More on Free Will
[My apologies to those who do not find these philosophical niceties either interesting or even, perhaps, intelligible.]
After reading Sam Harris’s book Free Will, I quickly put up a post about it while it was still fresh in my mind. None of the comments really surprised me. Most (?) of them took me to task for beliefs which I do not hold. First, I do not claim that there is contra-causal free will, in the sense that free will can be thought of as a power within us that can overturn the causal precedents of action. I do not even make claims about the existence of selves, as unitary entities, though it is not clear to me that Sam Harris does not support such a belief. Nor would I want to claim that more will not be discovered about what it is that we call free will, and how it operates to produce decisions and choices.
Harris (I have been accused of condescending to him by using his first name, though I think it is probably a response to the chatty character of his writing style) seems to think that the only kind of free will worth having is contra-causal free will, which is, he says, what we think of, intuitively, as free will. I’m not even sure that this is correct, since most of us, I believe, have a sense that our present choices are circumscribed by choices already made, as well as other restrictions placed on our choices, limits that we are sometimes acutely aware of. How could we not have such a sense? After all, the fact that I did not concentrate on maths in school or university means that there are many choices that I simply cannot make now. I am also aware that many of my desires and preferences, expressed over many years, severely limit the kinds of choices I am likely to make. I am even aware, of course, that some of these are a result of my upbringing and childhood socialisation; and very conscious that some of my choices were constrained by a (at the time largely unconscious) desire to upset my parents who, in many ways, had made my childhood an unhappy affair.
These limitations upon the field of our choices would, I suggest, become obvious to most people if they were to stop and think for a moment about the matter. Nor, I think, do we have a sense that we are the ultimate uncaused originators of our actions and choices. This is a philosophical — or more likely a theological — predilection, especially one deriving from monotheistic religious belief, and the sense of ultimate responsibility that this has given rise to. It has even been thought that we are ultimately responsible notwithstanding the fact that we are not the originators of our own actions. In the story of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, for example, there is simply no question that there must have been a person to play this perfidious role, and that fact notwithstanding, Judas was held to be responsible for his betrayal, and to be morally despicable for that reason. Jesus himself expresses the thought that: “It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come!” (Luke 17.1) And our failure to believe, although predestined, as John Calvin held, is still something for which we bear ultimate responsibility and as a consequence of which we will be punished absolutely. So, I think the issue of free will is much more complex than most people seem prepared to recognise. It is not simply a matter of intuitively thinking of ourselves as the ultimate, uncaused causes of our actions.
It is in this context, I think, that we need to think about the nature of free will. It is not, specifically, the question of contra-causal free will that is at issue when people feel threatened by the idea that causal determinism amounts to a denial of free will, even though this is what gets the most attention. I suspect, in fact, that most people wouldn’t understand what was meant by the idea of contra-causality. What they are more concerned about is the denial of free will in any sense of the word, the denial that we have any sort of control over what we do, that there is a sense in which the decisions and choices that we make are forced, and that we never have any options — and that, even though it may appear that we do, this is nothing but an illusion (or perhaps an illusion of an illusion, whatever that means).
In a comment on my post on Sam Harris’s new book, Jon Jermey says this:
We have — what, well over a million? — comprehensive explanations of things that go on in biological systems. None of them involves any mysterious ‘agency’. To claim that ‘agency’ must be responsible for just those phenomena that we can’t yet explain is a little too much like invoking a God of the Gaps.
Now, this seems to me to be a strange claim, because no one is attributing agency to the things that go on in biological systems. Where agency comes in is at the level of biological systems themselves. Biological systems sometimes display agency. We watch a tiger padding through the tall grass, alert to every movement that might indicate the presence of lunch. He stops, waits patiently, watching. Then, suddenly, with a few quick bounds, he lunges towards the small antelope in the clearing, upwind of him, and pounces mercilessly on his prey, bringing it to the ground by the sheer force of his weight and movement and the accuracy of his claws and the quickness of his jaws, opening the antelope’s throat as it falls, lifeless, to the ground. Nothing in that biological system, the tiger, displays agency, but the system itself is directed and purposeful. The tiger is an agent. Why should we deny this, or assimilate the claim that he is to the invocation of a god of the gaps?
The problem, as I see it, lies in the fact that there is a great deal of confusion in what is meant by ‘free will’, which is, in origin, a term of art, not an expression in ordinary language. We do things freely, voluntarily, without coercion, with malice aforethought, or with a guilty mind, but we do not speak, in ordinary terms, about having free will. The term derives from philosophers’ and theologians’ uses of voluntas, or appetitus rationalis, which have no application in ordinary speech. Aristotle spoke in terms of those things which were “up to us”. As Thomas Pink points out in his Free Will: A Very Short Introduction, it was only later Greek philosophers who spoke in terms of eleutheria, or freedom. And when ordinary people say that they did something “of their own free will,” they are saying that they were not forced or tricked into doing something, not that they exercised a particular mental faculty. But then scientists, like Sam Harris, come along, and suggest that, after all, what you think you did “of your own free will” you were compelled to do, that you, and all your “actions”, are simply a cog in a machine, in the great deterministic process called nature, and that you could not have done otherwise. You are just a puppet of fate, after all.
However, that phrase, ”I could have done otherwise,” is functioning differently in, “I did it of my own free will,” than it is the scientific context, where the denial of (a faculty of?) free will is at issue. In the ordinary sense, “I could have done otherwise” only means that there were other options, and, if I had chosen one of them, I would have done otherwise, so, in that sense of ‘could’, in the sense in which there were other options at the time I chose to act as I did, I could have done otherwise, even though I didn’t. And sometimes, when we realise that we made a mistake, we say that we should have done otherwise, should have acted differently, and that, the next time, we won’t make that mistake again, and so on. This is something that the scientist seems to be denying, and this denial is taken to be threatening to the things that we value, something that Harris has the grace to recognise at the outset of his book, and then ignores for the rest of it. He says that “[t]he stakes are high” (1), but do they need to be? I think not. When, later on, Harris recognises that, despite all that he has to say about “free will”, his choices matter, because “there [but not, notice "they"] are paths towards making wiser ones,” (39) he does not provide the context in which we can speak about things mattering or having value or choices being wise. This language has no purchase in the world Harris describes, where everything emerges randomly out of the darkness of the unconscious and compels us we know not whence nor whither.
And this is where Daniel Dennett and Tom Clark come in, because they are very aware of the human emptiness of the world that Harris is describing. Indeed, it is so humanly empty that it would not be hard to imagine things done, and programmes carried out, which were almost unimaginably horrific, simply because of the idea that we cannot choose what ideas, thoughts, or choices might inexplicably come into our minds. The thought that, after speaking about molecular robots and deterministic outcomes, there is no level at which we can reasonably speak about control, where it makes sense to think in terms of better and worse choices, humane or inhumane choices, is, as Tom Clark says, demoralising. Or, as Dennett says:
As I present the fruits of my naturalism … I encounter pockets of uneasiness, a prevailing wind of disapproval or anxiety quite distinct from mere skepticism. Usually this discomfort is muffled, like a faint rumble of distant thunder, a matter of wishful thinking … [until a question reveals the] hidden agenda that has been driving their skepticism: “That’s all very well, but then what about free will? doesn’t your view destroy the prospect for free will? This is always a welcome response, since it supports my conviction that concern about free will is the driving force behind most of the resistance to materialism generally and neo-Darwinism in particular. [Freedom Evolves, 15]
And, as Tom Clark said, in a response to one of Jerry Coyne’s recent posts on free will:
Given that choices have consequences, I hope you (and Sam) would eventually agree that we aren’t puppets or victims of circumstances who lack control, for instance in achieving our New Year’s resolutions. As I pointed out in comments in the earlier thread here about your USA Today article, puppets have no internal source of behavior control – their movements are a function of external forces only, e.g., strings. We, on the other hand, have tons of internal processing that makes us radically autonomous by comparison, acting on the basis of our own motives and desires. Determinism doesn’t erase the distinction between people and puppets, between acting autonomously and proactively on the basis of one’s own character and desires and being passive, with no sense of internal locus of control. Paradoxically, accepting determinism – that we could *not* have done otherwise in actual (as opposed to counterfactual) situations – gives us *more* control, since we’re led to examine very closely the causes of behavior, see for instance the paper on weight loss naturalism linked at http://www.naturalism.org/behavior_tech.htm It also makes us more empathetic and compassionate, something I’m very glad you’ve highlighted in your critique of CCFW [contra-causal free will]. It’s no coincidence that scientists tend to be liberals.
People really don’t want to think of themselves as passive puppets, so if they get the impression that the naturalistic denial of CCFW entails this, as you said in your USA Today piece following Sam Harris, they won’t accept naturalism. So it’s crucial for the prospects of humanistic naturalism that people *not* suppose naturalism entails puppethood, which it doesn’t, as argued above and see http://www.naturalism.org/demoralization.htm and http://www.naturalism.org/determinism.htm So I hope you and Sam will change your minds on this point and let it be known.
I don’t want to say anything more than either Dennett or Clark say. I am aware that Tom Clark does not think of his position as compatibilist (although I have to say that I can’t find a relevant difference between him and Dennett that would lead to this parting of the ways, except that Clark does not think of punishment as retributive, and Dennett, unaccountably, perhaps, does). So far, neither Jerry nor Sam have evinced any tendency towards a view like that of Dennett or Clark — although Clark thinks of them as being in transition – and I guess my concern is that they do not seem inclined to even consider such a position as either helpful or coherent, even though neither has yet given any reason for not giving this position the attention (I think) it deserves.
Posted on 12 March 2012, in Free Will. Bookmark the permalink. 40 Comments.
I would like the evidence that nature is deterministic.
Nature, it seems to me, is probabilistic. It starts with quantum effects, but continues in the world we inhabit. The tiger misses the antelope more times than he successfully kills it. The entire process of natural selection is a probabilistic one. On average, more members of species X with phenotype Y survive/mate than those with phenotype Z. There’s nothing deterministic about that at all — it’s probability based on environmental factors. Ring species are evidence of the probabilistic nature of evolution. . And frankly, to invoke determinism in nature is to then beg the question, “but if humans came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”
Hi Eric — thanks for the citation. But it’s ‘Jermey’, btw. I think you’re getting closer to the facts with the recognition that the ‘free will’ argument is essentially a linguistic one: that is, it’s about what we can consistently say and expect to be understood. In fact I tend to think ALL genuine philosophical arguments fall into this category, but that’s another story.
I don’t think, however, that by recasting ‘free will’ in terms of ‘purpose’ or ‘determination’ — or for that matter, ‘agency — you’re going to end up anywhere but going round in circles. And your example seems to me particularly unfortunate in that it demonstrates the thwarting of one purpose — the antelope’s desire to escape and survive — by another. Bereaved friends and family of the antelope might well go on to curse the unpredictable and unprecedented events that brought this promising young life to an end. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of victory for ‘agency’ here.
But as I have tried to point out in previous comments, there’s nothing wrong with ordinary language. If someone says they gave up smoking by an effort of will, I understand quite clearly what they mean — just as I understand what they mean if they say their daughter has a soulful smile. It’s the attempt to draw metaphysical implications from ordinary phrases which I find unproductive and ultimately baffling. Why would we expect ordinary language to provide insights into anything but ordinary life?
Jon, that (#2) just doesn’t make sense. The fact that my decisions may interfere with you carrying you yours says nothing about the failure of agency for either of us. You still display agency, even if, by my actions I frustrate the aim of yours. So, where is the circle? Agency is goal-directed behaviour. Agency does not have to be free agency, in the sense proposed by free will, so we can observe agency at fairly rudimentary levels of life. Indeed, there is no reason that we can’t, by progressively complicating a machine, come to the point where we achieve at least something analogous to agency, and it is not clear to me that we could never create a machine that could pass the Turing test. The whole point about agency is that it is goal-directed. The point about free agency is that there is a degree of internal control over the goal-directed options available, and this is a capability that has, as Dennett says, evolved, and it is still evolving. Freedom evolves. When I say that I gave up smoking, I mean that, out of a range of options, I chose to quit. I might have tried instead to reduce my intake, or to have changed to smoking a pipe instead of cigarettes. So when I say that I decided to quit, I am saying that “I” (whatever, in the end we want to say about selves and subjects) chose that option out of a range of options available to me. This is not just an ordinary language view of actiion, but a reasonably assessed capacity that some living entities possess, a capacity that evolves and may continue to evolve. Humans have evolved complicated systems for receiving, analysing and categorising information, and then responding to situations on the basis of these processes. That doesn’t mean that there are not any number of imponderables that are also involved in making choices, aspects of character and desire over which I may have had little control; but it does mean that there are conscious processes which are executive in relation to choices and decisions that I make. Nor does it mean that I stand outside the causal nexus. But it does mean that as the biological/cognitive system that I am, inputs are only probabalistically related to outputs, and that there is a process of inforrmation processing and decision that mediates between the inputs and outputs. And there is no empirical reason for supposing that this is not true. To suppose that the consciousness of deliberation and decision is a mere byproduct of something taking place at a lower level is not really plausible, and certainly not necessary. My decisions are part of the causal stream that runs through me. Or, as Tom Clark says:
– a situation which includes information, information processing, options, and decision. A decision once made, is of course the outcome of deterministic chains of causes and effects; it is the outcome of that complex situation, and of course it can’t be replayed. If it comes out in ways we had not intended, we will have information to feed into the same or similar processes in the future. Part of education and socialisation is learning how to deal with situations that commonly arise — which is why we’re so awkward in situations for which we have not been prepared. The more unconscious we are of the mechanisms involved — as in playing the piano, typing, playing tennis, tight-rope walking, speaking a language — the more accomplished we become in those skills. But it doesn’t diminish one whit the fact that these are things that we do. When you watch someone practicing and practicing until placing tennis balls exactly where they want them to go is second nature, until there is a rhythm and a decisiveness and confidence that is unshakable, you are watching them achieving control over the way they hold their racket, move their arms and body, place their feet, and control the ball. To suggest that, having achieved this control, they are not acting freely, seems ludicrous to me. The same goes for so many other things that we learn to do, and do well. I can type at roughly 100 words per minute, though perhaps I’m slowing down as I grow older. It took me days and days of typing meaningless strings of letters in order to achieve that level of proficiency. And now, unfortunately for those who choose to read my blog, people have to face the fact that I can type almost that fast and say what I want to say while doing it. I simply don’t see what sense it makes to say that these were not and are not actions performed by me for a purpose.
Eric, could you succinctly state what it is about the non-existence of Free Will that you have a problem with?
“Free will” as a folksy expression is quite distinct from “free will” used in philosophical debate, and while I agree with Dennett as to the folksy variant being one of naturalisms biggest triggers of criticism (see rejection of dualism further down), I also have to agree with Coyne and Harris to the deterministic nature of, well, nature; as soon as you reject dualism, something happens. Dualism has been food for free will for centuries – not to mention that it drives the basic tenant of Christianity – and when you let it go, when you admit that the agency of the mind and the deterministic part of it are, well, pretty much the same thing, then something *is* lost, the question then is how we deal with it. There is something important to note here:
We humans have an amazing ability to both predict the future (probabilities) and remember our past (analysis and data for new probabilities). Without this I suspect these “free will” discussions becomes moot very quickly, and I dare say that it is precisely *because* of it we get into the linguistic tides of back and forth. It is *only* if we remember our past that we can even ask the question of what we could have done instead. Could it be that our ability to store memories is the cause of our notion of free will? Could it be that our past memories *are* what gives us the impression of free will? And could it be that our memories are just as much part of a deterministic outcome as any other part of our biological markup? If this latter is realized I don’t think people would have allergies to determinism; you, your memories and faculties, are a huge part of the puzzle, and perhaps this is important to grasp as not to fear it.
I make a note that you (Eric) said – paraphrasing Coyne or Harris, I think – “You are just a puppet of fate, after all.” Here you make a grave error by using the word “fate.” (Don’t know if Coyne or Harris uses this word, but if they do, then that is a problem) There is a big difference between things being deterministic and things done by fate, and I fear it underlies this whole debate. Fate means that you are not in control, and that whatever comes has already been written down and is going to happen, and you can’t stop it; there is a future, and it has already been coloured in. Determinism just says that there is no future apart from what we probabilistically can create using our imagination, and whatever happens is determined by our past but the future is a big glaring blank sheet on which anything can happen.
Fate means we have no free will, but I’m pretty certain that determinism can, with some understanding, become an acceptable version of free will. People fear too much fate – perhaps rightly so, except Calvinists who seems to love it for some bizarre reason – but I don’t think they would have a problem with determinism if they actually understood it (except when they *want* their fate to be something specifically empowering).
IMHO, of course.
I personally find these philosophical posts the most rewarding, mostly because they have a high degree of difficulty to grasp (for me anyway). I find myself learning the most from them.
I am not entirely sure I agree with the hopeless picture of determinism painted here. I can look back on the decisions of Abraham Lincoln, knowing full well what his destiny will be, and still recognize that he made choices that had consequences and meaning. Truly wondrous and terrible ideas have come to human beings, even if they were to come “randomly out of the darkness of the unconscious and compel us we know not whence nor whither.” (I have difficulty envisioning Harris embracing such a random revelation based approach to knowledge.) The cogs in the machine still have an effect, even if in the end they can only go through one course of history. I see no reason to “give up” and stop trying to change my future simply because there will ever only be one actual history after events play out. I can still imagine scenarios and act to control my environment. I can make a difference and take responsibility for it.
As for “could have done otherwise”, I suspect the determinists will move their goalposts back to demanding time travel to be wrong and the free will proponents will demand ever more accurate predictions before admitting defeat to move their goal posts back. I can see no resolution to the stalemate. The sample size will always be 1 and the result only truly predictable after the fact.
Here’s a happy compromise: those people who don’t think they have free-will, well you don’t, while the rest of us do. Can’t we just get along now?
“as the biological/cognitive system that I am, inputs are only probabalistically related to outputs, and that there is a process of information processing and decision that mediates between the inputs and outputs.”
But exactly the same can be said about a tossed coin. The ‘input’ to my tossed coin, from my perspective, is ‘probabilistically’ related to the output. In other words, although I know in advance whether it will come down heads or tails, I don’t know which. And the coin in flight is ‘processing’ various unpredictable inputs related to wind speed, atmospheric pressure and so on — that is, they effect its behaviour and the resulting outcome. (What a ‘process of decision’ is, I have no idea.) From my point of view, the coin has ‘free will’.
Meanwhile, over at Mythbusters, they have done the research and analysed the inputs, and from looking at a high-speed film of the beginning of a flip they can predict with 95% certainty whether it will land heads or tails. From their point of view the coin has very little ‘free will’, if any. And there is no reason to think neuroscientists will find the brain is any different.
So you are still left trying to explain why a concept which has explanatory power at one very restricted level should be regarded as a genuine phenomenon which, if it exists, breaks all the laws of physics as we understand them.
Jerry often states that, if you could run the tape of time more than once, the decisions you would make would not change (all things being equal). This runs counter to the common definition give of free will where, running the tape of time more than once might see different decisions playing out. They are very clear on this definition and their meanings.
What Eric is trying to prove by changing the definition, I have no idea. If you’re not going to address Jerry’s main point, why bring him into the conversation?
Surely Eric has been addressing Jerry’s main point by saying that, yes, he agrees that if you could re-run the tape of time once or more than once, the decisions you have made would not be different. I think virtually any sensible person would agree with that. What Eric is saying or suggesting, it seems to me (perhaps mistakenly – on my part, not Eric’s!), is that the common understanding of free will is in fact not the same as the theological or philosophical definition of (contra-causal) free will, and that one should not confuse the two. He is not changing definitions at all, as Phaedrus alleges. He has also been showing – and, for me at least, persuasively – that the sort of greedy reductionism that seems to be at the core of Harris’s book (I have not yet read it) renders explanations of our behaviour and experience unintelligible, as the kind of compatibilism espoused by Dennett or Tom Clarke does not.
To speak frankly, attacking contra-causal free will is surely a trivial occupation and a waste of time (unless you want to smack some theologian or other in the face). The important task is surely that of understanding ourselves and the universe.
This is extremely important. It’s from this perspective that the compatibilist position makes sense. In fact, I think any time one uses language like “the next time,” “the last time,” “the next booth over,” etc., it is de facto compatibilism.
“The next time” is never really the next time because not everything about the situation will have been the same as “last time” — the only reason you call it “the next time” is because there’s enough the same to make a good-enough analogy between the two situations. Say you’re bowling and your roll hits the gutter. You use language to call the next event a “roll” because it had enough in common with the last event that you can pick out part of it to say “this” is what it means to “roll.”
This is what the compatibilist project is about – it’s about pointing out the different capabilities of different systems and the similarities between situations that make language and analysis meaningful in the first place.
It’s also the basis of empiricism – empiricism is dead if there’s no way to make analogies; you can’t say “the experiment was run 30 times.” I’m glad jonjermey brought up flipped coins because it’s really important what level of analysis you’re going to find relevant. If I flip a coin 100 times, I can still expect roughly half to come up heads. When I say of a flipped coin, “It could have come up heads, but instead it came up tails,” it is the interpretation of “could” that is important. When I use that kind of language I am saying something about the binary capabilities of flipped coins that we have induced from behavior of past coins, not trying to indicate that with exactly the same causal input to the coin that it nevertheless could have come up anything but tails. We can analyze those causal inputs for a given throw and predict what will happen, and we could even build a machine that will guarantee an outcome, but we still need some way of saying that a coin “can” come up either heads or tails for a given throw.
It’s the same thing with people but on a far more complex scale. If I happen to be deciding whether it’s a 1 or a 2 I should be carrying in an addition problem, and at the same time I was hooked to a machine that could predict with 95% accuracy what my behavior will be in the next 10 seconds based on my causal determinants, in no way to we get to conclude that I wasn’t really doing math or wasn’t really making a decision about the 1 or the 2.
The main thing that separates my behavior from a flipped coin as a kind of agent with inputs, outputs, and manipulation of information, is the orders of magnitude in the complexity of the system. We can’t just pretend that the complexity is “ultimately” irrelevant because it’s a deterministic system – we have to acknowledge it, analyze it, and account for it, determinism or no. A “decision” is just as real and meaningful as an “advantageous mutation,” and it just doesn’t do to call either of those “illusions.”
@Another Matt: Not meaning to sound simplistic, but even given the complexity, why doesn’t it do to call them illusions? If it quacks like a duck, et cetera. What is this “doesn’t do” you’re referring to?
Interesting and thoughtful posts, but I fear that this will never lead anywhere, or it would already have several discussions on WEIT ago. It always seems to go somewhat like this:
Compatibilist: I agree completely that there is no contra-causal free will and that naturalism is true, but don’t you think we need a word to describe the difference between how we can decide what to do and how an ant instinctively reacts to stimuli, or between giving $100 to somebody out of our own free will and giving $100 to the same person because they threaten us with a gun?
Incompatibilist: You are just as bad as a theologian with your belief in contra-causal free will!
Compatibilist: Did you read anything I wrote?
Incompatibilist: I do not need to address that – I am right by default because of naturalism. Where is your evidence that naturalism is wrong?
Compatibilist: Er, what… when did I claim… huh?
I found a comment by Daniel Lafave in the previous thread particularly clear and helpful, and would like to draw attention to it again: the claim that speaking of having free will is nonsensical because it is all chemical reactions and physical laws is just as reductionist as the claim that speaking of being alive is nonsensical because it is all chemical reactions and physical laws. One could continue down that road and point out that this reductionism could happily be applied to many other aspects, with similarly silly results. How can you speak of a novel with an interesting story, it is only a bunch of molecules! This car does not really drive, it is just the pistons moving and the tires turning! Emergent properties and different levels of complexity require different approaches.
@Alex SL : Besides having a good name, er, I think that’s an unfair straw-man of a compatibilist critic. The contra-casual free-will is not what is being said to be lacking; it’s the need for a new category between non-casual free-will and determinism that is somewhat lacking.
The comment you point to is all fine and well (and one I certainly can agree with), but when we view the world through the lens of quantum mechanics (and whatever you call your connection to relativity) then this whole debate doesn’t make any sense. How can anything in the natural world be claimed to be this thing called free will and still be part of a determined system? The only way seems to be to declare a new category slotted between them, however the properties of this category and the threshold of where the one turns into another seems to be of much subtle dispute.
The funny thing is that I think you’ve helped me see something a bit clearer, and may lie at the centre of this; I don’t think reductionism is wrong. And, as my thinking has been swinging between hard determinism and compatibilism for quite some time, the more I read philosophy and theoretical physics, the more I swing to the deterministic side; can we at all say that any system on a smaller scale don’t influence or outright determine outcomes for things on the larger scale? Are there thresholds of scale that makes one system deterministic and another compatibilistic free-will and yet another libertarian free-will? I personally don’t see these thresholds, and *that* is why I question compatibilism; I don’t agree with those properties.
But I’m happy to change my mind if the right argument spring forth, or my admittedly poor faculties can be corrected.
Have a look at this video of a flock of birds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eakKfY5aHmY&feature=related
It wouldn’t surprise me if watching such videos gives people a kind of spiritual experience, but this complex behaviour is well understood. Each bird follows simple rules, but as they do so a collective system emerges. This is what happens when outputs feed back into inputs, otherwise known as a feedback loop.
@Alexander Johannesen:
Sorry, but that is again missing the point – completely, and in exactly the way I was describing. Of course the system at a larger scale is completely determined by the system on the smaller scale! (Plus randomness, perhaps, but randomness is not free will either, and I tend more towards emphasizing determinism.) But that does not change that while it might be best to think in terms of, e.g., chemical reactions, on a small scale, the same approach will be utterly useless on a larger scale. You cannot even begin to understand ethnology, economics or human psychopathology if you reduce these phenomena to organic chemistry. And at that level free will and agency are concepts that are useful despite determinism.
Eric is completely right: my choice to study a certain subject at university or to buy a certain shirt may have been predetermined twelve billion years ago, but it did not “just happen” in the same way that a rock rolling down a slope just happened. There is an important qualitative difference between me and the rock in terms of how autonomous these two bundles of molecules are in their reactions to the environment.
It has, by the way, not escaped the notice of incompatibilists like Jerry Coyne that this difference is increasingly blurred the more we move upwards in complexity through the animal kingdom towards humans, and he somehow seems to assume that this would show the absurdity of compatibilist free will (“does a flatworm have it?”). I cannot currently remember the name of that particular fallacy, but the argument is about as convincing as the claim that the concept of adulthood is meaningless because you do not turn from a toddler into a 21-year-old in a single moment.
I agree with Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne – given identical precursor conditions your ‘choice’ will always be the same. ‘I will always choose to eat strawberry ice cream over chocolate under these circumstances’. But are identical circumstances a realistic proposition?
I expect that no one would expect the same choice to be (necessarily) made under wildly different precursor conditions. ‘I will rarely choose to eat strawberry ice cream when I have just eaten a full English breakfast’.
So the another way of framing the debate is to ask how different the precursor conditions must be before the predicted choice is unreliable? People are notoriously poor at knowing the precursor conditions, or at making accurate future predictions. This does have real world implications – e.g. how contrite must a criminal be before they are permitted parole?
If the feeling of possessing ‘free will’ is the feeling of uncertainty of predicted choice then determinism is still true and free will is also true. But I still believe that the feeling of possessing ‘free will’ is an artefact rather than a thing in itself.
Apology accepted – you guys have fun, and I’ll just wait for the next religious or Choice in Dying post. Note the UK High court decision re Tony Nicklinson.
@ Egbert #7 – Works for me.
Because that it’s not how we usually use the word “illusion.” When I say something is an “optical illusion” it means my visual apparatus is being tricked into “seeing something that isn’t there” (e.g. curves in those lines, blue and green where it’s actually one shade, etc.). If “making a choice” in the compatibilist sense is “merely an illusion,” then visual perception itself is “merely an illusion.” And if visual perception is already an illusion, what on earth could an “optical illusion” be? It could be a “meta-illusion,” and maybe it’s “mere illusions all the way down” which I suppose is fine, but we have to agree to treat the word “illusion” that way from the start. In that case, “thinking,” “the taste of an orange,” “the sound of Hitch’s voice,” “suffering” — all “merely illusions” because atoms don’t think, taste, hear, or suffer.
Here’s another example I’ve used before:
Compatibilist: “Did you hear? They found a bomb in my building – police said if the bomb squad hadn’t gotten there in time to disable it, it could have taken out the whole block! I could have died! Scary!”
Incompatibilist: “Didn’t you say the bomb squad disabled the bomb? Well, then it never could have exploded; you’re wrong to have been scared.”
Consider what we mean by a “faulty bomb” – we need a way of saying that a bomb is “faulty” because of its wiring, say — but we would never call a bomb “faulty” because it was eventually discovered and disarmed; the plan or the placement or the timing was “faulty” in the latter case. This is the compatibilist perspective at work; the incompatibilist would need to say that both bombs were equally faulty because there was no explosion, end of story (and “explosions” are merely illusions anyway — it’s all just physical processes at work at the quantum scale).
When we apply this to human behavior, we can distinguish human behavior from ant behavior or bomb behavior even though all three are made of atoms with deterministic qualities — it’s the arrangement of those atoms that is at issue. I have a much wider array of “options” before me from moment to moment than an ant does, based on our various capabilities. And even though under determinism my brain will be determined to choose one of those options, it is much more meaningful to still just call them “options” than it would be to call them “the illusion of options.” The latter imports too much dualism and essentialism into the discussion and clouds up the analysis.
Or, to put it more briefly: It doesn’t do any good to say, “Free will is just an illusion. Therefore we should not have retributive justice.” If “free will” is just an illusion, so is “retribution.” If “I” is (am?) just an illusion, then also “nobody” will be made to “suffer” because “suffering” is also just an illusion. None of this reasoning works! There are many good, coherent reasons to oppose retributive justice, but the idea that “nobody really makes choices” is not one of those reasons.
Eric says
“Harris (I have been accused of condescending to him by using his first name, though I think it is probably a response to the chatty character of his writing style)”
If this is a reference to my comment, #3, 10 March 2012 to “Free Will: Finding a Place to Start, ” what I said was,
“Your tendency to refer to Sam Harris as Sam rather than the conventional Harris or Sam Harris implies your disdain for Harris and his book.”
I used the word “conventional” to indicate that it is a convention in literary criticism or in any discussion of another person’s writing to use the writer’s first and last name or the writer’s last name only. Following this convention/style allows the critic to maintain a critical distance from the work and author he is critiquing.
I don’t get why there is a need to write such lengthy treatises at all. I do consider philosophy interesting, and I do like lengthy arguments. But all I have to say about free will is to ask how one would go about and find the empirical difference between a world with free will and a world without. In other words, I don’t see any reason to believe that “free will” is a notion that has any real meaning at all, as it is emprically indistinguishable from “unfree will”, but makes a reality claim: “There is (free/no free)” will. Where’s the difference? How could I tell?
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2458
Another Matt — I think you’re being a little unfair. Nobody seriously expects reductionism to _replace_ other kinds of explanations in psychology or anywhere else any time soon; but we do try to insist that higher-level explanations are _compatible_ with lower-level ones; otherwise there’s no way to rule out impossibilities (‘Angels make your decisions for you’).
In calling free will an ‘illusion’ I don’t want to imply in any way that it’s not a useful concept, merely that it ‘disappears’ as soon as you move down (or even up) to different levels of abstraction.
So in explaining one why identical twin reacts in one way to a certain drug, and the other reacts differently, for instance, ‘free will’ is meaningless. In looking at the behaviour of large groups of people — in behavioural economics, for instance — ‘free will’ is meaningless. It’s a perfectly valid concept as a certain level, but it’s the attempt to represent it as a real phenomenon with application outside that level which — as a determinist — I find bafflingly wrong-headed.
And round and round it goes.
ACuriousMin: Where is the empirical difference between a world with rainclouds and a world without them? It is all just water molecules!
jonjermey: The concept of rainclouds disappears at the level of quantum physics, so rainclouds are an illusion!
In what sense please was my first comment a straw man?
‘It’s a perfectly valid concept as a certain level, but it’s the attempt to represent it as a real phenomenon with application outside that level which — as a determinist — I find bafflingly wrong-headed.’ But who, jj, is trying to say that the concept has application outside the level in which it has validity?
@Alex SL: “Sorry, but that is again missing the point – completely, and in exactly the way I was describing.”
No, I don’t think I missed the point you were making, nor that I “did it” in some prescripted way. I may be bad at explaining my stand, however.
“while it might be best to think in terms of, e.g., chemical reactions, on a small scale, the same approach will be utterly useless on a larger scale.”
And *this* is where we do differ, quite dramatically. I have never seen a compatibilist explain in any meaningful way that this compatibilist threshold in any meaningful way can describe where a particular view up or down the scale of things become useful or useless*. These are mere words you throw at me because I don’t accept your rejection of what I stated very clearly: “I don’t think reductionism is wrong.” In fact I’ll go further and say that the ontological categories we use for encompassing concepts in our mind and language are the very thing that stop us from fully understanding nature (and yes, I include our topic in that).
* Every abstract we use remove or add constraints to our understanding, and for me this debate about free-will is an example of where different abstracts aren’t mutually exclusive; when two sides collide (and by this, I’m meaning the incompatibilist vs. compatibilist views specifically) there is something they share (that contra-casual free-will is a myth, and logically determinism is true) and a gap they don’t share, and we’re left with stuff that neither side’s arguments cover. Now, having said that, I feel it’s the compatibilists that have come in and claimed this mystery spot that allows some kind of free-will into the previous domain of incompatibilist views, by altering the definition of free-will to talk about constraints around the agent rather than what goes on inside the agent. That an agent has free-will in terms of outside influence of other agents (as opposed to naturalistic determinism) is trivially true but for me doesn’t save free-will as it has traditionally been understood. I simply don’t like the re-definition because I don’t understand why we need to protect valued propositions with ontological trickery (IMNSHO).
Alex SL,
The agency skeptics aren’t just being reductivist, they are being eliminativist. I have no problem with reductivism. Ultimately chemical processes reduce to physical ones, and biological processes reduce to chemical and physical processes, etc…. However, the eliminativist goes further and says that nothing really has biological, chemical, economic, psychological, etc… properties at all. They might say, “it’s all an illusion” or “It’s an acceptable way of speaking but nothing really is a biological process” because there are only physical ones. What I don’t understand is why they believe it’s an acceptable way of speaking if they don’t think those claims are true. When I say that pre-mRNA is the product of transcription, I don’t consider that to just be a acceptable way of speaking. I consider that to be a true claim. Eliminativism is a really extreme position in that it claims that all of the claims of the sciences other than physics are simply false and only a useful way of speaking.
What, exactly, is it that we distinguish are different? They are two different scales of complexity (ie. more parts, more neurons, more calculations, more reasoning, etc.), not two different things, two different behaviours.
This is the core of what the problem of compatibilism is to me; it’s tweaking the ontology to make something complex a little simpler, but by doing so they also lose contextual meaning, so I don’t understand why they’re doing it. It just feels like a language game more than anything useful. Hmm.
@Daniel Lafave: “Eliminativism is a really extreme position in that it claims that all of the claims of the sciences other than physics are simply false and only a useful way of speaking.”
Could you explain why it is an extreme position (apart from taking nature extremely seriously)? Is it a false position? I know intuitively that it’s not necessarily easy to our normal discourse to talk like this, but surely admitting that this is reality isn’t extreme? Our brains wrap the world up in abstract categories so that we can make some sense out of it, and I think very much that in that sense all of our ontological definitions are mere illusions, or, to put it in a more scientific framework, they are models of nature that we use to further model nature. Isn’t it, well, unhealthy for progress to hold on to these ontological thresholds just for the sake of niceties and ease of use? *That*, to me, make them false even if useful.
@Alexander Johannesen: “In fact I’ll go further and say that the ontological categories we use for encompassing concepts in our mind and language are the very thing that stop us from fully understanding nature”
Maybe I misunderstand that, but are you actually and seriously arguing that we would understand economics, history, psychology or evolution better than we do now if we scrapped concepts like volition, personality, production, natural selection, genes, education, etc., and tried to analyze all these processes entirely in terms of interactions between subatomic particles?
I do hope I misunderstand. Quite apart from the question whether that is a fruitful approach in the first place it would quite simply be technically impossible to take it. And as you have implied yourself in the last comment, all our knowledge is merely hypotheses that have not yet been rejected and models that have not yet been superseded. There is nothing about quantum processes that makes them stand closer to The Way The Universe Really Is(TM) in this regard than a high level process such as allopolyploidy or soil erosion.
jonjermey:
This sounds very much like Dennett’s project. I think something like his version of compatibilism is the only perspective which is sufficiently reductionist, and in the right way – it seeks to connect the levels of organization coherently. So if it disappears when you move down or up in organization, that’s a perfectly fine and usual way to look at things. You can do the same with consciousness (or sentience, or whatever you prefer).
I agree, except for one point, and I think maybe it is the point of contention. What would it mean to say that it is not a “real phenomenon?” I think that’s only coherent if you want to say that only the elementary particles and space are real phenomena and everything else is merely shorthand. The kind of behavior we’re talking about is just as real as “capillary action,” but again many orders more complex. Again, I think there’s nothing contradictory in saying that we make choices but for any given choice we could not have chosen otherwise – what matters is that a choice was made.
Not so much misunderstand as to expand on it until it gets bizarre.
No, what I’m saying is that once we’ve established an ontological category there is a danger in not understanding it relationships that aren’t captured in other ontological categories. When we establish that a person is an individual, and a crowd is a bunch of individuals put together, the concept of the individual disappears. Do we understand “crowd” as its own thing, or as a compound? Are we missing important information because we don’t have words to describe the various stages from individual to crowd?
Anyway, we can look at many concepts up and down the ladder of scale of things, and where we find some constraint or recognizable border, we slap a name on that border. I think it’s important to remember what these words are, and that sometimes we need to remove ourselves from their contextual meaning and their constraints to better understand complex systems in which the constraints and borders probably aren’t so well defined or well behaved.
When it comes to free-will I suspect we need to ignore – or, at best, temporary forget – some of the ontological categories we use, because, well, we’ve learned so much since the cradle of philosophy, and that, perhaps, what philosophy do is too much definition of words and phrases, and too little focus on applicability to what we know in science, up or down the scale. In fact, I think my opinion is that there’s a severe lack of scale in philosophy, and, by extension, this debate.
Btw, I don’t expect many to agree with me.
Alexander Johannesen #34:
I actually do agree with you on this for the most part, and in this last post it sounds again like you’ve described the compatibilist project, which is to take the metaphysics and the “magic” out of things like free will and consciousness, in favor of emergence and levels of organization.
One of the most healthy things about this is its examination of metaphor and analogy in language and cognition. The Tom Clark quote about the puppet metaphor is a good example of this. If someone says “you are controlled by physics like a puppet,” they are sneaking dualism in through the backdoor. Not only does the “puppet” language make it sound like the “controls” are “external,” as Clark points out, it doesn’t at all get to the idea that the “you” in the sentence is itself emergent. It’s a dualist “you” being coerced by the nasty physics.
Further, the “puppet” metaphor is poor because puppets have only a few strings (see the cover of Harris’s book — http://bit.ly/xIwjSq ). For the “puppet” metaphor to be apt, we’d have to imagine a puppet controlled by trillions of strings, each of which does something slightly different, some of which only tug at other strings, and all of which are only connected to other points inside the puppet. But this no longer describes a puppet at all — at best it describes a complex robot — and even then we’re left with the stupefying “trillions of strings” which is a scale our brains have not evolved enough to imagine, let alone model adequately or design.
Sorry for the needless excursion… Anyway, if we’re around in a million years maybe we’ll be able to communicate about the world without invoking objects, but until then we’ll just have to endure with our piecewise models and be vigilant about where those models mislead (i.e. we’ll need to continue to do science).
@Another Matt: Sooooooo … basically I’m a compatibilist, don’t know it, and certainly don’t like it?
Anyway, I’ll have to digest this a bit further as I think we’re mostly agreeing. I can’t seem to get Harris’ book on my tablet (in Australia), so I’ll have to wait around for a dead-tree version.
@ Another Matt:
“I think there’s nothing contradictory in saying that we make choices but for any given choice we could not have chosen otherwise – what matters is that a choice was made.”
i think you’ve put your finger on it. Many folks *will* find this contradictory because they suppose that real choices involve being able to have done otherwise in an actual situation as it played out, when in fact a choice simply *is* how a situation involving an agent’s perceived alternatives, beliefs, desires, and deliberative capacities played out. The choice has consequences and is just as causally effective as the factors which created the agent, her desires, and her capacities.
Wanting to have been able to do otherwise in an actual situation is to want that there needn’t have been sufficient causes related to one’s self and one’s situation such that the choice was produced as it was. But that would mean the choice was to some extent a function of something unrelated to one’s self and situation, and what would be the use of that? If we think about it, seems to me we want our choices to be a deterministic outcome of well calibrated decision procedures (unconscious or conscious, fast or slow), along with an accurate perception of the situation. When a choice isn’t optimal in these respects, seeing that we couldn’t have chosen otherwise in that situation draws attention to exactly *why* we chose as we did, giving us knowledge we can put to good use in future situations.
Eric,
[My apologies to those who do not find these philosophical niceties either interesting or even, perhaps, intelligible.]
I don’t think that is really necessary – at least on my account; people aren’t being coerced or threatened with the application of thumbscrews. While I have at times been somewhat disparaging of philosophical pursuits – suggesting, as in the joke, some similarities with economists who, if you took all of them and laid them end to end, still wouldn’t reach a conclusion – that is partly a consequence of the complexity of the topic and getting a handle on all of the terms and concepts. And, no doubt, it is partly a consequence of the evolving discipline itself with cross-fertilizations from physics and chemistry and biology and mathematics. No wonder I feel like I’ve managed a round or two against Muhammad Ali or Joe Frazier ….
But one interesting thread in the post and subsequent discussion that seems particularly salient and which speaks to the heart of the matter is highlighted by your quote of Tom Clark:
We, on the other hand, have tons of internal processing that makes us radically autonomous by comparison, acting on the basis of our own motives and desires.
It seems that for all of the external influences on our sense if not reality of agency, it also seems that there is some emergent process by which a synthesis of those influences takes place such that, as the old saw has it, the whole becomes quite a bit more than just the sum of the parts. And I at least find it interesting and somewhat encouraging that that concept of emergence is becoming more prevalent and part of a framework to tackle what Richard Dawkins called the most profound mystery facing modern biology, if not all of society, that being consciousness itself – salient facets of which include free will and determinism.
And while emergence is, of course, a very complex subject – probably connected to everything else in the universe – and one which I have nowhere near the grasp that I would like to have, it seems there are a number of intriguing examples – “Example is always more efficacious than precept” [Samuel Johnson] – that I find quite illuminating. And probably the most central one is that illustrated by Cantor’s diagonal argument which is, apparently, central to “Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and Turing’s answer to the Entscheidungsproblem” – not that I have a particularly great handle on either of those too.
But the essence of it is that, generally, given a list of numbers – generally infinite but I find it is easier to comprehend if one starts with a finite list, if one takes the first digit of the first number and the second digit of the second number and so on until the last number then one is guaranteed to wind up with a number that is not in the original list. And likewise, one might argue, with the causes that influence our behaviours – the precise and unique compounding of them in the crucibles of our selves – so to speak – is what makes the results – us – autonomous and something quite a bit more than any particular influence.
And somewhat analogously, though from the field of physics rather than mathematics, there is the phenomenon of phonons which Lee Smolin in his The Trouble with Physics described as follows:
This proliferation of strings is an example of the familiar but rarely understood phenomenon of emergence, a term that describes the arising of new properties in large and complex systems. We may know the laws that the elementary particles satisfy, but when many particles are bound together, all kinds of new [emergent] phenomena become apparent. …
Here is an example [of emergent properties]: Perhaps the simplest thing a metal can do is vibrate; if you hit one end of a metal bar, a sound wave will travel through it. The frequency at which the metal vibrates is an emergent property, as is the speed that sound travels in the metal. Recall the wave/particle duality of quantum mechanics, which asserts that there is a wave associated with every particle. The reverse is also true: There is a particle associated with every wave, including a particle associated with the sound wave travelling through the metal. It is called a phonon. [pg 132]
And Wikipedia has an interesting article which illustrates that rather well. But the point is that one has again something that is quite a bit more than just the particles which it is composed of and which, one might argue in the case of consciousness if it is the same type of phenomenon, has at least some but not an absolute degree of autonomy – free will; if you will.
But what the ramifications of that concept might be – again assuming it is relevant to the phenomenon – is anybody’s guess, although I think it is likely to be substantial. Ran across a quote the other day of Jerry Fodor pertaining to the “ghost” of consciousness which I think is suggestive of the possibilities:
The ghost has been chased further back into the machine, but it has not been exorcised. [The Modularity of Mind; pg 127]
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