Free will: a human, fuzzy, chaotic process.

In keeping with the policy of The Humanist to consider the diverse social, political, and philosophical viewpoints of its readers, this feature has been reinstituted to allow expression of alternative opinions to issues previously raised within these pages.

Editor's Note:

Given the nearly every letter and phone call we received in response to the March/April 1996 cover story was negative, it seems in order to present an alternative humanist viewpoint on the "free will" dilemma. So here it is, not a response to Thomas Clark but, rather, an article that presents its own case.

Sally is making a matrimonial choice between Charlie and Fred. She picks Fred. Sally feels that she has exercised free will in making her decision. Has she? Is there such a thing?

Most readers of this essay will have settled for themselves, however tentatively, the question of whether or not human beings have free will. But perhaps it is time to revisit the concept in light of two relatively new ideas: chaos in science and fuzzy logic in mathematics.

Free Will--The Traditional Perspective

For most people with a philosophical inclination, the possible answers to the problem of free will are limited. If one has decided that there are supernatural powers, free will is generally regarded as having been granted by a supreme being and the question is settled. If one decides that there are no supernatural powers, one must look to naturalistic solutions to the question of free will.

Naturalistic answers lie in the domain of science, which has as an axiom that the mechanism of cause and effect is a requirement for scientific explanation (determinism). If one accepts science as a foundation of "naturalistic truth" (no capital "t"), one accepts cause and effect. In this framework, if one is logically rigorous, one must come to the logical conclusion that there is no such thing as human free will, since all events are determined.

Traditionally, there is no satisfactory way out of this dilemma. According to the doctrine of determinism, Sally's decision has been predetermined by precursor events, but she cannot perceive this as she conducts her "decision-making" process. People, being what they are, cannot help but think they make their own decisions. Alas, the universe fools mere humans in many ways (the sun certainly does appear to revolve around the earth until one learns the deeper scientific rules), free will being one of them.

People have attempted to find a way out of universal physical determinism through metaphysics (invoking other than naturalistic forces) or through quantum physics (that is, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). These efforts have proved to be generally unsatisfactory. But consider what happens to the human decision-making process if the principle of cause and effect is violated, nullified, or made a function of randomness. Clearly and simply, the person can no longer rely upon his or her choices during decision making. That is, if the links between the person's reasons for a choice and the choice itself are broken by some outside force or uncertainty, then uncertainty and perhaps randomness enter into the "free will" . Any break in cause and effect leads to a negation of free will because the result depends on a force other than the individual.

Given this basis, can there be free will in a deterministic universe? In the traditional approach to the question, the answer is no. We will argue that the answer is yes, but that such an answer clearly demands the introduction of new mechanisms to explain free will. These mechanisms include the scientific concept of chaos and the mathematical concept of fuzzy logic, which once understood, will result in the dethronement of much of Western Aristotelian thinking.

Free Will in a Nontraditional Sense

Humans know they exist (cogito ergo sum). Human consciousness exists; we will take this as a given. Consciousness is a product of the biological body, including the brain and its coupled reservoirs of information (hereditary and learned).

From consciousness arises a number of constructs. Most humans know love exists, as do fear, tribal loyalty, envy, and many other human attributes. Humans also know that they have free will. Everyone does, after all, discern its existence. We simply have--and always have had--a great deal of intellectual trouble justifying its reality.

The traditional deterministic philosophic position has been that, since there is no physical free win in the universe, there cannot be any human free will. This is a trite and foolish conclusion. One may as well say that, since deterministic molecular reactions don't have "love," then humans can't display this attribute.

Human love exists because humans, in certain circumstances, generate a combination of hormones, physical responses, thoughts, feelings, and verbalizations, and this set of phenomena is given, in English, the name love. In a similar fashion, human free will exists because aspects of the human body/mind create a set of conditions that can be given the name free will. Free will is a human condition born of biological evolution, not of some undiscovered physical force in the universe.

Conditions of Free Will

What are the necessary conditions which have evolved in humans to produce free will? The two attributes are power and preference, and both are required for the exercise of free will.

Power is a necessary but not sufficient condition to effect a decision in the free will process. One must have the power to make a given choice, and in general the limits of this power have been established by human evolution, individual biology, and a lifetime of learning and living. For example: humans do not have the power to fly without machines; humans born blind have no power to distinguish between a red flower and a green one; certain types of deprived babies seem to lack the power to bond to others love); people who have inherited riches can access more of the options that require economic means (power to buy).

Preference is also a necessary but not sufficient condition to effect a decision in the free win process. Preference is a feeling, statement, or action of choice. Statements such as "I favor the Ford car over the Toyota," "I feel I love Fred:" and "If I had a million dollars, I would move to France" are all statements of preference.

One may have power and not preference (I can go to a movie, but I don't feel like it today) or preference and not power (I would like to go to France, but I don7t have the money), but neither alone is capable of being carried forward into actual decisions. When a person buys brand X over brand T, he or she acts on both power and preference. The person has the power to buy either, and the preference is for brand X.

Free Will and Chaos

For most people, understanding the preference aspects of free with decision, making has been obfuscated by the dormant concept of physical determinism and our societal heritage of Western thinking patterns. We were carefully trained that our world is one in which humans make logical decisions. In addition, we have been tricked by our science teachers. Remember when they told us to "ignore friction, air forces, and minor perturbations at the extremes of the data"?

Science instruction led many of us through a physical world that was constructed of nice, clean, logical, linear relationships. We studied one linear system at a time: one pendulum, two electric charges, one falling bar, the gravitational pull between earth and moon. We were told we could solve problems in a logical fashion. Many of us generalized that concept to form a world view that humans operate in a logical fashion. Did any of your science teachers ever tell you, "That's not the way the world actually works"?

But lo and behold, most of the phenomena in which we are interested (weather, wind, digestion, sex, evolution, revolution, decision,making, and so forth) are not simple linear functions. Worse yet, not only are they nonlinear but each is the result of a multitude of nonlinear functions. The result is chaos. Not human chaos but, rather, scientific chaos, deterministic but noncomputable.

Scientific chaos has nothing to do with randomness or lack of cause and effect. Every event in a chaotic system (such as a weather front) is strictly deterministic. A chaotic system is one in which a number of nonlinear functions interact deterministically in a manner such that the outcomes cannot be predicted by humans, even with massive computers.

What role does chaos play in free will? Simply put, most important human free will decisions are made concerning chaotic events. Even in a fairly straight, forward situation (say, the purchase of a car), there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nonlinear functions creating a decision-making process that is chaotic. A really complicated decision might involve emotional and financial problems: "Should I move out of the old homestead and marry Fred? Mother doesn't like him, and he has this drinking problem, but I think I can get him to stop and we'd be spending less money than we do now, and.

The upshot is this: in important human problems, there is no such thing as making a logical decision in the midst of chaos. One uses the resources at hand (feelings, conscious and unconscious knowledge, hereditary information, and so forth) to arrive at a decision--a preference. One of the strengths of the mammalian mind is the ability to make sense out of multitude of inter, acting chaotic systems.

If one has the power to actualize a given preference, the conscious mind, reflecting on the decision, cause it "free will."

Free Will and Fuzzy Logic

How does one come to a preference without using logic? A mathematical system called fuzzy logic probably provides a current model of how the human mind reaches conclusions, determines preferences, and generates feelings and feelings statements about the result.

The term fuzzy logic was generated in 1962 by Lofti Zadeh and perhaps was ill,chosen. In general, fuzzy has the connotation of being hazy, indistinct, loose, or not well founded. Fuzzy logic itself is none of these; it is a mathematical framework of axioms and propositions. Fuzzy logic is not fuzzy in the traditional sense of the word, nor is it logical in the Aristotelian sense.

In school we were indoctrinated in traditional logic with firm boundaries. In traditional Aristotelian logic, everything in the world is divided into distinct sets. For example, "apples" is a set; as every kindergarten teacher strives to make clear, any given object belongs either to the apples" or the "not-apples" set. This way of looking at things permeates our thinking. Through, out our lives, we have used this "crisp" or Western Aristotelian logic.

But suppose we show you an apple and ask, "Is this an apple or not an apple?" (That is, does it belong to the set called apples or the set called not, apples?) You respond, "It belongs to apples:" of course. Then a bite is taken out of the apple and the question is re,asked, and this process continues until you are in a quandary. Sooner or later you will have to switch from apple to not-apple if you are to accurately reflect the reality you observe, but that point can never be clearly defined. Such would not be the case for fuzzy logic, which is not confined to apple or not apple but is free to construct a mode called part,apple, part not-apple."

Fuzzy logic theory has lots to say about words, which seem to be the principle human method of information, processing and communication. Zadeh has pointed out that most words are fuzzy These include any adjectives or adverbs (tall, warm, gently), nouns (apple, car, mountain) and verbs (run, sell, avoid). Others who have spoken to the issue (for ample, Bertrand Russell and Bart Kosko) have declared that every, thing is fuzzy except numbers.

The use of words in describing complex systems led Zadeh to state his law of incompatibility: "As complexity rises, precise statements lose meaning and meaningful statements lose precision"--that is, as a system becomes more complex, one's ability to make precise statements or decisions about it decreases. In a complex situation (in which we would place almost all human decisions of any importance), a person simply cannot marshal enough meaning or precision to make a logical decision.

What humans can do (and do exceedingly well) is to summarize existing knowledge concerning a situation and to make "shorthand" feelings statements--that is to say, fuzzy logic preferences.

Briefly, fuzzy logic is the mathematical system that models the way humans process words. It is a tool to better understand the way in which the mind produces preferences. A preference may be defined as a distillation of fuzzy knowledge about chaotic events that results in the making of a choice between two or more fuzzy options. More often than not the choice is expressed in a simple fuzzy verbal statement ("Marrying Charlie would be a bad choice").

Free Will Redux 

Using the term free will in association with physical systems such as atoms and molecules is a meaningless pursuit. However, free will in humans is as real as is thinking, consciousness, or love. Free will is the human capability of implementing a preference which is the result of the conscious brains interpretation of a chaotic environment (in the scientific sense) using decision processes described by fuzzy logic (in the mathematical sense). The fact that the universe is deterministic or strictly dictated by cause and effect does not negate the fact that humans cut their way through the fuzzy, chaotic world to make their power and preferences known, both to themselves and to others.

Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell are a husband and wife writing team with independent businesses. They coauthored Teachers, Computers, and Curriculum Allyn and Bacon) and are authors of other professional publications. Geisert's doctoral degree is in instructional systems, and Futrell's is in curriculum and instruction. Both have spent a number of years teaching science at all educational levels.