Ramblings on Billiard Ball Causation vs. Agent Causation

I particularly enjoyed that conversation between Tom Cruise’s and Colin Farrell’s characters in Minority Report. I can’t recall it verbatim, but it went something like this:

Cruise then rolls a ball along the counter towards Farrell, who catches it before it falls off.

Cruise then concludes with the observation that just because Farrell stopped the ball from falling, it didn’t mean that it wouldn’t have fallen. Ditto those whom Cruise arrests. He is as certain of the future murders as Farrell was certain of the falling billiard ball. Although the pre-crime unit prevented the murder, it didn’t mean that the crime wasn’t going to take place, thereby justifying the arrest of said ‘pre-criminals’. The implication is that agent causation (i.e. human self-determination, choices, volition) is substantially similar to billiard-ball causation.

But we ought to differ with Cruise on this.

We cannot apply the concept of causation wholesale from the impersonal world to personal agents. Individuals simply aren’t like billiard balls, although no doubt very often we seem that way. Put pizza in front of a hungry man, he’ll most likely eat. Tempt a hormone-charged teenager enough, and he’ll probably succumb to lust. Provoke an enraged fighter too much, he may soon begin throwing punches.

I emphasize ‘most likely’, ‘probably’ and ‘may’ as I think it’s important to highlight that we’re in the realms of possibility here, not causal predeterminacy.

In all these cases, the agent is primary. We are the ultimate ‘cause’ of our actions via our free will, and to the extent that we believe we are free to will what we will, it doesn’t make sense to ask what caused our actions apart from ourselves.  Because if we are the irreducible causal factor for our actions, it is contradictory to posit something antecedent to our will which determines our actions.

One simply cannot go from the provocation to the punch, the way one goes from the cue ball to the red ball to the green, and so on.

Geisler writes:

"The cause of a performance is the performer. It is meaningless to ask what performance caused the performance…Likewise, the cause of a free act is not another free act. Rather it is a free agent. And once we have arrived at the free agent, it is meaningless to ask what caused its free acts. For if something else caused its actions, then the agent is not the cause of them and thus is not responsible for them. And it is senseless to ask what caused the free agent to act as it is to ask who made God?

"…humans are the first cause of their own moral actions. If humans were not the first cause of their own free actions, then the actions would not be their actions." (Predestination & Freewill, ed. David Basinger & Randall Basinger)

In principle, free choices are not determinate and predictable the way billiard balls are. A future which contains agent causation cannot be subject to the laws of cause-and-effect. There is an irreducible element of ex nihilo in our choices.

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