Free will without logic and causality is useless, because while we may be free to choose, we won't be able to tell what we're choosing. Imagine a world where there is no strict relationship between cause and effect. In this world, events would seem completely random. I could choose to open the refrigerator, but it might spontaneously close itself a moment later. Or, it might stay open, but the little light might not come on. This means that I would not be truly “free” to turn on the light in the refrigerator, because whether it came on or not would be purely a matter of chance and I would have no influence upon it. Free will only makes sense in the context of a universe with a high degree of predictability and stable rules of cause and effect.
If free will only makes sense in the context of an ordered universe, which works like a long line of dominoes of cause and effect, then our “choices” are little more than the decisions about where to set up dominoes that will fall later in the chain. I do not choose to tip over every domino in a chain. In fact, even if I set up the dominoes quite carefully, I don’t even know for certain that each one will tip over. This small degree of uncertainty about the dominoes represents the uncertainty that we humans have about the physical universe. We assume that rocks don’t suddenly leap up off the ground, but they could, in a theoretical sense, do just that, according to the laws of quantum mechanics. In fact, individual atoms do weird things like that all the time. The probability that all (or even most) of the atoms in the rock spontaneously decide to move in a gravity-defying direction, though, is so small that you might have to live for trillions of years just to see that happen with one pebble, somewhere on the earth, one time. Even in trillions of years, it’s unlikely that it would happen.
We might have another choice beyond the choice of where to set up our dominoes, though. In fact, none of us really tips over the first domino. Our very births are just dominoes in some existing chain. But, we might have the ability, metaphorically, to tip over dominoes “out of order” like an eager kid starting in the middle of a long line because he’s eager to see that line of dominoes fall.
We might also have the choice available to us of what dominoes we see fall. We might be able to choose to watch one trail of dominoes now and another later. We might not restrict our perspective to watching a single trail of causes and effects. The importance of this choice should not be overlooked because if no one ever chose to look in a certain direction, at lines of dominoes off in some dark corner of a room, we might never even know those dominoes exist.
These few choices are the main (perhaps only) ways in which we can express our free will, which is dependent on the order and causality in the universe, the rules of physics, and the relationships between causes and effects maintaining a degree of consistency over time (predictability). The ironic conclusion is that in a world with no “lines of dominoes” – a world in which things happen arbitrarily – we are not free to choose our paths.
We must then, be chained to the laws of cause and effect in order to be free, the same way we must have limited rights under our government to maintain our liberty. For example, if I am free to kill at will, I can deprive you of your freedom to live, and thereby, your free will. Such is the order of the universe. It is a paradox that freedom can only exist partially, and partial freedom sometimes seems like no freedom at all.
There are many odd implications of this idea that freedom is inherently partial. First it means that, the same way a society cannot be organized by anarchy, truly free will on the part of its participants is an impossible way to organize the universe. Truly and completely free will is not possible without cause and effect, and cause and effect can exist only in an ordered universe. An ordered universe has rules, and these rules place limits upon the imposition of our wills. These conclusions raise moral, ethical, and philosophical conclusions: are people who don’t understand cause and effect less free?
Intelligence, logic, and even religious faith are ways of decoding, demystifying, or subjugating the seeming arbitrariness of the universe. Gravity seemed completely arbitrary until it was understood by Newton. Gravitational effects on an interstellar or light-speed scale seemed arbitrary until Einstein refined Newton’s theories of gravity. If education or faith reduces arbitrariness, do they then increase free will? Am I making a “more free” choice if I do so within the context of a greater understanding of how the universe would work should I make no choice (or a different choice)? In some ways, this feels intuitively correct. If I truly have no clue who I am voting for (if I just choose the longest name, or the one that comes first alphabetically), have I exercised less free will than someone who consciously votes for a particular candidate for particular reasons? If I have no idea how to drive a car, should my “choice” to steer it into a lake be viewed in the same way as a similar choice by Dale Earnhardt Jr.
There is also a further moral implication. If someone has no understanding of cause and effect, if they can’t predict what will happen tomorrow, what have I really done if I throw them in jail? What have I taken away from them? As far as they understood the world, this might have happened, anyway. Uncomfortable as this implication may be, it seems that if a person were completely unable to predict events, and therefore completely unable to exercise free will, then he would have no freedom for me to take away by my putting him in chains. This sounds silly, and it doesn’t apply to humans very well, but it’s exactly the argument we use for other living organisms. We treat plants as if they have no free will (and they don’t seem to). Whether it is sunny, whether they are watered by rain, or whether they are eaten by animals appear, from the plants’ points of view, to be completely arbitrary events. Since plants have no free will, we have no qualms about deciding to lock them up, move them around, or kill and eat them.
Perhaps the most relevant implication, though, concerns education. Because understanding the universe reduces arbitrariness, and in a world with less arbitrariness -- a world in which we can see all the perfect lines of dominoes as they are -- we have the most true freedom to choose what to look at and if or how to interfere with the lines of dominoes. Education, logic, intellect, or religion -- anything that helps us understand the universe -- sets us free.
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