Free Will vs. Exogenous Agency. A term is born!

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to Exogenous Agency.   When fate first had me create this blog a couple of days ago, the intention was to create a “Flickers of Freedom” like site for academic determinists.  Now it has me thinking that I should just use it as a personal blog, and create a separate one for the academics.

What is exogenous agency?  I haven’t gotten around to creating an about page yet, but essentially the term is meant to address a conceptual/linguistic problem with the free will vs. determinism debate.   What’s the problem?   Ask yourself; do we humans have a free will or…?  That’s the problem.  At that point you could say “is everything deterministic?”  But that doesn’t solve the problem because many people (not me) believe that some natural events are random, in the sense of uncaused.  You might want to amend the question to: do we humans have a free will, or is everything deterministic or random?  At that point, the conceptualization and phrasing becomes awkward.

Or, consider this question: are we free agents or…?  We’re faced with the same problem.  Essentially the problem is that, hopefully until now, there has not been a linguistically parallel antonym to the terms free will and free agency.

Introducing EXOGENOUS AGENCY.  What does it mean?  Well, here’s the first definition that came up when I did a Google search for exogenous –

Adjective:  1. Of, relating to, or developing from external factors.  2. Growing or originating from outside an organism.

What does “agency” mean?  Here’s the relevant definition –

Noun:  the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power

So, putting them together, we arrive at the concept of deciding on or initiating an action that has developed, grown, or, most precisely, originated from outside of the organism.  And that’s exactly what we human beings do any time we think, feel or do anything.  In other words, not only do we humans not have a free will, technically, we don’t even have a will

Why not?  Let’s first dispense with the notions of free will and human will as they apply to the prospect of randomness, in the salient sense of acausality.  If what we think, feel or do is random in this sense, then there is absolutely no way we can logically attribute those actions to ourselves.  Now we move on to causality. If events, including human thoughts, feelings and actions, are not random, then they absolutely must be caused.  There is no third option.  It is black and white.  Conceptually and empirically, something can be either caused or uncaused.  If you doubt this, just try to describe what this third option would actually be.

So, if everything that is not random, or uncaused, has a cause, that means that every human thought, feeling and action must have a cause.  Don’t get caught up in what the cause actually is.   Or, if you want the most general and comprehensive cause to anything and everything that happens in our universe, we can designate its cause as the state of the universe immediately preceding the caused event.

Let’s work with a choice, any choice.  Our choice has a cause.  That cause must either have a cause or be random or uncaused.  Since we’ve already explained how randomness, or acausality, makes free will impossible, we’ll just stick to causality for this example.  Our choice has a cause, and the cause of that cause has a cause.

At this point, keep in mind that a cause, by definition, must come before its event.  This is true notwithstanding physical relativistic factors because we are considering completely local phenomena.  In other words, you can’t apply the twins paradox to our causal chain because it is happening within one, and not two, time-frames, and because it is not happening at a speed approaching the speed of light.

To further illuminate all of this, let’s begin by referring to the cause of our choice as the brain state immediately preceding the choice.  So, that state is caused by the one immediately before it, and that state is caused by the one immediately before it.  We are now going back in time, moment by moment, brain state by brain state, in a causal manner.  This is what is referred to as a causal regression.

At some point, we discover that our chain of cause and effect takes us all of the way back in time to when our chooser’s brain suddenly emerged as a structure in the developing embryo.  But causal chains do not just stop because, remember, everything that is not random must have a cause.  Again, I want to emphasis that there is nothing in nature that is random in the sense of uncaused, but because the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics and other interpretations of quantum phenomena have so completely confused some of us, I’ve explained that random or uncaused choices cannot, by definition, be attributed to anything, including human wills.

So, we follow our chain of cause and effect to whatever physiological state caused the first brain cell to divide and the chooser’s human brain to begin to take form, leading to the brain states that ultimately led to our chooser’s choice.  At this point we can keep following the states of the developing embryo back in time, cause by cause, to conception.

At this point something interesting and absolutely relevant happens.  The causal regression behind our choice has now moved back in time to before the person making the choice was actually a person.  Pretty amazing, right?

And we could keep following that regression back in time, moment by moment, all of the way back to the Big Bang if we wanted.  But that’s not really necessary to our present purpose.  What we’ve just shown is that the cause of our choice did not originate in the chooser.  What does that mean?  Well, it means that the “chooser” did not really choose anything.  He or she simply played out the choice that was caused by events preceding the chooser’s birth.

That is why we humans do not technically have a will, and why if we don’t have a will we can’t in any sense, compatibilist or otherwise, say that we humans have a free will.  Both randomness and causality, as just explained, make free will completely impossible.

So, if we don’t have a free will, what we have is exogenous agency.  We act out the choices of whatever initiated the causal regression that ultimately results in our choice.   As far as we know, that’s the Big Bang, but that’s only as far as we know.

And if we are not free willers, what are we?  We are exogenous agents.  Which reminds me, if I create another separate blog where academic philosophers and scientists who understand that free will is an illusion can post articles, that’s probably what I would call it.  Not as a result of any free will, or will that I clearly and obviously do not have.  But as a result of AUTONOMOUS AGENCY.

I hope you enjoyed my first post here.  Let’s see if the Big Bang (if you’re religious, you could say God) has me follow up soon with another.

Finally, if you want to better understand why we humans do not have a will or a free will in many other ways, and why our understanding this matters, check out my website Exploring the Illusion of Free Will.