Determinism vs free will

Did the Buddha’s teachings imply a deterministic universe, where everything is “preordained” (and therefore the future can be foretold) or did it support the concept of free will, or the notion that individuals can shape their destinies?

The answer is: It’s complicated.

From the perspectives of modern science

At the quantum level, it could be argued we are living in a deterministic universe. Quantum states represent probabilistic outcomes, but imply that these probabilistic outcomes all exist more or less simultaneously based on their probability levels. This corresponds to the Sarvastivadins’ view that “everything exists, past present and future.”

However, at the level of atomic particles, it would seem particles are subject to nondeterministic consequences - ie. the trajectory of an atomic particle seems to follow random paths influenced by entropy. But they are also influenced by existing state and previous states. Can future state be completely predicted?

Could a hypothetical omniscient observer, who is able to observe the quantum states of all matter, be able to infer future state? In other words, does observing current and past state allow the future state to be completely inferred?

The “one electron model of the universe”, as popularised by Feynman, seem to imply a deterministic universe - everything in the universe is simply the manifestation of a single electron traversing backwards and forwards in time, interacting and combining with instances of itself to form all the other particles that make up matter. And hence the future has already happened, we are simply traversing through time along fixed paths.

And yet this flies against conventional wisdom, and much of “ordinary” science.

Our brains are highly complex collections of neurons and ganglia. The operation of a neuron seems to be stochastically driven - whether it fires or not depends on the level of various chemical substances, and activity of nearby neurons. However, it is also argued that our minds are quantum, they rely on the existence of quantum states and therefore somewhat deterministic. What we regard as consciousness can be likened to a spark of flame traversing through multiple parallel universes governed by quantum states.

Therefore, in a sense, our consciousness may be the ephemeral “entity” that creates, or instantiates, the notion of free will. The universe itself may be deterministic, but our experience of it isn’t.

This is the basis of the Mahayanan’s view that everything is an “illusion” - ultimately our consciousness is wandering through an illusion of the universe that does not fundamentally exist (in the way we perceive) - the real nature of the universe is something we cannot comprehend. And therefore awakening or “perfect understanding” comes from realising “profound emptiness” - that there is simply no basis for the subjective and phenomenological collection that we call a “self” and once we realise that, everything disappears.

Or, as the Theravadins may prefer, and to paraphrase a popular movie,

“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Roy Batty, Blade Runner

Dependent origination

This seems to be arguing for both deterministic and volitional views of our ability to influence the future.

On on hand, the causal links between the factors in the DO framework strongly suggests a deterministic view of the future, that it is determined by our past actions and behaviour. This is a view from a phenomenological nature of consciousness - that our consciousness is an aggregation of past subjective experiences and volitional choices, which then determines our future experience of the world.

However, implicit in the above is the notion that we do have volitional choices, we can make decisions today that impact the future. In particular, a decision to cease production of non optimal mental constructions will lead to an avoidance of dukkha in the duture. This strongly suggests the Buddha believes in the notion of free will.

The five collections

In the second discourse, the Buddha seems to be advocating a lack of free will. He points out that our sense of personal identity or self does not seem to have control over our “forms” (including our bodies and the external world), our perceptions, feelings, consciousness etc.

This seems to imply we have no free will, or does it?

It could be argued the Buddha is pointing out our belief in free will is itself flawed, because we equate free will with the false notion of a self. In reality, we are not able to control the outcomes of the future, any more than we can control our subjective experience of the world through the constructed nature of our consciousness.

But again, this would contradict the notion that we can make a volitional decision, in particular to cease construction of non optimal mental constructions.

So the Buddha seems to be implying that even though our notion of self is “constructed”, we do have the agency to “unconstruct”.

The analogy of a Large Language Model

A Large Language Model (LLM) seemingly generates coherent responses and exhibit signs of reasoning ability. In other words, an LLM seem to exhibit traits of consciousness.

But in reality LLMs simply “predict the next token” based on previous tokens fed into it as input, and relying on a large sequence of tokens that have been used to “train” the LLM (creating the model through modifying it’s parameters).

It could be argued that LLMs operate both deterministically and stochastically, just like our brains. It is deterministic in that the next token is completely influenced by the parameters of the LLM and past tokens. And yet there is an element of randomness - the tokens generated by an LLM are influenced by hyper-parameters such as temperature, top-k and top-p.

If we regard an LLM as an “illusion” of consciousness, in the same way that our notion of self is also incorrect, then arguably we are similar to LLMs. However, the Buddha seems to be implying we have the ability to retrain our parameters, to create different responses through altering our volitional decision making framework.

Conclusion

The Buddha is surprisingly quite aligned with modern science. Because our experience of the world is perceptual, we have no “control” over the external world or “reality.” Therefore the Buddha seems to be implying whether “the real world” is deterministic or not is irrelevant, we only experience it subjectively and perceptually.

What is important is that we can use the “illusion” of free will or self control to alter our perception of the world. Because we believe in the notion of a “self”, we can actually use that belief to “alter” future perceptions. It is the very impermanence of our notion of the self that allows us the ability to change future outcomes.

If we think of a stylised view of the “self” or consciousness as that spark of flame that is wandering through a perhaps deterministic universe, then we have some agency or “free will” to direct where that “self” wanders to. And ultimately, this is the essence of the Buddha’s teaching.