laura Ekstrom, Mark Balaguer and others argue that your decision must not be “determined” by all the considerations that arise during your deliberation. You are not free enough , they say, even if some of the alternative posssibilities might be random combinations of your own past experiences that you have dreamed up yourself.

Compatibilists should be quite content to think that this decision is adequately determined (that randomness is negligible ) by an evaluation process that included our character and values, our habits and preferences, our current feelings and desires, etc. This then is a “kind of freedom available to us,” as Galen Strawson recently agreed.)

I think the Libertarians have been right about the need for some indeterminacy, but they are wrong to try to push it into our decisions themselves, with one exception.  Mark Balaguer’s “torn decisions,” perhaps some of Kane’s “decisions requiring great effort,” and in general Buridan-type “liberty of indifference” decisions, might all be made by flipping a “mental coin.” If we are fully aware that it is a random choice, and if we are prepared to accept responsibility either way, perhaps we can still regard this as an act of our will.

On my Information Philosopher website, I have researched over twenty recent philosophers (including a few Gardeners) who have published versions of this simple and logical argument. It apparently has convinced them, and perhaps hundreds or thousands of their philosophy students and readers of their textbooks.

See the Standard Argument Against Free Will.

None of them appear to have seen this flaw. Do you agree that there is a flaw here that might be corrected by a clearer description of how indeterminacy can be limited - to do no harm to an adequate determinism.

More important, do you see how indeterminacy can help to provide a kind of freedom from the fixed past (and the laws of nature, as the argument goes) and an ability for humans to be creative individuals?

This week’s Nature magazine (14 May 2009) has an essay on free will by Martin Heisenberg (son of Werner), chair of the University of Wurzburg’s genetics and neurobiology section of their BioCenter.

Since the indeterminacy principle was his father’s work, the comment that the physical universe is no longer determined and that nature is inherently unpredictable comes as no surprise.

What is unusual is that Heisenberg finds evidence of free behavior in animals, including some very simple ones such as Drosophila, on which he is a world expert.

He says:

“the activation of behavioural modules is based on the interplay between chance and lawfulness in the brain. Insufficiently equipped, insufficiently informed and short of time, animals have to find a module that is adaptive. Their brains, in a kind of random walk, continuously preactivate, discard and reconfigure their options, and evaluate their possible short-term and long-term consequences.

“The physiology of how this happens has been little investigated. But there is plenty of evidence that an animal’s behaviour cannot be reduced to responses. For example, my lab has demonstrated that fruit flies, in situations they have never encountered, can modify their expectations about the consequences of their actions. They can solve problems that no individual fly in the evolutionary history of the species has solved before. Our experiments show that they actively initiate behaviour.”

When you combine some randomness with some “lawful” (read evolved and adequately determined) behaviors you get something like free will.

This is more or less exactly my work of the last few decades. Free will is a two-stage process.

First there is a random generation of alternative possibilities, some of which may be truly creative in the sense that they are new information in the universe.

Then an adequately determined will selects, from among these possibilities, the one best suited to one’s character and values, along with one’s current desires.

First free, then will.

It is not that the will is free in the sense of random. The will is determining and adequately determined.

Several other philosophers and scientists have had something close to this idea since William James in 1884, including Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, A.O. Gomes, Karl Popper, Henry Margenau, Daniel Dennett, Robert Kane, and Alfred Mele.

For more details, you might want to look at a few of the web pages on informationphilosopher.com.

There you will find web pages on the above thinkers and over one hundred others who have considered the problem of free will, including several gardeners.

I am working on a history of the free will problem here (a very long page).
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/history/

Here is my version of the two-stage model (a much shorter page).
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/cogito/

Compare the standard argument against free will, which separately attacks randomness and strict determinism. Taken together, randomness and adequate determinism suggest that many compatibilists might consider a merely adequate compatibilism?
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html

Abraham de Moivre’s classic book The Doctrine of Chances (in three editions between 1718 and 1756) was basically a handbook for gamblers. It enabled them to know how to bet in various games of chance.

It begins…

The Probability of an Event is greater or less, according to the number of Chances by which it may happen, compared with the whole number of Choices by which it may happen or fail.

This brief statement contains the assumption that all states are equally probable, assuming that we have no information that indicates otherwise.

While this describes our information epistemically, making it a matter of human knowledge, we can say ontologically that the world contains no information that would make any state more probable than the others. Such information simply does not exist. This is sometimes called the principle of insufficient reason or the principle of indifference.

If that information did exist, it could and would be revealed in large numbers of experimental trials, which provide the statistics on the different “states.”

Probabilities are theories. Statistics are experiments.

In the philosophical controversies between a priori or epistemic interpretations of probability and a posteriori or ontological interpretations, the latter are often said to be “frequency” interpretations of probability. We prefer to use the term statistics for these frequencies.

de Moivre’s work underlies James Clerk Maxwell’s velocity distributions for the molecules in a gas, and Ludwig Boltzmann’s explanation for the increase of entropy in statistical mechanics (the second law of thermodynamics).

All other things being equal, any physical system evolves toward the macrostate with the greatest number of microstates consistent with the information contained in the macrostate. This information is intrinsic to the system. It may be observable, but it in no way depends on being observed or “known” to any observer.

In his book, de Moivre worked out the mathematics for the binomial expansion of (p - q)ⁿ by analyzing the tosses of a coin. If p is the probability of a “heads” and q = 1 - p the probability of “tails,” then the probability of k heads is

de Moivre also was the first to approximate the factorial for large n as

James Stirling determined the constant in de Moivre’s approximation ( = √(2π), which is now commonly called Stirling’s formula.

Using this approximation, which is valid for large numbers, de Moivre went on to approximate the discrete binomial expansion with a continuous curve.

Pierre-Simon Laplace also derived this result, which is sometimes called the de Moivre-Laplace Theorem. Laplace very likely knew of de Moivre’s work, but gave him no credit, perhaps because of de Moivre’s association with gambling, perhaps because de Moivre was a Huguenot protestant who had emigrated to England, or perhaps because Laplace’s great works summarized much of the previous century’s mathematics and science without giving credit to his predecessors.

Nearly 100 years later, Legendre and Gauss independently developed this curve as the distribution of measurement errors. It came to be poorly named the “law” of errors, misleading many philosophers to argue that random events were therefore lawful and determined by this underlying lawfulness.

In order to derive de Moivre’s curve as the distributions for errors, Legendre and Gauss made three assumptions - that errors are distributed symmetrically around a maximum value, that the value goes to zero for large positive and negative values of x, and that the mean value of errors is the average value, namely zero.

In Laplace’s hands, this tendency for the curve to peak around a maximum at the mean value in the limit of large numbers came to be called the central limit theorem.

Today the principle of indifference (equiprobability assumption), the law of large numbers, and the central limit theorem are three of the fundamental postulates of probability.

Returning to de Moivre’s original work, which was the chance occurrence of random events, it is very important to note that individual events are still very random, despite their asymptotic approach to the normal distribution in the limit of large numbers of events. The material world itself is discrete and random, despite the idealization of the analytical continuous probability curve discovered by de Moivre.

We now have a design for the Glossary page on Information Philosopher and have glossed over 50 terms so far.

See www.informationphilosopher.com/afterwords/glossary/

We announced the new Glossary on the Garden of Forking Paths blog.

The glossary takes advantage of the web to include recursive links to other terms in the glossary, to I-Phi web pages on specific concepts, and external links to Wikipedia or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy where available.

Each term also has a “Search I-Phi” link which retrieves all the web pages mentioning the search term from the Information Philosopher website.

As an example of how the links to other glosses work, consider the gloss for Ethical Fallacy:

We see that limiting free actions to moral/ethical choices is a form of Restrictivism. Clicking on the Restrictivism link goes to:

Here we see that other restrictivists are Peter van Inwagen and Susan Wolf.

You can click on the Search I-Phi links above. They are active.

Since the time of Peter van Inwagen’s 1983 classic Essay on Free Will which introduced the Consequence Argument, John Martin Fischer has been arguing the case for a compatibilism that focuses on moral responsibility and agent control rather than compatibilist free will per se.

Fischer was inspired by Peter Strawson’s influential 1962 essay, Freedom and Resentment, which changed the subject from the intractable free will problem to moral responsibility alone.

As Fischer says in his new 4-volume set Free Will (but mostly about MR and AP), “Some philosophers do not distinguish between freedom and moral responsibility. Put a bit more carefully, they tend to begin with the notion of moral responsibility, and “work back” to a notion of freedom; this notion of freedom is not given independent content (separate from the analysis of moral responsibility). For such philosophers, “freedom” refers to whatever conditions are involved in choosing or acting in such a way as to be morally responsible.” (Free Will, vol.I, p.xxiii)

Fischer also has been influenced by Harry Frankfurt’s attack on what Frankfurt called the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP). Before Frankfurt, compatibilists and incompatibilists alike had argued that alternative possibilities seemed to be a condition not only for free will but for moral responsibility.

Frankfurt’s clever examples changed the debate from compatibilism vs. incompatibilism to the very existence of alternative possibilities.

Although attacks and counterattacks continue, Frankfurt-style examples have become far too arcane and unlikely to win support outside a small number of compatibilists and incompatibilists.

Nevertheless, Fischer has tried to carve out a position called semicompatibilism, which de-emphasizes alternative possibilities and emphasizes agent control.  Fischer hopes that semicompatibilism will be resistant to any discovery by science that strict causal determinism is true. He does this by dividing the needed agent control into two parts, “regulative control” and “guidance control.”

Regulative control involves alternative possibilities, which lead to what Fischer calls “alternative sequences” of action. Fischer thinks he can simply deny that agents have regulative control, and bypass the question of alternative possibilities, based on Frankfurt-style examples.  Although Fischer generally supports Frankfurt-style examples, he is the author of one of the cleverest counterattacks, the idea that the mere possibility that the agent might try an alternative gives rise to a “flicker of freedom” (The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control , p.131-159).

Fischer wants to focus our attention on the more critical guidance control, which describes the “reasons-responsiveness” and “sourcehood” involved in the “actual sequence” of events leading up to the agent’s action. For Fischer, no alternative sequences, however many and however they flicker with freedom, are as relevant as the actual sequence.

Being the source of our actions allows us to say that our actions are “up to us,” that we can take ownership of our actions. This is what Fischer regards as the “freedom-relevant condition.”  It is what Robert Kane calls our “ultimate responsibility (UR).” And it is what Manuel Vargas calls the “self-governance condition” in his Revisionism.

Kane, Vargas, and Derk Pereboom contributed to Fischer’s recent book Four Views on Free Will. Pereboom also focuses on moral responsibility like Fischer, but he disagrees with Fischer that moral desert justifies praise and blame, reward and punishment. At the most, says Pereboom,  responsibility can justify that we can be “legitimately called to moral improvement.” Desert implies retributivism. Pereboom says the most we can justify is moral rehabilitation, for its beneficial consequences to society.

Although Fischer is officially agnostic on the ancient problem of free will versus determinism, he shows a strong commitment to causality and determinism over his years of defending compatibility with determinism.

Nevertheless, Fischer’s dividing of agent control issues into regulative control (involving alternative possibilities) and guidance control (what happens in the actual sequence) is an excellent approach that allows us to situate the indeterminism that many thinkers feel is critical to any libertarian model. Fischer notes that indeterminism in the alternative possibilities might generate “flickers of freedom.” And he says clearly (Four Views, p.74) that guidance control is not enhanced by positing indeterminism.

In his 1998 book Responsibility and Control, written with Mark Ravizza, Fischer describes what he calls the Direct and Indirect Arguments for incompatibilism. The Indirect Argument says that determinism rules out alternative possibilities.  From his semicompatibilist view, that does not threaten moral responsibility. Only in the Direct Argument for incompatibilism does determinism rule out moral responsibility.

So might Fischer agree with a view that 1) allows the “freedom-relevant condition”  (reasons responsiveness and ownership) in the actual sequence to be governed by what he calls “almost causal determinism” (Responsibility and Control, p.15n) and 2) allows indeterminism in the generation of the alternative possibilities (flickers of freedom)?

That is the view we offer in the I-Phi Cogito model. Although they do not endorse it themselves, Daniel Dennett and Alfred Mele have also offered this view as something libertarians should like.

Indeterminism is important only in microscopic structures, but that is enough to introduce noise and randomness into our thoughts, especially when we are rapidly generating alternatives for action by random combinations of past experiences. But our brain and our neurons can suppress microscopic noise when they need to, insuring what we call adequate determinism, what Fischer calls almost causal determinism, and what Ted Honderich calls near determinism - in our willed actions.

In Robert Kane’s contribution to Four Views on Free Will, he correctly identifies noise in messages as generated indeterministically, but mistakenly thinks these are merely a “hindrance or obstacle” that raises our level of effort when making his rare but morally significant “self-forming actions.”

The role of indeterminism in free will is better seen as simply generating Fischer’s AP “flickers of freedom.” These alternative possibilities are then the “free” part of “free will” (Fischer’s regulative control).

The “will” part (Fischer’s guidance control) is “almost causally” determined to be reasons responsive and to take ownership for the determination to act in a fashion consistent with the agent’s character and values.

Event-causal libertarians like Kane and Laura Waddell Ekstrom think this kind of freedom is not enough. And agent-causal libertarians like Randolph Clarke and Timothy O’Connor want even more “metaphysical” freedom. They say that if the will is determined to act in a rational way consistent with its character and values, then the agent will make exactly the same decision in exactly the same circumstances.

Such consistency of action does not bother the common sense thinker or the compatibilist (even a hard incompatibilist?) philosopher.

Kane, Ekstrom, and others continue to invoke some indeterminism in the decision process itself. As Daniel Dennett recommended as early as 1978 (in Brainstorms) and Alfred Mele has been promoting as a “modest libertarianism” in his recent books (Autonomous Agency and Free Will and Luck), indeterminism is best kept in the early stage of a two-stage process.

We first need free (alternative possibilities) and then will (adequately determined actions) in a temporal sequence. First chance, then choice.

I think that John Martin Fischer’s guidance control, perfectly compatible with his “almost causal determinism,” validates not only his semicompatibilist view of moral responsibility, but also supports the common sense or popular view of free will that is found in the opinion surveys of experimental philosophers Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols.

While limited compared to “metaphysical” freedom, this view is consistent with a broadly scientific world view, a requirement for any systematic revisionism that Manuel Vargas calls “naturalistic plausibility” (Four Views, p.153).

Ironically perhaps, this view would be the very opposite of a revisionism, in the sense that the diagnostic (descriptive) analysis of common sense would agree remarkably well with what Vargas calls the prescriptive view for philosophers. Or perhaps it is the philosophers’ views that need revision?

As an illustration of just how naturalistically plausible this new view of free will is, consider the case of biological evolution. The evidence is overwhelming that variations in the gene pool are driven by random mutations in the DNA. Many of these mutations are caused by indeterministic quantum mechanical events, cosmic ray collisions for the most part. Think of the mutations as alternative possibilities for new species. An adequately determined process of natural selection then weeds out those random variations that can reproduce themselves and compete with their ancestors. First chance, then selection.

Indeed, the story of life is maintaining some information stability (parts of our DNA have been the same for 2.8 billion years) in a chaotic environment - and not the pseudo-random deterministic chaos of the computer theorists, but real irreducible chaos.

Only a believer in metaphysical determinism would deny the evolutionary evidence for indeterminism and two stages, the first microscopic and random (chance) the second macroscopic and adequately determined (choice). Sadly, such a metaphysical belief is the intelligent design position of the creationists.

Of course we are discussing only science, not logical certainty.

So we can also ameliorate John Martin Fischer’s nightmare of waking up one morning to a New York Times headline “Causal Determinism Is True”  (Four Views, p.44).

Nothing in science is logically true, in the sense of true in all possible worlds, true by the principle of non-contradiction or the weaker law of the excluded middle.  It is the excluded middle argument that leads us to the muddled standard argument against free will.

Our two-stage argument is quite old. We can trace it back to William James (1884 in The Dilemma of Determinism), Henri Poincaré (1906), Arthur Holly Compton (1935), and Karl Popper (1961).

What does Information Philosophy have to do with the two-stage model?

Information is the principal reason that biology is not reducible to chemistry and physics. Information is what makes an organism an individual, each with a different history. No atom or molecule has a history. Information is what makes us ourselves. Increasing information is involved in all “emergent” phenomena.

In information philosophy, the future is unpredictable for two basic reasons. First, quantum mechanics shows that some events are not predictable. The world is causal but not determined. Second, the early universe does not contain the information of later times, just as early primates do not contain the information structures for intelligence and verbal communication, and infants do not contain the knowledge and remembered experience they will have as adults.

The universe began in a state of minimal information nearly fourteen billion years ago. Information about the future is always missing, not present until it has been created, after which it is frozen.

John Martin Fischer calls this the “Principle of the Fixity of the Past” (Responsibility and Control, p.22). It suggests that even divine foreknowledge is not present in our open expanding universe, lending support to the religious view called Open Theism.

_____________________

I am indebted to Kevin Timpe’s new book Free Will:Sourcehood and its Alternatives, which clarified many of the terms in the current debates and greatly clarified my rereading of Four Views, especially elucidating the positions of Fischer and Vargas.

Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument is an attack on one horn of the two-part standard argument against free will.

informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html

This horn is the Determinism Objection. If all our actions are determined by a causal chain of prior events which goes back to long before our birth, we cannot be responsible for our actions.

The other horn of the two-part argument is the Randomness Objection. If our actions are caused by random events, or if some events in the causal chain were uncaused, we also cannot be responsible for our actions.

In either case, and many philosophers have claimed that these two horns of the dilemma exhaust the possible cases, there is no responsibility.

For many incompatibilist libertarians, van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument was a success, with the result that many more thinkers today call themselves incompatibilist or at least agnostic on determinism.

I propose an attack on the other horn of the dilemma - the Randomness Objection.

The Creative Possibilities Argument

In order to dramatize the situation, it might be helpful to use what Daniel Dennett calls an “intuition pump.” Let us imagine an “anti-Frankfurt demon.”

Where Frankfurt’s intervening demon blocks alternative possibilities so that the agent can still freely choose an alternative that the demon allows, our anti-Frankfurt demon introduces new alternative possibilities into the agent’s mind. And some of these alternatives are generated randomly, for example by using amplified quantum events, to make them irreducibly random.

Let’s call the anti-Frankfurt demon Doyle’s demon.

Where Frankfurt examples subtract alternative possibilities, Doyle examples add alternative possibilities, some of them irreducibly random.

I would like to emphasize that these new possibilities may lead the agent to create new information in the world, like Mozart composing another concerto. That’s why we call it the Creative Possibilities Argument.

The problem before us now is this. Can we be responsible for actions which had their origins in randomly generated creative possibilities?

My answer is yes, but only if the agent’s Will is adequately determined to de-liberate among these creative possibilities and choose one by making a determination that the chosen action is consistent with the agent’s character and values, and in the Mozart example, good enough music to be added to Mozart’s body of work.

What is “adequate determinism?” It is the determinism we have in the real world, which exhibits quantum uncertainty at the microscopic level but enough “certainty” or accuracy at the macroscopic level to send men to the moon and back. The brain is a macroscopic object, large enough to average out or suppress quantum indeterminism - when it needs to.

informationphilosopher.com/freedom/adequate_determinism.html

The brain also has access to single atom or photon events and can access the implicit randomness or uncertainty - when it wants to. If you doubt this, consider that the eye can detect a single photon. The nose can smell a single molecule.

In our Cogito model for free will, we unpack “free will” into “free” and “will,” a temporal sequence between microscopic randomness in our thoughts and macroscopic adequate determinism in our actions, a sequence that generates new information in the world.

informationphilosopher.com/freedom/cogito/

Libertarians will not find the “metaphysical” freedom in the willed decision that they think they need.

Compatibilists and Determinists will be bothered by the injection of randomness into the generation of alternative creative possibilities.

Some libertarians want the agent to be able to act differently in exactly the same circumstances. Apart from the impossibility of “exactly the same circumstances,” what is wrong with the agent making the same decision and acting the same way in essentially similar circumstances? It displays the agent’s character and values, a simple requirement for moral responsibility, right?

Some determinists deny the existence of uncaused causes (causa sui), but they fly in the face of modern physics and simply show what William James called “antipathy to chance.” Their position is similar to  those who favor intelligent design and creationist evolution. They abhor the idea of something truly random happening in the world, perhaps a hangover from the time when chance was regarded as atheistic.

So what do you think? If a Doyle demon planted several random alternative creative possibilities in your mind, if you then de-liberated about the pros and cons of each, comparing them to your past actions and past work, if you then made the determination that one of these was your best alternative, and if your will that chose that action was adequately determined (involved negligible uncertainty), could you feel responsible for such an action?

I assert that if the agent in the Frankfurt example can be held morally responsible, can feel guilty or proud of the result, surely the agent in the Doyle example can also feel good that this is his or her work and can accept praise or blame?

Please note that chance was not the direct cause of the agent’s action. It is just the case that there was a random event earlier in the causal chain. Unless you believe that any random event earlier in a causal chain contaminates that chain forever, you should find that the chosen action was “up to us.”

John Locke liked the idea of Freedom and Liberty. But he thought it was inappropriate to describe the Will itself as Free. He agreed with Hobbes and called Free Will unintelligible, setting a precedent for today’s philosophers.

For Locke the Will is a Determination. It is the Man who is Free. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XXI, Of Power, section 14, he said “I think the question is not proper, whether the will be free, but whether a man be free.” “This way of talking, nevertheless, has prevailed, and, as I guess, produced great confusion.”

Surely some rigorous analytic thinker or ordinary language philosopher should have sorted this confusion  out since 1936 when Moritz Schlick, following Wittgenstein,  called free will a pseudo-problem?

We must limit determinism
but not eliminate it as Libertarians mistakenly think necessary.

We must admit indeterminism
but not permit it to produce random actions as Determinists mistakenly fear.

David Layzer is a Harvard astrophysicist who in the early 1970’s made it clear that in an expanding universe the entropy or disorder would increase, as required by the second law of thermodynamics, but that because the number of phase-space cells was also increasing, the maximum possible entropy of the universe might increase faster than the actual entropy increase.

The difference between the maximum possible disorder and the actual disorder allows for the growth of order in the universe, the subtitle of Layzer’s 1990 book Cosmogenesis.

Layzer pointed out that if the equilibration rate of the matter (the speed with which it redistributes itself randomly among all the possible states) was slower than the rate of expansion, then the “negative entropy” (defined as the difference between the maximum possible entropy and the actual entropy) would increase. Claude Shannon had identified this negative entropy with “information.”

Since James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, most physicists and astronomers believed that the universe began with a high degree of organization or order (or information) and that it had been running down ever since to an ultimate “heat death.” Layzer showed that this standard view was wrong for our expanding universe.

Layzer was perhaps the first to claim that the initial state of the universe lacked significant order or information.

We need not assume, as Clausius and Boltzmann did in the nineteenth century and as many modern astronomers and physicists still do, that the Universe started out with a huge store of order that it has been gradually dissipating ever since. If {this] hypothesis is correct, the initial state of the Universe was wholly lacking in order.
(Cosmogenesis, p.170)

In the opening chapter of Cosmogenesis, Layzer tackled the problems of free will, determinism, and moral responsibility:

Freedom and Necessity

What is the relation between being and becoming? Is the future as fixed and immutable as the past? What is chance? These questions bear on one of the perennial problems of Western philosophy, the problem of freedom and necessity.

Each of us belongs to two distinct worlds. As objects in the world that natural science describes we are governed by universal laws. To Laplace’s Intelligence we are systems of molecules whose movements are no less predicable and no more the results of free choice than the movements of the planets around the Sun. but as the subjects of our own experience we see the world differently; not as bundles of events frozen into the block universe of Laplace and Einstein like flies in amber, but as the authors of our own actions, the molders of our own lives. However strongly we may believe in the universality of physical laws, we cannot suppress the intuitive conviction that the future is to some degree open and that we help to shape it by our own free choices.

This conviction lies at the basis of every ethical system. Without freedom there can be no responsibility. If we are not really free agents — if our felt freedom is illusory — how can we be guided in our behavior by ethical precepts? And why should society punish some acts and reward others? The Laplacian worldview tends to undermine the basis for ethical behavior.

Judeo-Christian theology faces a similar problem. Although Laplace’s Intelligence is not the Judeo-Christian God — Laplace’s Intelligence observes and calculates; the Judeo-Christian God wills and acts (”Necessitie and chance approach not mee, and what I will is Fate,” says the Almighty in Milton’s Paradise Lost)— they contemplate similar universes. Nothing is uncertain for an all-knowing God, and the future, like the past, is present to His eyes. But if we cannot choose where we walk, why should those who take the narrow way of righteousness be rewarded in the next life while those who take the primrose path are consigned to the flames of hell?

Theologians have not, of course, neglected this question. Augustine, for example, argued that God’s foreknowledge (or more accurately, God’s knowledge of what we call the future) doesn’t cause events to happen and is therefore consistent with human free will. Other theologians have embraced the doctrine of predestination and argued that free will is indeed an illusion. Still others have taken the position that divine omniscience and human free will are compatible in a way that surpasses human understanding.

Reconciling the scientific and ethical pictures of the world was a concern of the first scientists. Our scientific picture of the world was foreshadowed by Greek atomism, a theory invented by the natural philosophers Leucippus and Democritus in the fifth century B.C. According to this theory, the world is made up of unchanging, indestructible particles moving about in empty space and interacting with one another in a completely deterministic way. Like modern biologists, Democritus believed that we, too, are assemblies of atoms. Yet Democritus also elaborated a system of ethics based on moral responsibility. He taught that we should do what is right not from fear, whether of punishment or of public disapproval or of the wrath of gods, but in response to our own sense of right and wrong. Unfortunately, the surviving fragments of Democritus’s writings don’t tell us how or whether he was able to reconcile his deterministic picture of nature with his doctrine of moral responsibility.

A century later, another Greek philosopher with similar ideas about physical reality and moral responsibility faced the same dilemma. Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) sought to reconcile human freedom with the atomic theory by postulating a random element in atomic interactions. Atoms, he said, occasionally “swerve” unpredictably from their paths. In modern times, Arthur Stanley Eddington and other scientists have put forward more sophisticated versions of the same idea. According to quantum physics, it is impossible to predict the exact moment when certain atornic events, such as the decay of a radioactive nucleus, will take place. Eddington believed that this kind of microscopic indeterminism might provide a scientific basis for human freedom:

It is a consequence of the advent of quantum theory that physics is no longer pledged to a scheme of deterministic laws. . . . The future is a combination of the causal influences of the past together with unpredictable elements. . [S]cience thereby withdraws its moral opposition to free will.

But neither Epicurus nor Eddington explained what the “freedom” enjoyed by a swerving atom or a radioactive atomic nucleus has to do with the freedom of a human being to choose between two courses of action. Nor has anyone else.
(Cosmogenesis, p.6-7)

Of course many have tried, as we show in our  History of the Free Will Problem.  And we propose our own solution.

In the concluding chapter of Cosmogenesis, Layzer argues for unpredictable creativity in biological evolution and human activity.

Creative human activity is unpredictable in the same way and for the same reasons that biological evolution is unpredictable. Unpredictability, however, is only one aspect of human freedom. We are free because we are, to a considerable extent, the authors of our own lives, and because every human life is something new under the Sun. That is what Democritus and Socrates believed; and if the picture I have sketched in this book is correct in its main outlines, it is also one of the lessons of modern science. Our awareness of the openness of the future and of our own ability to help shape it reflects a deep property of objective reality.

The scientific worldview sketched in the preceding pages offers an alternative to reductionism in both its physical and its biological forms. It shows us that the Universe is more than a collection of elementary particles governed by immutable mathematical laws. Order and the processes that bring order into being lie at the heart of reality. Biological evolution, cultural evolution, and individual human lives not only are the most prolific sources of order in the known Universe, but also are creative. Because of them, the future is genuinely open.

The standard interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics is that the disorder in the universe is increasing. This appears to mean that information should be decreasing.

Some philosophers and scientists took this to mean that all the information existing today must have been present at the creation of the universe. This view was consistent with the idea of an intelligent, all-knowing designer.

Increasing Information. In our open and expanding universe, the maximum possible entropy is increasing faster than the actual entropy. The difference between maximum possible entropy and the current entropy is called negative entropy.

To give this very positive quantity a positive name, we call it “Ergo.”

Ergodic processes have room to increase the information structures in the universe. The Arrow of Time points not only to increasing disorder but also to increasing information.
The universe is its own observer.

“Soft” Causality. Events are always caused but not always determined. An event is caused by prior and proximate events (technically those within its relativistic light cone from the past), but not every event is predictable. Indeed, as logical philosophers would put it, determinism is not true. The determinism we have is merely “adequate determinism“.
Soft causality does not entail strict determinism.

A Corollary. The universe is creative. Information structures and processes are emergent. Deterministic phenomena are emergent. Some laws of nature are emergent. Knowledge of the present did not all exist in the past. The creative process continues. Life and humanity are a part of the process. What gets created is in part our responsibility. We can choose to help create and preserve information. Or we can choose to destroy it.
We are free to create our own future.