Free Will Confusion

I enjoyed a recent article in the review section of the Guardian Weekly, which started by discussing some new research about twins.

Twins are the dream of anthropologists, especially twins sharing identical genetic code, since they help research about the balance between nature and nurture. There have been some extraordinary findings. Apparently one pair of twins, separated soon after birth and unaware of each others’ existence, went on to marry a girl of the same first name, then divorce her, then marry again to women of another shared first name.

Of course there are lots of other twin pairs who do no such thing. If you make your sample size big enough, you’ll always find some outliers that feel amazing. Miracles may or may not happen, but there are so many events in the world that some things take place that feel as though they must be miracles.

Nonetheless, the new research does conclude that nature does have a larger role in our choices and our outcomes than was previously established. Experiments with twins have concluded that there is a higher degree of predetermination in our lives than earlier research. Some have gone so far as to claim that we hardly have free will at all, and we are somehow hardwired to take a certain direction.

I am not surprised by the findings. There is a certain mystery to our genes. I have similarities to my parents and to my sibling that I can’t really explain. Even in a situation where we could not possibly have shared an environmental experience, we seem to be drawn the same way, to an uncanny extent.

My suspicion is that most of us share these sensations and find them uneasy, so we rarely articulate them or even admit them to ourselves. Due to our nature, we are always searching out our blemishes and our vulnerabilities, and we see them in our parents and our siblings, usually unconsciously.

Watch how we all treat our close blood relatives. They annoy us much more easily than anyone else. We treat them with shocking disrespect, much more willing to criticize than a situation warrants. They can bring out our best, but far more often they bring out our worst. I think this is because somehow we see in them what we like least about ourselves, facets that we resent and regret. We are not lashing out at them, but at ourselves, or at least our creator or our own characters.

This must be especially difficult for twins. I have only known one twin really closely, and indeed her relationship with her twin sister seemed to have a far deeper impact on her life than I could easily explain, and usually in a mutually damaging way.

The Guardian article went on to discuss how difficult we find the nature or nurture question, This field is a bit like evolution or some others, in that in goes uncomfortably near to core beliefs or fears or perceived wisdom.

A lot of this is about sin and judgment. We have to believe in free will, or how can we do good or evil, except as somehow preordained? If somehow our free will does not exist or is somehow highly limited, how can we judge others? In particular, how can we justify punishing others, if really they had little or no choice over their actions? And how does a human preordination square with a different belief in a divine one?

Separately, there is a fear about our power and even our purpose. If all we do is act out our fate, why do we get so anxious about it? How can we be so self-important? How can we see ourselves as superior to others or even to animals?

This can all be very uncomfortable. If that gives us pause to question our easy judgment of others and our support for punishment over reconciliation, then that is only good. Similarly, it can only be good if it gives us pause to consider whether we really should be defending our relative privileges, for example in welfare or immigration policy.

The article explains that it does not help that we are somehow taught to think of free will in terms of binary choices – perhaps again influenced by the binary notion of sin or goodness. We somehow consider our lives as a long series of binary choices. If even the choice between turning left or right is somehow preordained by genes, we feel powerless or even worthless.

Like the article, I am happy to accept a more prosaic mathematical explanation. Most things we do are from a spectrum of options rather than binary alternatives. Even binary alternatives are so many and overlapping that it feels like a spectrum. In every case, we have complete free will over our choice. But the choices have a range of probabilities based on context.

So for each choice in our lives, the probability distribution may be a sort of bell curve. The most likely value and spread of that curve will depend on everything my brain knows about that choice based on the current situation, everything that occurred in my past and everything in the past of my parents and grandparents and ancestors. In as much as I am hard-wired, it is the wiring that determines the boundaries of the choice. It does not make the choice for me, but makes some outcomes more likely than others. Someone else facing the identical choice would have a different set of probabilities.

I don’t find this scary at all. My free will is intact. So is that of everyone else. But it does explain how my parents and grandparents continue to affect my life. If I had a twin, it would help to explain any uncanny similarities in how we might see the world, and it helps me better understand my sister.

Does this contradict God? I don’t think so, at least if we explain God as a mysterious higher power rather than some controller of the universe. It helps me to see how extraordinary our existence is, and how little control we have, even though we have so much free will and control. Life is just an unimaginably complex algorithm, made up of interlinking probabilistic choices going back to the start of time. That makes me feel humble, and gives me a sense of awe. In my understanding of God, those are good things.

It also gives a little bit of insight into a belief of Hinduism and some other religions, that of reincarnation. I had previously thought of this as one of the human constructs about life after death. Some sort of perennial league table across multiple lives seems to give us more purpose and hope, as well as a way for the powerful to exploit others. But I wonder if there was additional origin, based on people noticing strange family connections across generations. It is a short step from noticing an uncanny shared trait of someone with their grandfather towards believing in some sort of reincarnation.

This also recalls a book from my childhood that I remember a teacher reading to us and that I found scary. Someone in the book was invited to go back in time, many thousands of years. But because everything in the present was influenced by everything in the past, preparations had been made so that nothing should be disturbed, in the form of some sort of safe path. In the event, the protagonist carelessly strayed from the path and squashed a small creature. On returning to the present, everything was subtly different. Sensing this, the organisers killed the protagonist.

Ever the logician, I remember thinking how the plot didn’t quite square up. If things were different, how could the organisers tell, since their own lives must have been different too? This only made me think harder and be more scared, and it made we want to watch the next episode of Doctor Who even more than before.

For all its flaws, I find the plot of the book quite helpful, as it does get across this concept of unimaginably interlinked history. Now I can understand this concept better, I actually find it reassuring and empowering. Thank you Guardian weekly, its reporters and the researchers who helped to make this clearer.