Preproceedings 2006 - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

On Freedom to Predict
Laurian Kertesz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
This essay is written in a Wittgensteinian spirit, in the light
of the relatively little-known Lectures on Free Will (LFW).
For historical accuracy: the LFW were written by a student
and there is no evidence that the text faithfully records
Wittgenstein's words. I shall assume that it does, since my
work is not exegetical. I want to throw a Wittgensteinian
light on the problem of free will.
Prima facie, the LFW exhibit a compatibilist view.
Like other thinkers – both religious ones like Augustine
and secular ones like Hume – Wittgenstein does not
believe that, if all our actions are predictable from sufficient
causes, our concepts of voluntariness and responsibility
must be abandoned. Determinism threatens freedom if
understood as availability of alternate possibilities ("we
could have done otherwise") so we must be satisfied with
freedom of spontaneity ("we do as we will"). Wittgenstein's
position is more nuanced, as he holds that:
"It is in one sense foolish to say 'If my actions can be
predicted, I can't choose…Prediction is incompatible
with choice in the case where you yourself predict what
you will choose, or I predict and then tell you". (LFW, p.
442)
Suppose that at the end of a day, I write down in a
diary everything I did that day. Then I discover a printed
text, dated one day before, that differs from the last entry
in my diary only in that the sentences "Today I did so-andso"
are replaced by "Tomorrow Laurian will do so-and-so").
Do I have good reasons to believe that I was not free, that
all my choices were not really my choices and I acted
mechanically?
My first reaction to such an event would be to look
for author of the text, and find if what s/he wrote is not due
to mere chance. If a human author is found, I would
probably ask her for the method used in writing the
forecast. Suppose that no author can be found – all we
know is that a computer printed the text. Let's further
imagine that next week, the computer regularly prints,
every evening, the texts that I write in the diary every next
evening – so the prediction cannot be mere lucky guess. In
such a case, we have good reasons to look for a scientific
law correlating the computer's texts with the entries in my
diary. Would this prove that I am not free? My answer is:
yes, provided I continue my usual behaviour: continue to
write entries in my diary, do not read the computer's texts
until at least one day after they are printed and do not
actively look for their human author (if any). But then the
entries in my diary will become meaningless. I hope to
make this clear.
The scientific law that has to be discovered,
correlating the computer's output with the entries in my
diary will most likely take into account facts about the
computer's mechanisms and about my behaviour. It is
important to note that it will also be a psychological law,
that will have to answer to the question: "Why do I write in
my diary what the computer printed the day before?". A
spy may watch for one day two persons who spend the
whole day together and may write in his report that they
did the same things; but the two persons watched might
write different stories from each other – and from the spy's
report - in their respective diaries under the heading "What
I did today": they may attach a sense of importance to
different things they did that day. "To write an accurate
report of what someone did in a certain day" makes no
sense, apart from the standpoint of the report's writer. And
if two stories about what a person did are identical, this
proves the identity of their points of view, their
cobelongingness to a form of life. To return to my example:
what would be astonishing about the computer's printing
accurate forecasts of the entries I write in my diary is that it
predicts not only what I am going to do the next day, but
also what I shall deem important, worth remembering and
writing down at the end of the day.
If the person whose behaviour is predicted keeps no
diary, it is not clear what accurate prediction means. A
team of doctors (including neuroscientists) may try to
predict all the physical movements that a politician will
make until the end of the year. Even if their forecast is
100% confirmed by a video-camera that watches the
politician, the forecast will be of little political interest, since
it will hardly be possible, on its basis alone, to know
whether that person will keep the same political office until
the end of the year. The accuracy of the prediction does
not prove that the politician will not have freely chosen his
gestures – his physical movements are, partly, reactions to
political events and reactions to the reactions to these
events: it will be reasonable to conjecture that the doctors
who predicted his behaviour were also good political
analysts, who tell us less than they know. (On the other
hand, if it can be predicted that the politician will describe
his behaviour in purely physiological terms, this will have a
tremendous political interest, since he will have to be
considered insane). This proves why it is foolish to say that
"If my actions can be predicted, I can't choose". What
matters is: who makes the prediction, why s/he predicts my
behaviour rather than interfere with it; what matters is the
point of view of the prediction, whether it coincides with the
point of view of the person whose actions are predicted. If
the two points of view are different, this does not prove
that person whose behaviour was predicted was not free.
It proves, inter alia, that the person who formulates the
prediction chooses to adopt a fatalist perspective about the
person whose behaviour was predicted – rather than
actively influence his decisions and his behaviour. And
"fatalism is a peculiar way of looking at things". (LFW, p.
431), a human attitude that may be proven true or false as
little as the belief in the uniformity of nature (Philosophical
Investigations par. 473, 477).
Consistent fatalism is self-defeating, since it implies
that the fatalist's uttering his own words is subject to
natural necessity like the movement of planets. The
consistent fatalist should not try to convince other people
of the truth of fatalism, but regard his utterance "Fatalism
is true" as a parrot's words. A consistent fatalist should
change his way of life and make random movements of his
body, rather than purposeful actions (of course, "random"
in the eyes of other humans). The fatalist predicts based
on the belief that he did not choose to predict, that he was
not free to predict.
If the two points of view are identical – as in my
original example – the prediction is empathetical. The
prediction-maker is a person who belonged to the same
form of life with me, then shifted to an outer view of it.
Such a person resembles a good psychologist, who
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