Free Will and Editing Fiction

In the free will “debate” (scare quotes since I think it’s mostly a pseudoproblem), there are three major camps. There are the libertarians, or those who believe we have contra-causal free will (ie. our decisions are not entirely constrained by the laws of nature). Those who believe we don’t have contra-causal free will mainly fall into two groups. The first is the compatibilists, who believe that even in a fully deterministic world it still makes sense to talk about free will (a subset believe free will is ONLY meaningful in a deterministic world). The other is the non-compatibilists, who believe that the world is deterministic and this means we do NOT have free will.

As mentioned a few times before I’m a compatibilist. At some point, I was going to explain this position. But there’s something about free will that just leads to a great multiplication of words and people talking past each other for hours on end. The Non Prophets podcast typically puts out 60-80 minute episodes. A few years ago, they were discussing free will which ended up at an epic 2.5 hours of arguing. A similar thing happened on Reasonable Doubts: although they didn’t spend that long on it, they vowed to avoid the topic in future since it’s an area where opposing sides just can’t seem to make progress.

Maybe I’ll actually discuss this in some detail one day. But instead, I simply have a story which I think illustrates some of the motivation behind my compatibilist position. Most critics of compatibilism argue that if things are fully determined (including our decisions) then we’re not free in any meaningful way and therefore the compatibilist is redefining free will to water it down. Or worse, just playing word games.

As well as this blog, I write some fiction. I’m still very much a beginner so I only linked one piece on the LHS sidebar, taking the rest down as I now think the others are a bit embarrassing. Still, I currently have two completed novels and three novellas under my belt. During the writing process I have, I came across an interesting phenomenon.

I write the first draft on the laptop. Then I print it out and read it offline. This lets me mark up corrections and changes in pen on the actual paper. When I’m done, I data enter all the corrections back into the file for the next iteration. When I’ve done heavy cutting or copyediting there might be up to 25-30 changes on a single sheet of A4 paper. This means that on some particularly dense pages I might miss one and forget to put it into the file.

However, when I type changes into the file, I also look at the file itself. Meaning that sometimes I come up with new changes that weren’t part of the original. But for a dense page it sometimes means I make the same change twice without realising it.

For example, I might finish all changes from page 103 and then also see that “fell” would be better as “stumbled” in this sentence. I’d make the change in the file but when I look back onto the paper I’d see that I already made that exact word change in pen but just didn’t see it when transferring to the paper!

Seeing this is the closest I’ve been to feeling like my decisions are deterministic. It’s the same to making changes to a story, forgetting everything and starting again and realising that you’ve made the exact same changes the second time round. As I said, this is not an argument just an anecdote. When I notice this glitch, I do not go “oh no, this means my editing is determined and hence ‘not meaningfully mine’!” Instead, I go “that’s great: if I’ve made this change twice then it really does stem from my [deterministic] writing style (not from some stochastic cause like the weather) and therefore the right change to make!”

Consider for a moment how you’d react. I think being disappointed is more in line with non-compatibilism or libertarianism. But if you’d actually be thrilled then this is what compatibilism feels like from the inside.