The Objectivist Account of Free Will is Nonsense

Ayn Rand, Objectivism’s creator and primary advocate, argued against biological determinism in favor of a view that regarded man as a free agent with real choices available to him. Her stance on free will can be summed up by the following quote: Because man has free will, no human choice—and no phenomenon which is a product of human choice—is metaphysically necessary. In regard to any man-made fact, it is valid to claim that man has chosen thus, but it was not inherent in the nature of existence for him to have done so: he could have chosen otherwise. Choice, however, is not chance. Volition is not an exception to the Law of Causality; it is a type of causation. She never attempted to explain what precisely she meant by this, or how it was supposed to work. Her understanding of the issue was fuzzy at best. When one further investigates her claims, obvious inconsistencies appear. The untenability of her stance is hard to miss when one considers it within the context of Objectivism as a whole.Ayn Rand claimed she wasn’t a materialist. However, considering that she viewed all phenomena, including mental phenomena, as explicable in physical in terms - that is, in direct correspondence with the physical world - one wonders what on earth she meant by this. She rejected all forms of idealism, but held that man’s consciousness (which she often referred to as his “soul”) gave him volitional powers. She held that consciousness couldn’t exist without a brain, implying that consciousness derives its properties from the workings of the physical world. If nothing happens by chance - which she ensures us is the case- then everything happens according to fixed laws. And if everything happens according to fixed laws, then the physical substrate of consciousness i.e., the brain, behaves in fixed ways, and our “freedom” is merely an illusion...our consciousness amounts to an irrelevant sideshow compulsively played out by our deterministic brains. This insistence on determinism is precisely why Objectivism takes issue with quantum mechanics, which asserts that distributed physical laws alone cannot account for any state of the universe. Objectivism rejects any notion of “probabilistic freedom”, demanding that every state of the universe be absolutely explicable in terms of its prior state. Ayn Rand was an advocate of compatibilism, the view that “free will and determinism are compatible ideas, and that it is possible to believe both without being logically inconsistent.” Ayn Rand wanted to have her cake and eat it too. She wanted the universe to be free from uncertainty while at the same time wanting humans to possess a degree of freedom that was not justifiable. For how can volition be a bona fide source of causation if it is the product of consciousness which is the product of the brain - the behavior of which is the product of determinism laws? If volition cannot in any way contradict the structure of the brain from which it arises, and if the brain must behave according to its intrinsic causal nature as determined by its material configuration (which must be fixed, since A is A) then where’s the freedom? Volition would merely be the acting out - the inevitable realization - of a deterministic universe. If volition is not a material process, then what is it? A mental process? If it’s a mental process, then how does the mental process exist except as an isomorphism (one-to-one mapping) of a physical process? If physical processes can unfold in more than one way, then the Objectivist account of causality falls apart. And if they can’t unfold in more than one way, then we can choose only that which we, ultimately, must “choose.” If our will is itself determined, then calling it “free” makes little sense. Ayn Rand defended the existence of free will with the following argument: denying the existence of free will is contradictory, since if we don’t have free will, then we can’t be certain that we haven’t been forced to think incorrectly. I suppose Ayn Rand thought this argument was very clever. However, it doesn’t work. For every thought we have, we can be certain we were not forced to think otherwise. So when we follow a valid chain of reasoned thought, we can be sure we were not destined to be irrational. Valid thinking is self-evidently valid; we needn’t be infallible to argue that X=X, since it is true by definition. Thus, there’s no way we could have been forced to think incorrectly, or have incorrect views about what is incorrect, when faced with self-evident truth. Secondly, claiming that deterministic minds cannot be certain of their own rationality is itself contradictory if we are, in fact, deterministic minds. In order for that argument to work, it must take for granted that which it attempts to prove: that we aren’t deterministic minds. Thirdly, this argument - in light of my earlier criticisms - at best establishes a paradox. I.e., we would be forced to conclude that we both do and do not possess free will. In order to resolve the paradox my opponent must defeat my earlier criticisms without appealing to the notion that denying the existence of free will is contradictory.