Bigger brother
Definition
For the seventy-third series of Big Brother, the producers had introduced a fiendish new toy: Pierre. The show’s consultant psychologist explained how it would work. ‘As you know, the brain is the engine of thought and action, and the brain is entirely physical. Our understanding of the laws of physics is such that we can now accurately predict how people’s brains will react – and thus how people will think – in response to events in their environment. ‘On entering the Big Brother space station, a brain scanner maps the brain states of all the participants. Our supercomputer, Pierre, monitors the various stimuli the contestants are exposed to and is able then to predict what their future behaviour will be. ‘Of course, all this is so fiendishly complicated that there are severe limits. That is why the technology works best in a controlled, enclosed environment such as the Big Brother space station, and also why predictions can only be made for a few moments ahead, since tiny errors in predictions soon compound themselves into large ones. But viewers will enjoy seeing the computer predict how the contestants are about to react. In a sense, we will know their minds better than they do themselves.’
Source
The deterministic thesis of the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827)
Motivation & Background
The French scientist Pierre Laplace suggested that if we knew both the laws of physics and the location of every particle in the universe, we would be able to predict everything that would come to pass in the future. Quantum theory has shown that to be false since not all causal processes are strictly determined by prior conditions. There is more indeterminacy in the universe than Laplace supposed. Nevertheless, quantum effects occur only at the smallest level, and most objects in the world do work as though they were strictly determined by prior causes, just as Laplace thought. It therefore seems possible that we could adopt something less complete than the stance of Laplace’s all-seeing observer and make more modest predictions. In short, the Big Brother computer is still a theoretical possibility. It could be very unsettling to watch the show with the benefit of Pierre’s predictions. We would see people behave time and time again exactly as predicted by a computer that had knowledge only of the physical states of their brains and environments. Contestants would be making decisions that the computer calculated they were bound to make. In short, they would appear not to be free agents making autonomous choices, but automata. How should we respond to this prospect? One way is to deny its possibility. Human beings do have free will, and that means no computer could ever do what we imagine Pierre doing. However, this response looks like an example of simply refusing to accept what we don’t like. We need to know why Pierre is not possible, not merely be told that it isn’t. The appeal to quantum indeterminacy won’t do. Even if it is true that quantum theory introduces more unpredictability than our thought experiment has allowed, all it would do is replace an entirely predictable causal process with one which contains unpredictable, random elements. But our actions are no more free if they are the result of random causal processes than if they are the result of strictly determined ones. Free will appears to require that we escape the physical causal chain altogether. And that, it seems, we cannot do. The second response is to accept that Pierre is possible, but argue that free will, in some important sense, is not threatened by it. One possible route is to drive a wedge between the notions of predictability and freedom. We can often predict, for example, what food or drink our friends will order, but we do not suppose that their choice is therefore not free. If that is true, why should we think that being able to predict all of a person’s behaviour would show that they are not free? But would that really save free will? What is freedom if not the ability to do what you choose, irrespective of what has happened up until the moment of the choice?
