Thursday, January 19, 2023

Is Susan's order of noodles not rice a free choice?


 

It was a question in an online Masterclass: was Susan making a free choice when she ordered noodles instead of rice with her Chinese meal?

Most of us would say at once, Of course. She could have ordered rice if she’d chosen to. Or not ordered rice or noodles and asked for chips that were not even on the menu. Susan can do what she likes. Susan has free will.

Well, has she? Science and thinking about it can suggest otherwise.

I answered first that she did not make a free choice. There were alternatives on the menu, but Susan chose noodles because she wanted noodles, not rice. Obviously. That left her, in effect, with no choice.

Then I thought, it’s a question in a Masterclass. They must expect more thought than the obvious. And so I thought some more.

Did Susan choose noodles because she always chooses noodles? Wouldn’t that suggest that she hasn’t got free will, like I said - that she’s just ‘programmed’ to choose noodles? Then I thought, on the other hand, even if she’s programmed like that, she’s still free to break with the programme. She could order something else, including rice, if she chooses to. And so I changed my answer to she has got free will.

But now I examined my reasons more closely. I was seeing this little Masterclass problem in terms of Susan’s choice, which of course begs the question - meaning the question itself assumes she has a choice. (We all assume that, don’t we?) But what if we don’t have a choice? So I changed again and decided, finally, Susan did not make a free choice. What she wanted determined she would choose noodles, at least on that occasion.

Which means my first, instinctive answer was the right answer, though it didn't explain why. In this way.

The choice and the action are not two ‘events’ - that is, first we decide to have noodles as opposed to rice and then we order noodles. The two are one and the same thing. This idea can be confusing at first, contrary to common sense, but becomes clearer with another example.

I choose to raise my left arm .. and it’s raised. I choose not to raise my left arm .. and so it’s not raised. We believe we’re making a choice between two options when our action must plainly be one. Your arm is raised because you’ve chosen to raise it; or it stays put because you’ve chosen not to raise it. The action does not involve any choice; the action is the choice.

Now that still seems strange, even wrong, until we see there's a quite simple explanation for all this.

Susan could have chosen rice, looking back, because free choice and free will are what we have only when we’re looking back or forward, not faculties we exercise at the time. Occasionally we seem to glimpse and confirm this. We say about something we've done, I felt I had no choice. Is freedom merely what we imagine we have, not a reality?