Free Will: A First, Very Tentative, Step
Jerry Coyne has taken me to task recently for the “position” I have taken on free will, and has challenged me to make a response. He has worked this theme rather assiduously over the last few weeks, but the real challenge lies in this post: One more go round on free will: Eric MacDonald’s take. He ends the go round with these words: “So, Eric, that’s my response. Cheers.” I take this as a challenge to make a response, even though, to be frank, I have never spent a great deal of time thinking about this issue, one that has dominated philosophy from the time of the Greeks, 2500 years ago. This may seem an unforgivable lacuna in my training — as it doubtless is — but the problem itself has always seemed to me to intractable to solution.
The main reason for this intractability lies, it seems to me, in its unverifiability, a problem that Jerry Coyne himself, even with the aid of Ceiling Cat, has failed to shake. You might say that, as a scientist, determinism is a “properly basic” principle (in Alvin Plantinga’s sense), and neither needs defence, nor can find any. This, it seems to me, should worry Jerry a lot more than it apparently does. As an article of scientific faith, you might almost say that Jerry is here fudging off by degrees into the realm of theology — Ceiling Cat help us! – a space normally occupied by religious believers.
Of course, this was just the reason for Strawson’s famous paper, “Freedom and Resentment,” for the reactive attitude of resentment seems to be in tension with the other requirement of our understanding of human action, that human actions are not free, and therefore, it would seem, we have no good reason to resent what has been done to us. If we are not free to choose, then we are not free to avoid causing the kinds of harm to which resentment seems an appropriate response.
It is only fair, I think, to begin with the fact that it is hard not to make a distinction between actions we perform as agents, and things that merely happen to us as a consequence of causal factors that we can, at least to a certain extent, discern. In his famous essay, “Freedom and Resentment,” Peter Strawson speaks of the fact that “people often decide to do things, really intend to do what they do, know just what they’re doing in doing it; the reasons they think they have for doing what they do, often really are their reasons and not their rationalizations.” (Freedom and Resentment and other essays, 3). He then goes on to say that these facts (if we accept them) are consistent with the determinist thesis.
But it is hard, I think, not to accept them. That’s why the problem of free will is so intransigent. We seem to have a subjective conviction that we do things for reasons, and not just because we were determined by antecedent causes to do them, and yet the universe seems also to be governed by iron laws of necessity, which leave no room for the reasons that we give. Thus Sam Harris can say, with Schopenhauer: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will. (Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills — or he can do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants. ) So what Schopenhauer is saying, if I remember my Schopenhauer correctly, is that one can want or make choices, but one cannot choose to want or make choices, because that pertains to the noumenon, to that which we cannot in fact change or influence, since it is the underlying nature of reality. That’s why he speaks of the world as will and representation, Wille and Vorstellung. We may not be able to choose not to choose, but we do choose, for that is the very nature of being, even though Schopenhauer, like many scientists, as Harris doubtless rightly reads him, cannot find a role for choice in particular circumstances, and, as a consequence, Schopenhauer’s position seems to be a contradictory one, since he does find a role here for moral blame and praise, and administers it quite widely and with a great deal of passion too.
Take the upbringing of children, which Strawson introduces to put more meat on the bones of his argument. This is particularly apt, from my point of view, since I once had a philosophy of education class with a dyed-in-the-wool Skinnerian, who not only believed that we are all just a skinful of robotic conditioned responses, but thought about education in the same way. It was, I must tell you, an extraordinarily frustrating experience, since he would not give an inch so far as determinism was concerned. Education had nothing to do with enlarging the child’s vision, or the scope of his or her choices; it was, in fact, merely a matter of instilling, by means of shortcuts, a pattern of stimulus/response to help the child cope better with ranges of inputs. He conceived of children as input-response systems, much as Deep Blue is (or was) a sophisticated input-response system with myriads of possible responses to the various possible moves in a chess game. So there was no sense of enlarging a child’s freedom, but to make the child a more efficient robot, so that the consequence, in the end, should be a happier child, and later a happier, well-adjusted adult in a kind of robot utopia.
Now, this is not the usual consequence of arguments designed to show that free will is an illusion. Indeed, Jerry Coyne cannot himself help thinking that some people make the wrong choices, seriously wrong. That’s why he writes a blog entitled, eponymously, ”Why Evolution is True,” after the book of the same name, written to convince people that they are wrong. And he didn’t make the book into a series of stimulus patterns, but actually included in it sentences with meanings which, he believed, and I think believed rightly, should convince those who read it that the theory of evolution is not just a working hypothesis, but actually reflects the truth about the way that the world of life works.
Now, one thing that he missed in this process is the whole issue of meaning, and how remarkable it is that the evolutionary process actually produced animals that could understand and appreciate the power of language and meaning, which is (or at least may be), as theorists like Dawkins, Blackmore, Dennett, and others suggest, a second replicator, similar to, but completely different from the first replicator known as DNA. I don’t want to get involved here in the whole problem of memetics, and whether this really is a Darwinian replicator in the way that DNA is, although Susan Blackmore’s book The Meme Machine is very compelling. This is still, so far as I know, not widely accepted. But what happens when animals become, not simple input-response mechanisms like Deep Blue or Ichnumonidae, but intentional systems with a narrative history? Whereas we may quite properly see Ichnumonidae as quite simple input-response systems which are hardwired to lay their eggs, as they do, in the living, paralysed bodies of caterpillars, it is much harder to see human beings in these terms.
The question of determinism, as I see it, does not have so much to do with contra-causal possibilities, since once something has been done, it scarcely makes a lot of sense to ask whether the agent could have done something quite different. Presumably, all the causes and influences that came to bear on the person at that time are such as to have produced exactly that result and none other. The question is whether the agent might have acted differently had he or she considered more thoroughly the possible alternatives that were open to choice at that time, and all their many ramifications and consequences. Redoing the same situation with the very same parameters, including the person’s limited survey of the alternatives, and inadequate consideration of the consequences of his action, will almost certainly produce the same action, not because that action was determined — though it certainly was determined by the influences then in play upon the person’s decisions — but because that action was only one of a range of possible actions he or she might have done, depending upon the thoroughness with which he or she had considered the alternatives to what he or she in the end decided to do. That may seem to be contra-causal in this sense, that the possibility of his having considered the alternatives and their consequences in more depth was not available to him at the time, and if that is so, then the question of freedom does ask the contra-causal question.
Is the agent the ultimate source of his or her actions? No, obviously not, since there is so much complexity at work in every action, even of the simplest sort, that it is hard to sort out what might be thought to be the agent’s contribution to the action itself. There is no ultimate responsibility of this sort, as though each time the agent acted, he or she acted as a result of never before considered reasons and powers which stand outside the causal chain. At each moment of action, a person stands within the chains of causes leading up to this moment, including, it may be, childhood influences, past bad decisions, present overpowering desires, and so complexly on.
Let’s take an example. This is a post in a blog which I began in early December 2010. It has been much more successful than I thought it might be, but I began it for a reason, or for a number of reasons, and there were probably other things that came to bear on my decision to start the blog of which I am not aware. I began the blog, in the first instance, because I had volunteered to manage the blog of Dying with Dignity (Canada), and the new Executive Director of Dying with Dignity decided to take down one of my posts without consulting me first. That was a form of censorship which I was not prepared to accept. Had she come to me with suggestions, that would have been one thing, but she didn’t. She took the post down peremptorily and without consultation. From some experience that I had had with her I did not think it likely that we would see eye to eye about this, and so I resigned from the blog as well as from the Board of Dying with Dignity.
That was, you might say, the precipitating cause of my starting a new blog, where I could call the shots myself, without being monitored by someone else whose understanding of the issues involved in advocacy for the right to die with dignity seemed to me to be sadly inadequate and largely misinformed. That perception was no doubt influenced by my experience with authority figures in my past, and what might be called (thank you Ophelia) my Oppositional Defiant Disorder. I have always had rather ambiguous relationships with authority figures, and do not respond well to dictums from on high that seem to me to be inadequate to justify interference in the ordinary occasions of my life.
But then, add to this my own sense of frustration that Dying with Dignity (Canada) was really heading nowhere, and that after years and years of existence it still had only about 1800 members across a country whose population is, while small, numbered in the millions, 70 percent or so of whom claim, in polls, that they would like to see laws governing assisted dying in force, and that it seemed to me that part of the reason for this was Dying with Dignity’s refusal to address, head on, the major issue facing advocates of assisted dying, namely, religion and its enormously powerful “pro-life” lobby — add in all this, and resigning from Dying with Dignity, especially since the post that was censored addressed some religious issues head on, seemed a reasonable thing to do, and starting a blog was, for one person, without any visible means of support, perhaps the only, if not the best, way, to get my message out. And so, weighing all these different factors, starting a blog seemed to be a reasonable thing to do, at least to test the waters to find out what the response might be.
Just as Jerry Coyne thought that writing a book and starting a blog was a good way to address issues of importance to him, so starting this blog and writing about religion and unbelief as well as about assisted dying, seemed to me one way of having some impact, at least more impact than I would have had, had I simply withdrawn into my little fortress, and called it a day. Now, having given those reasons, which, I think, fairly sum up many of the considerations which weighed with me before I took the plunge into WordPress, I wonder, could I have done any differently? Was that decision determined by the iron law of necessity, or was it, however much different causal factors impinged upon the making of the decision, reasonably thought to be a free decision on my part? The truth to me seems to be that, even if it could be explained by taking all the factors into account, including the reasons I just gave, I did choose to do this — that is, it was my choice — and that what I did was inexplicable apart from the reasons given, and what it means to give them. And that seems to me a freedom worth having. But, as I say, this is only a very tentative first step.
I can only say; ‘You being you, you did what you did.’ and I, with many others, are glad you did. Whether or not it was a ‘free’ choice, we can argue until the cows come home (for whatever reason they do that). Thanks for this … I think (therefore I am).
You say “The question is whether the agent might have acted differently had he or she considered more thoroughly the possible alternatives that were open to choice at that time, and all their many ramifications and consequences.”
That seems to locate free will in the gap between what the agent actually considered and what else he/she could have considered. But suppose he/she in fact considered all the relevant information. Or suppose the decision was so simple (do I want a red or a yellow fruit gum?) as to require no consideration. Would that make the decision unfree?
P.S. While I would enjoy reading Jerry Coyne’s “Why Religion is True”, I don’t expect to in the near future.
Eric,
This is a typo, right?
Indeed, Jerry Coyne cannot himself help thinking that some people make the wrong choices, seriously wrong. That’s why he writes a blog entitled, eponymously, ”Why Religion is True,” after the book of the same name, written to convince people that they are wrong.
LOL!
Nice post, and I’ll comment after I’ve absorbed it.
cheers!
Ha! Ha! Well, just remember that I entitled this “A First, Very Tentative, Step”!
No, that’s not where I have located “free will”. It is located in the space of choice. We may indeed be driven to choices simply by past actions and preferences, or by carelessness or by bias, and our choosing may have no particular effect, aside from being the choice that it is, on our choice space, and correspondingly little on how things are in the world. If I prefer yellow to red fruit gum every time, then the likelihood of this being “free” in any significant sense, apart from having been “free” (in the relevant sense) at some point in the past, when I made choices and found that I preferred one every time to the other, is correspondingly small, but it doesn’t, to that extent, derogate from its freedom. I assume that freedom is not only something that has evolved, but it is something that in fact increases as we make choices for reasons. But, again, I am not altogether clear about this, that is why this is called a very tentative first step.
Let’s say – the nature “delegates” to us a task to gather information and to act upon this information. Everything is determined. Evolution “decided” about our senses, our mind inherited such and such capacity, we were trained to observe, most of our decisions are instinctive (i.e. quicker than our conscious thinking), and still there is a great difference between decisions taken by any two people in similar situation.
We can discuss and discuss about those differences until we are angry at somebody that his/her decision was wrong and he/she should know better.
If Jerry can swear that he will never use the expression “you should’ve known better” I’m almost ready to accept that this idea of free will is really unnecessary.
Just a small correction (other than the name of Jerry’s blog, obviously): the chess computer you’re referring to was called ‘Deep Blue’, not ‘Big Blue’ (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_(chess_computer) ). You could use IBM’s latest computer foray into the human competitive sphere, Watson, as another example (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer) ). Yes, I am a chess player.
Strange thing. I didn’t even notice my mistake when you “hinted” at it so broadly. It just shows to go you. I had to wait until Tappancs pointed it out quite straightforwardly! Funny though!
Thank you for pointing out what was already hinted at, very clearly, by Jerry, and yet I missed it! It just shows that you see what you expect to see. About Deep Blue. I knew it was wrong, and meant to check it when I finished the post, but then I forgot. I had a big day of rearranging my library to do, and it took me all day. In fact, I’m still not finished, and I’m tired out already. I haven’t played chess for years, though I once enjoyed it.
Can I recommend Gilbert Ryle and his book The Concept of Mind (1949)? He basically solves the problem of free-will by explaining our uncanny ability to confuse concepts with reality. And so the entire discussion about free-will is based on a categorical fallacy. I think it is worthwhile to take a brief look.
I may be simplifying, but it seems to me, Eric, you have not located free will specifically. Until you do, the default is, Newtonian cause and effect with a little quantum indeterminacy thrown in. The classical notion of freewill seems to require some kind of duality – which is not something we are likely to see evidence for.
Perhaps this is something that has already been discussed by compatibilists, but doesn’t it make sense to consider “free will” as the internal corrective to our modeling of the world?
That is, a basic part of what we humans (and perhaps some other animals, as well) do is model our world and our actions in it. Making a “choice” involves modeling the expected results of different actions and “choosing” among the actions based upon what will achieve our goal.
Of course, we all make bad “choices” from time to time. What is interesting in this light is that I (at least) feel differently about different sorts of choices. I feel responsible for bad choices (here tying ‘free will’ with ‘responsibility’) in those instances when I can say “I could have made a better choice, if only I’d … (thought more clearly, examined the evidence more carefully, or some such).” On the other hand, I don’t feel the same responsibility when I can (honestly) say “that choice was the best one possible at the time.”
In this view, ‘free will’ is not the idea that “everything being exactly the same, I could choose differently”, as Jerry Coyne suggest (I think that this is magical free will, and nonsense, for several reasons), but the recognition that, had things been ever so slightly different, I could have — indeed would have — chosen differently.
And what this permits, then, is an improvement of my modeling of the world and the results of my choices, not in the past, but in the future, when I am faced with similar situations involving similar choices.
Egbert. Long time since I read Ryle, and I’m not sure that “category mistake” can carry all that much weight. As I understand it he seems to think that we are extending the word ‘voluntary’ out of its normal range, and therefore that it simply doesn’t apply to philosophical questions about about free will (about voluntariness at a very general level). We distinguish between voluntary and involuntary actions in everyday speech, but not between voluntariness and determinism. For an ordinary language philosopher this shows that we are using the words in an inappropriate sense to apply to categories to which the language does not normally apply. I’m not sure that answers the question of choice vs. determinism adequately.
Rick. I simply see no reason why Newtonian cause and effect is the default position when we are dealing with life forms where alternative choices seem to be possible. Indeed, other things being equal, why should Newtonian cause and effect be the norm? The question is whether the conviction — which is almost impossible to avoid — that we are in command of our actions (or at least some of them) are also caused in the one-to-one sense that Newtonian causation seems to require. I don’t think defaulting to this is going to solve the problem.
Greg, this would be my assumption. Given that we do model the world, and our models are not closed, it seems that, without subverting a causal account of the world, we can account for choice and agency without courting dualism. This is what I mean when I say that, for an intentional system, every act is causally underdetermined. If our models provide alternatives which can be chosen, then our actions might be entirely the result of causation, and yet still be our choices, since the causation can be seen as attaching to any number of different possible options in our space of choices. What would be the point of having this redundancy otherwise? (And the fact that there are a range of options available, any one of which might be chosen, depending on the circumstances, provides the redundancy.) Luther, for example, may have said something to the effect that Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht ander. But he could have done otherwise, if he had chosen, but he believed, rightly, perhaps, that his integrity and honour depended on the particular choice he made.
Eric, something similar used to be said about storms and volcanoes and various other types of things for which “alternative choices seem to be possible”. We now see that such an imputation is incorrect, certainly in those cases, and that the world seems to be “cause and effect” pretty much “all the way down” (with a place for randomness, but that’s not useful in rescuing ‘choice’, I don’t think). If such is true, then the onus would seem to be on the person proposing something else to present a justification for it.
Eric, The assumption of cause-and-effect materiality comes from our understanding of physics. This has to be our default. If you propose that conscious agents somehow came to exhibit choice in the sense of a non-material realm, then you will be seen to have joined the Catholics who think God, at some point in evolutionary history, “breathed” a soul into humans. This begins to sound pretty magical. As greg says, the onus is on you to provide evidence for such a non-naturalistic view.
I share your conviction that “we are in command”, but to follow our first impulse here is to posit a concept of “we” that presupposes the dualism required of the free will hypothesis. Dennett makes this clear and as I recall he outlines plausible scenarios for what is a utilitarian self deception.
Eric,
As I see it, at their most basic, events can be deterministic, random, or probabilistic (that is, weighted random — such as a six-sided die with two ones and four twos). Even if one throws dualism into the mix…the “spirit” can only act according to a set of rules (be deterministic); act without rhyme or reason (be random); or use rules to guide random choices (be probabilistic).
How does your concept of “free will” fit into such a model?
Cheers,
b&
Eric, you say
“We seem to have a subjective conviction that we do things for reasons, and not just because we were determined by antecedent causes to do them, and yet the universe seems also to be governed by iron laws of necessity, which leave no room for the reasons that we give.”
I’m not sure why you think there’s a conflict between reasoning to true conclusions about the world and those conclusions being reached deterministically. Logical reasoning can be modeled algorithmically (Deep Blue), and there’s no evidence that our evidence-gathering capacities transcend or evade causal chains moving from sensation to concepts to explanations and reasons. So we can make choices for reasons and know truths about the world and still be completely determined in doing so. Both scientists and palm-readers are equally determined in their beliefs, but the former have a better grasp of reality, http://www.naturalism.org/resource.htm#rationality As you point out, Strawson believed genuine human reasoning is “consistent with the determinist thesis,” and of course compatibilists such as Dennett believe this as well. As you rightly say, we can’t understand human behavior without assuming the intentional stance – that people (really) do things for reasons. But this is completely consistent with determinism, should determinism be the case at the level of human action.
You get it right when you say, in response to Greg, that
“Given that we do model the world, and our models are not closed, it seems that, without subverting a causal account of the world, we can account for choice and agency without courting dualism.”
But then you immediately seem to contradict yourself:
“This is what I mean when I say that, for an intentional system, every act is causally underdetermined.”
This suggests that there’s causal slack in human decision-making, but there’s no evidence for that I’m aware of. Given one’s motives and reasons and situation as they were at a given time, a particular action took place as a result of all the factors in play. In any case, any indeterminism inserted into the mix wouldn’t reflect who you are, that is, your motives and reasons, so wouldn’t help in giving you authorship or control. So it’s not a sort of free will worth wanting, were it the case.
In support of supposing a causal account *does* apply to us, you say:
“At each moment of action, a person stands within the chains of causes leading up to this moment, including, it may be, childhood influences, past bad decisions, present overpowering desires, and so complexly on.”
And
“Presumably, all the causes and influences that came to bear on the person at that time are such as to have produced exactly that result and none other.”
Luther, typically human in his capacity for flexible responses to varying conditions, could have done otherwise had the situation been somewhat different, but given the situation as it was, he necessarily did what he did. That this is the case doesn’t negate the fact that *he* did it, for *his reasons*, such that he is justly characterized as a moral agent acting out of a sense of conscience and duty. Re “could have done otherwise” as analyzed by Dennett (what Greg nicely summarized), see http://www.naturalism.org/choice_and_creativity.htm#chdo
Eric, I’m not sure how to read “causally underdetermined” here, partly because I don’t see any way for that to be the case, absent something equivalent to a ghost in the machine. I think it might make sense (I haven’t really thought this through) to think of our choices as causally overdetermined, particularly in the light of materialist understandings of consciousness. A “mulitiple drafts” model, for example, might fit well with an overdetermination model of choice or will.
Eric,
I’m having trouble figuring out whether you’re arguing for a form of libertarian (incompatibilist) freedom, or whether you’re defending a fairly standard compatibilist line.
On the one hand, you say “The question of determinism, as I see it, does not have so much to do with contra-causal possibilities., which sounds compatibilist. (At least it does if you’re loosely tying determinism to freedom. If you actually mean determinism, then your claim seems contradictory. Causal determinism is, of course, just a rejection of contra-causal possibilities.)
On the other hand, in your above comment you say “I simply see no reason why Newtonian cause and effect is the default position when we are dealing with life forms where alternative choices seem to be possible,” which seems to reject determinism.
I may have mentioned this to you elsewhere elsewhen, but we do in fact have good reasons coming from physics for thinking that “Newtonian cause and effect” holds in our brains. The relevant point is that physics gives us an account of where physical theories hold and where they are invalid.
We know that at high energies, new physics comes into play. But we also know that our brains don’t make use of such high energies. There’s no fission or fusion or black holes in our brains. Well-understood physical laws govern all neural processes. And the relevant processes (opening of ion channels, binding of neurotransmitters) are deterministic (to the relevant degree of precision). This follows from the physics.
Yes, you’re right. I do sometimes think of thinking as a ghost in the machine, and outside the causal chains that provide a complete “state” description at the time of the action. And I also understand that thinking and reasoning, being a part of the causal state, are not for that reason non-agential. That’s why I called my post a first tentative step. It’s very hard to think oneself out of the ghost in the machine or Cartesian theatre idea of consciousness, but I’m working on it. When I say ‘causally underdetermined’ I think that is what I’m doing, regressing to the Cartesian theatre, and thinking of myself as adding that little bit of impetus that provides for flexibility of response. I guess the reason that I tend to do this is that there seems to be a deep sense that, either we have the Cartesian theatre, or everything, including reasoning, is deterministic in such a radical way as to vitiate the significance of reasoning. That seems to me to be what Jerry is doing, just as Plantinga does when he tries to subvert naturalism. I see the problem that you point out, and I know the answer, but Hier stehe ich, after all. I put it down to causation! It’s a work in progress, and as Dennett points out, it’s very hard to think outside this particular box, since so many people simply don’t get what he’s trying to say.
See my response to Tom Clark on underdetermination. I have no doubt you’re right. Thank goodness I had the sense to say that this was only a first, tentative step.
No, you’re right. I think I’m having trouble tearing myself away from some old ghosts. I do want to defend a compatibilist account of free-will, and I do not think, when I think about it, that the incompatibilist, libertarian position makes sense, and I don’t think I’ve ever taken that position. However, Rylean ghosts still do plague me. It’s written into the language, as it were.
Yes, it’s interesting that we’re wired to be dualists. ti makes me wonder whether it might somehow be tied to our capacity for language and abstract thought. We can put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, and consider non-actual situations. Perhaps this is linked to perceiving my “self” as something outside of any concrete thing I turn my mind to (like a brain or a set of atoms, for instance). Just an idle thought.
Eric, your candor concerning your struggle with all this is admirable. Quite the opposite of John Horgan, a science writer who thinks determinism is the mother of all evils and thus cuts himself off from most of science, see http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/37155?in=16:41&out=32:38
If reasoning is mechanistic and deterministic, it’s still just as causally effective as any other causal process in nature, so it counts just as much in our explanations of events. And adding randomness wouldn’t make it more effective. Here’s how Gary Drescher puts it in his book Good and Real, reviewed at http://www.naturalism.org/reviews.htm#Drescher :
“Thus choice…is a mechanical process compatible with determinism: choice is a process of examining assertions about what would be the case if this or that action were taken, and then selecting an action according to a preference about what would be the case. The objection ‘The agent didn’t really make a choice, because the outcome was already predetermined’ is as much a non sequitur as the objection ‘The motor didn’t really exert force, because the outcome was already predetermined.’ …Both choice making and motor spinning are particular kinds of mechanical processes. In neither case does the predetermination of the outcome imply that the process didn’t really take place.” (p. 192)
Jerry’s mistake as I see it is to say that our capacities for deliberation and deciding and reasoning don’t amount to *real* choosing because they are deterministic. But this is to use a contra-causal and effectively supernatural standard by which to judge our actual natural capacities: to be real choosers, according to Jerry, we’d have to be exempt from causation, an impossibility. Moreover, being uncaused causers or reasoners would only tie us in knots when making choices, http://www.naturalism.org/fatalism.htm#The Flaw of Fatalism To suppose that we don’t really make choices is to forget that our capacities for reasoning and evaluating evidence are just as real and causally effective as the genetic and environmental factors that created us. So there’s no cause for alarm or depression (Jerry’s reaction) when we discover we’re not contra-causal agents, or for thinking that reasoning isn’t just as real as the neural instantiation of our reasoning processes.
I myself, need to explore his book and thinking more fully, because he seems to be both onto something but also confused or confusing. His book appears to be a kind of therapy in removing the false application of concepts so as to present a clearer map of the mental.
I say he’s onto something, because I too frequently make such errors, and have yet to fully go through my own false application of concepts and purge them. But until I do throw off all those errors, I still continue to make such errors myself.
Eric, I understand where you’re coming from, but I too had to get rid of the idea of dualism. However, I recognize the difference between a human and an enormous bag of atoms and energy. I really do think we are free, but freedom to me has nothing to do with any metaphysical reality, only a description about possible actions, and therefore it is a value, much like truth or right.
The question of determinism, as I see it, does not have so much to do with contra-causal possibilities, since once something has been done, it scarcely makes a lot of sense to ask whether the agent could have done something quite different. Presumably, all the causes and influences that came to bear on the person at that time are such as to have produced exactly that result and none other.
Count me among those who think that this is precisely what the question of determinism is about, and that precisely because of this free will is not a useful concept.
On the other hand, I cannot really understand what difference it makes. You, like many who argue for the existence of free will, do at a minimum imply what others argue more explicitly: that somebody who does not believe in its existence would not write a book to convince others of their own opinion. I have seen others argue that if I were convinced there is no free will, I should logically stop trying to educate my daughter. But that simply does not follow, and nor does not writing “WEIT”. Recognizing that we do not do these things because we are a supernatural ghost in a machine, but because we are the machine, does not mean we should suddenly sit down and decompose.
Here is a thought that I think can resolve the debate. So I assume that on your view Bernie Madoff made a free choice to initiate a Ponzi scheme, and that he is morally responsible for that choice. Suppose, then, that I take your brain and put it in the exact neurobiological state that Bernie Madoff’s brain was in a few picoseconds before he made his choice. Would you make the choice that he made? Alternatively, suppose that I give you his thoughts, feelings, emotions, dispositions, characer, and so on, and let you make the choice. Again, would you make the same choice that he made?
If not, then why not? What would lead you to make a differenct choice, given that you would have a brain in the same state and the same psychological makeup as Madoff? It’s hard to see how your not choosing what he chose could be attributed to anything other than random blind luck, since there is nothing in you to push the choice in a different direction (if there were, it would have been in him as well, and he would have chosen differently).
The bottom line, then, is that our choices are either consequences of our psychological/neurological makeup, or they are random. In neither case can we be ultimately responsible for them, and in neither case can they genuinely be described as “free.” .
The reason it is hard to describe free will is that the concept is not coherent. It was never meant to be. It is just a word that we advanced primates use to rationalize certain vague emotions that we instinctively feel, specifically emotions of retribution, i.e., praise and blame. Evolutionarily, the reason we feel those emotions is that they play an adaptive role in behavior feedback, not because the emotions are literally true or reflect a genuine aspect of behavior. All behavior, good or bad, is caused, or else it is random and morally uninteresting.
Psychologists tell us that we carry around a ‘map’ of the world in our heads: if I go out for a walk I can navigate successfully around the block because somewhere in my mind there is a simple model of the neighbourhood. And I can call this up in other circumstances; if someone asks me “How do I get from the shops to your house?” I can call this map up and — by pretending in a sense that they are me at the shops — tell them how to get here.
Extend that map forward in time and we have the beginnings of a theory of free will. I know, for instance, that I will probably have dinner at home tonight, but events may intervene to prevent that. Among those events are my own behaviours — for instance, someone may call and invite me out and I may accept. So when I look at the future I see, not one definite sequence of events, but a spreading cluster of alternative events, some more probable than others. It is this, I think, that gives us the illusion of free will.
The future is not an absolute mystery: it’s most unlikely, for instance, that I will be on the moon in fifteen minutes, or even outside this house. On the other hand, I may or may not be drinking tea, reading a book, scratching my nose. All of these are reasonably likely events which I need to factor in to my model of the immediate future. ‘Free will’, as I see it, is just the description given to that process.
And this, of course, is why we don’t talk about ‘free will’ relating to events that have already happened, unless we go into the past subjunctive. There’s no longer a probability distribution to describe.
As I understand Prof. Coyne’s version of “free will” what he is actually demanding is an unmoved mover of the sort often required by religions that need to justify eternal torture as punishment for “sins” and “evil” actions. But as best I can tell, all that “determinism” means in this context is that, if you imagine an Omniscient Being, with perfectly complete knowledge and understanding of all things, that Omniscient Being could actually predict (and essentially has foreknowledge of) what each of us will do in the future and the circumstances we will be facing when we do whatever it is we do.
So using me and The Mutt as an example, the Omniscient Being knew or could have predicted that, about 8 years ago, I would be looking at the local newspaper and see a photo of The Mutt in the ad run by the local shelter, that I would then go to the shelter and see The Mutt, and take her for a walk, and bring her home, and we would then annoy each other for the ensuing 8 years. The Omniscient Being already knows which of us will die when. Even mere human odds-makers would bet on The Mutt, but time and chance happeneth to us all, and we can’t be sure. Life’s a crap shoot from the perspective of The Mutt and me. But the Omniscient Being knows how the dice will eventually fall and when they will come up snake-eyes. Uh, OK. And my question to Prof. Coyne is: And I’m supposed to do what with this?
All my adult life it’s been pretty clear to me that life isn’t fair, and like Popeye, I am what I am, and that, had circumstances been different when I started I might be someone else now. There but for the grace of Dog go I. I’d like to at least look like Robert Redford please. We won’t go into the issue of how Prof. Coyne apparently went to a pretty good college but mine had a crappy biology department for anyone but pre-med students. From the perspective of the Omniscient Being, it was and is all “determined” but The Mutt and I go on through time and space, taking it as it comes, and responding, consciously or not, as best we can, given who we are and given what cards we were dealt. (Yeah, I switched game metaphors. I, consciously or otherwise, like this image better right here.)
To steal from Pascal (I think), The Mutt and I are in the game, and we must play. No one we know can tell us what will happen, although there are family, friends, and enemies who might successfully predict what we will do in any particular situation. As we pass through time we are making decisions, consciously or otherwise, about what to do, and the notion that the Omniscient Being (and maybe a few people who know us really well) can predict what we’ll do is no big deal. The fact that we’re already who we are, where we are, is enough to worry about. Given all the actual problems I could list here, I think I’m missing the tragic sense of determinism that appears to afflict Prof. Coyne.
I understand that Hume thought that “reason is a slave to the passions.”
Although I also understand that Hume came to value the role of reason a bit more as he got older.
You make a good argument by early-on examining the relationship between reason and causality.
I would think of Hume as your main arguer.
I don’t see what this sort of thing is supposed to get us, as it seems to be nothing more than a dogged insistence that only libertarian free will is “genuinely” free will.
I don’t think this is particularly helpful, in part because I don’t think that this is what people generally mean by ‘free will’. We don’t concern ourselves with who or what might be “ultimately responsible”, but only with being responsible. Yes, Madoff is responsible for his actions. And if I were somehow magically placed in exactly the same situation with exactly the same brain, etc., then I would almost certainly do the same, and I would be responsible. Note, though, that even this sort of thought experiment is nonsense, for it supposes that there can be some identity between an “I” (the person writing this) and some other entity having nothing at all in common (no shared memories, no shared experiences, etc.). That is, being “in the exact neurobiological state that Bernie Madoff’s brain was” is just being Bernie Madoff; if I were that, then I would be him.
But this “exactly the same case, but different result” isn’t even what anyone would want. Even in the most trivial case. If I’ve just purchased a ginger ice cream, after having thought about it and how much I will enjoy it while walking there, then I have done exactly what I willed (presumably). If, on the other hand, I were to find myself in exactly the same situation, but to my surprise found myself ordering ‘tutti-frutti’ instead of ginger, then I would be shocked and horrified rather than celebratory of my “freedom”. And I am reasonably sure that just about everyone else would feel the same.