Digital Humanism, Digital Nudging and the Scientific Basis of Free Will

Abstract

Digital humanism, and in particular digital nudging, is reigniting old debates about free will. The reason is that digital technologies are continuously uncovering ways to influence our behavior and beliefs without our full conscious perception and control. The increasing potential for digital nudging has furnished what could be cast as two opposing visions for digital humanism. One side argues nudging is inevitable and we should deemphasize free will to promote humanist goals. The other side insists that humanism requires emphasizing free will and constraining nudging. We suggest that the normative arguments of both sides have merit and the apparent contradiction can be resolved by a modern scientific understanding of free will. Such an understanding casts free will as an emergent phenomenon, arising from the continuous interaction of indeterministic and deterministic processes in a temporally recursive loop. The resulting model, which we label the temporally recursive two-stage model suggests free will is a graded, temporally unfolding, and partially social phenomenon. It acknowledges that both nature and nurture shape our behavior, character and will, but reasserts freedom as the ability of our emergent selves to become aware of, and cumulatively affect, this shaping. The upshot is that it is no longer sufficient to assume we are free unless we are being intentionally manipulated. Instead, asserting free will in a digital era must increasingly mean to judge the nudge.