Time and Free Will

David Banach

Saint Anselm College

ABSTRACT

            Some things just take time. An action is one of them. Many of the puzzling features of free actions come not from the unique nature of their causal origin, but from the way they exist in time.

            Not everything I do is an action. Obviously, if I am pushed out a window, my falling is not an action. But, more importantly, even events that originate in me need not be my actions: As I walk across the room, the movement of my left pinky finger is not an action; nor is the set of all actions I performed since 10 AM this morning an action. Actions have a unity and integrity in time such that they constitute a single whole. As I walk across the room my stride is a single continuous whole in which each of the changes that make it up are transformed. If I try to decompose my stride into the components that make it up (lift right, shift weight forward, lift left heel, move right foot forward, fall forward, land right foot, etc.) I find that it is no longer walking. An action is a synthetic unity in time that cannot be reduced to the other individual events that compose it and which transforms those component events.

The mystery of follow through is related to this feature of actions: Why do we have to follow through when we throw a ball (or swing a bat, or racket, or golf club), since the follow through occurs after the release point and cannot possibly affect the path of the ball? The answer, of course, is that a swing or throw is a single continuous motion or synthetic unity in which the parts are transformed within the whole. If we want to be doing the right thing at the release point our motion must be part of a whole which contains the follow through, since we will these actions as a continuous whole. The paradigm for this type of unity is the type if unity recognized by Immanuel Kant in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. (Especially, A101-102) Actions, therefore, exist over time in a way that precludes their earlier component from merely causally determining the later components. Obviously, if the release point cannot be what it is apart from the follow through, it cannot determine the follow through. An action exists as a unity in time in a way that precludes it having parts in this sense.

            Typically we understand the problem of free will in terms of the problem of how any event can be free from the causal determination of physical law: There are objects in space with certain properties at each discrete moment of time, and there are laws that govern what object’s properties will follow from these in the next discrete moment of time. We can now use as a model for this the way that a computer can keep track of the properties of each pixel of the screen at each moment of time, and then update each of those pixels according to a program.[1]  As we usually present the problem to our students. Determinism argues that all events, being simply states of objects arising from physical law, must be determined by those laws. Indeterminism argues that there are some events, or states of objects, that are uncaused, or whose causal origin lies in objects or laws outside of the physical domain. Compatibilism or Soft Determinism would hold that there is a subset of objects that comprise the person, however its identity is defined, and that an event is freely chosen if its causal determination lies within the person and not in some external objects. This simple categorization is undermined by looking at the types of causal relations that entities, such as actions, that exist over time have.

            Most of the objects we recognize are not simple elementary particles or sets of elementary particles, but patterns whose salient properties are not the properties of the particles and that only exist over time[2]: Atoms have the chemical properties they do because of the pattern of the motions of the electrons in their orbitals. As a stack of blocks teeters and then falls over, we notice the arc of its fall and its shape as the blocks lose contact with each other for an instant in their descent. Each block acts on the basis of the forces and laws that operated on it in the previous instant. It is not these individual blocks and their physically determined motions that cause what we see, but the formal and spatial relations that constrain the pattern that emerges from them. And these are not themselves components in the descriptions of the properties of the object or the physical laws that govern them. The curve of the tendril of the vine as it grows, is determined on one level by the chemicals that make it up, yet the interactions in space over time that produce the characteristic spiral are not them results of the physical laws that govern each part. The complex pattern that we recognize as the object emerges from the geometric constraints of the interactions of the physical processes in each particle over time. As a flock of geese flies overhead nothing in the laws that govern any particular goose’s flight produces the characteristic V formation. The significant form of each of these phenomena is caused not by the particles and the physical laws that govern them, but by the constraints imposed upon this process by form.[3] This form is not something that exists in the past and causes the present state, but is a set of formal constraints on the interaction of the physical processes over time that makes them more than just a series of discrete temporal states.

            This paper will attempt to argue that free actions are best seen as a species of natural causation that works through this type of formal constraint in processes that occur over time, rather than one of the three types of causal relationships between discrete states of sets of particles described in determinism, indeterminism or compatibilism. Free will is best seen as an ability, evolutionarily acquired, of organisms to represent form and to allow form to organize its activities. Like all things that take time, free actions have additional constraints imposed upon the physical process beyond those imposed by physical laws, constraints that bind the process together into a unity that the individual discrete states that compose it do not have. It is not a matter of whether free actions are events that are not determined by past events, but whether they can best be described, in their salient features, as discrete states of sets of particle at all.