{"id":1226,"date":"2025-10-30T11:13:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T18:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/?p=1226"},"modified":"2025-10-30T14:15:52","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T21:15:52","slug":"the-bicycle-theory-of-free-will","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/2025\/10\/30\/the-bicycle-theory-of-free-will\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bicycle theory of Free Will"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This is one of my favorite bikes (I have 8 and they are all my favorites). This is the one I ride to places like this where I like to camp out in the woods. I can move freely around on this bike, but only because its mechanisms turn freely. This bike is a fully deterministic system. The wheels are determined to turn efficiently when I pedal them, but only because the drive train of the bike is clean, well lubricated and well adjusted. It is much harder for this bike to move around in the world if the gears are poorly adjusted, or if the bearings are worn out, the chain is dirty or rusty, the wheels aren’t true, etc. etc. This bike rolling freely and taking me where I want to go depends on several functional modules working well and being well integrated with each other. Whether the bike’s mechanisms function freely doesn’t depend on violating deterministic laws of motion. Nor would the bike function more freely if it could behave other than it is caused to behave. To the contrary, the bike rolling freely depends on it functioning in accordance with laws of nature. In particular, its functioning freely depends on causal inputs it receives when I do regular maintenance and repair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A mechanism like this bike affords a helpful analogy for understanding how compatibilist and incompabilist conceptions of free will differ. Incompatibilists take having free will to be incompatible with causal determinism, the view that every event is causally determined in accordance with laws of nature given the prior state of the world. Every event includes our own actions. So according to causal determinism, when we make a choice and formulate a will to act in a particular way, we could not have made a different choice or acted differently. Our traditional western way of thinking about free will takes acting of our own free will to mean we could have chosen to act differently. This is known as the “libertarian” conception of free will (not to be confused with the political philosophy of the same name).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The libertarian view of free will takes the will to function independent of the broader causal fabric of the world. The will is conceived to be determined only by us as agents. This requires some philosophical understanding of how agents like us could be uncaused causes of our will and action. No viable theory of “agency causation” has emerged. Meanwhile, biology and neuroscience now provide a decent understanding of how causal biological processes do shape our will and action. So, the libertarian view of free will, as appealing as it is to our self-aggrandizing egos, is pretty-much dead in the water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, as far back as Hume, philosophers have proposed compatibilist conceptions of free will, ways of understanding what it means to have free will that are compatible with causal determinism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On various compatibilist conceptions of free will, having free will is more like having (or perhaps being) a well-maintained bicycle, one that functions freely (which in turn allows you to ride far, efficiently and joyfully). So, what does this look like in more detail. We will need to build a picture of how the mind functions in formulating our will and motivating our choices and actions. Here’s a simplified model. We make our choices and formulate our will through the operation and interaction of a couple of mental modules. One generates representations of how things are in the world. Another generates motivating desires based on our tastes, values, and the things we care about. We then reflect on what matters to us most and how best to achieve that given what we believe. Through this deliberation process we formulate a will to act. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we’ve just described is basic belief\/desire “folk psychology.” It should seem pretty familiar since we ordinarily explain peoples’ choices and actions in terms of what they believe and what they desire (hence “folk” psychology). There are three mental modules involved in this picture of will formation, the representational module (responsible for belief formation), the motivational module (responsible for desire formation based on the things you care about) and the deliberation module (responsible for integrating the other two in determining how to maximize desire satisfaction based on beliefs). For your mind to be functioning freely (like my favorite bicycles), is for each of these modules to be functioning well and interacting well with the others. Critical thinking is about tuning up your representational module (forming beliefs on the basis of the best reasons and evidence). Your desire generating module functions best when you critically reflect on what you care about, get clear on your values (ethical and otherwise), and generate desires in line with these (see Harry Frankfurt for more on this). You deliberate well when you formulate your will in line with beliefs that are the product of critical thinking and well considered desires that align with your values and the things that you care about. For our will to be free is just for our mind to be functioning well in each of these modes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, there you go. Free will, according to a compatibilist conception, isn’t about how you could have done otherwise, but rather it’s more like riding a bike. And what more joyful freedom could a person ask for!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m sure you see the limits of my analogy. My bike camping bike still requires a rider with a will. So, of course, you aren’t just like that bike. Your mind is more like an autonomous self-riding bike. We could frame the analogy in terms of more autonomously functioning mechanisms like weathervanes, but I like bikes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The important point of the analogy still holds. Free will, on compatibilist conceptions, can’t be taken for granted as a built-in part of human nature (if there even is such a thing). Rather, free will, as an aspect of a freely functioning mind, is something we can attain to greater or lesser degrees depending how it is cultivated and nourished. Whether your mind functions freely, whether you have free will, has a great deal to do with the care it receives. The care and maintenance of the freely functioning mind includes lots of things like education, friends and family, community, health care, spiritual nourishment, economic opportunity (the ability to participate in the reciprocal “taking care of” that happens in healthy communities) and probably a good deal more. A society that doesn’t help to maintain all these things in good working order for its citizens will be a society of less freely functioning people with less free wills. At this point, the philosophy of free will leads us to broader issues of ethics, epistemology, moral psychology and political philosophy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is one of my favorite bikes (I have 8 and they are all my favorites). This is the one I ride to places like this where I like to camp out in the woods. I can move freely around on this bike, but only because its mechanisms turn freely. This bike is a fully … Continue reading The Bicycle theory of Free Will<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1226"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1235,"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226\/revisions\/1235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.bellevuecollege.edu\/wrussellpayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}