If you have ever fished before, you will know what it looks like (though not how it feels) to be a fish out of water, flopping around helplessly as you drown in the air. It’s one thing that convinced me that fishing is as cruel as hunting, and calling it a sport needlessly turns human beings into callous killers who are unresponsive to the despair of other creatures with which they share the planet. The fact that we can think this way, even if many do not, and hold ourselves responsible for the misery we may cause by our decisions, is a vital aspect of what it means to be human. Yes, I know, other animals can feel distress at the misery of their fellows, and domesticated pets, like dogs, seem to have a second sense to catch the moods and miseries of their masters. But only humans, so far as I know, can think that causing such misery is wrong, something that, if avoidable, ought to be avoided.
As I think about these things the farther and farther I get away from the determinism that seems to underlie many of the theories of human action that seem to be favoured by those who take science as foundational for our understanding of the human, and the more I feel like a fish out of water myself, floundering around with ideas that are foreign to me, and that I find increasingly rebarbative and unintelligible. I also feel that the apparently self-contradictory attempt to empty of significance all the words that refer to our ability to make decisions and in some sense to be the originators of our actions, despite the fact that in explaining this we inevitably use words that are redolent with the same ideas of agency and decision, really represents a sort of floundering of its own. Determinists like Sam Harris think that if we were to “give up” the notion of “free will” and instead think of what we normally think of as actions, originating with us, as merely occurrences in the chain of cause and effect, we would “recognise” a number of things, but especially that the language of responsibility, praise and blame, punishment and reward, is based on nothing more than illusion, and that, by “giving up” these illusions we will, in the end, become more humane, and “create” kinder societies, since we will “see” that people are not really responsible for what they do, for either the “good” or the “bad” things that they do, and that “recognising” this will lead us to “treat” them with more gentleness and consideration.
At the same time, though, we think that “freedom” is a great “value”, that people should be left to make “decisions” about their own lives, that they should not be limited and circumscribed by laws, unless such laws are “designed” merely to make sure that when people are making “decisions” they do not limit the ability of others to do the same. But yet the making of “laws” for “purposes” which we can “entertain”, and thus “control”, by mechanisms “designed” to channel people’s energy in “socially approved” directions, implies the ability to make decisions and to originate acts which the deterministic theory itself seems to deny. Indeed, when you stop to think about it for a moment or two, the whole business of “theory construction” in this connexion and its consequent deployment in “arguments” “designed” to “convince” others by “reasons” is in fact directly contrary to the theory itself, which thus undermines itself. Because there can be no reasons, as such, in such a deterministic world, but simply causes, and if we cannot choose, because choice implies that we are somehow freely able to do so, we cannot really give reasons either, for what are reasons, if they are not meant to provide justification – and not merely a causal theory of why one behaviour occurred instead of another – why one course of action would be preferable to another?
Now, mind you, I don’t know how to argue for the kind of freedom which seems to underlie our language, and perhaps, in the end, the determinists are right, and language is no more than a system of causal triggers that prompt people (well, members of the species H. sapiens sapiens) to respond in certain predictable ways. I do not even know whether we have to have incompatibilist and not merely compatibilist free will, though I tend to agree with Derek Parfit that only the latter is necessary for morality (see On What Matters, vol I, 258-263). (I want to stress, lest I be misunderstood in what follows, that, when I speak of determinism, I am speaking of the kind of determinism that does not even provide room for compatibilist free will or free choice, something that, in fact, simply makes no sense to me.) But when an individual instance of this species “argues” that this is all that there is — that is, that “we” are deterministic systems through and through, merely skin bags of molecules that are in some sense higher level billiard balls in complicated causal interaction with their environment — no “reasons” can be thought to be being “given” for “believing” that the world is composed in such and such a manner. On this bare bones determinism all that the language of “argument” can contain are stimulus patterns “designed” to evoke particular responses.
When I consider things in this way, I have a deeper appreciation for Alvin Plantinga’s argument that naturalism defeats itself, something that I had always thought of as a piece of scholastic mummery. But when you realise how many words need to be put in scare-quotes when trying to express a purely physicalist theory of mind, it seems that self-defeat cannot be far away. For, on the naturalistic assumption, how do you speak in terms of knowledge, reasons, and justification — all those words that imply rational control of the contents of one’s mind — without subverting the determinism that underlies it? While I have not read Plantinga’s argument recently, it seems clear, not that Plantinga wants to deny that we can know things, and that we can confirm them by theory construction and confirmation, but that this ability implies what determinism denies, namely that we do have these abilities to give rational consideration to our beliefs, and to hold them for reasons rather than just because these “beliefs” have been caused by circumstances in the world beyond our control. Of course, I do not want simply to deny that compatiblist free will is also an acceptance of determinism, whilst permitting scope for the notion of free choices and decisions. But I find I cannot make sense of any of the words that apply to our knowledge and understanding without there being some sense in which we can be said freely to decide, based on reason and evidence. And if what we are calling reason and evidence consists merely links in a causal chain, then the question arises why we should call the result of all this ‘knowledge’.
Of course, the other side of this is just to say that the process works. Scientific “method” works by weeding out theories that simply do not work, so the outcome of the sifting process of theory construction, confirmation or falsification, and further theory construction, confirmation or falsification, iterated endlessly, must at least reflect what is “really” “out there” in the world, and therefore our brain contents can be said to be in some correspondence with the way things really are. Now, while I haven’t thought this through, it seems to me that the problem is more serious than the determinist can admit. Perhaps that is a result of causative factors too; but it is more likely the result of a failure to consider the implications of the language being used. Since the determinist has problems with the whole idea of believing things for reasons (even though some of them apparently cannot see this) – reasons being different than causes, just as the knee-jerk reflex is different from the act of kicking a football through the goal posts — all the naturalistic determinist has to go on are the causative factors behind the occurrence of beliefs. But how do you speak intelligibly about such causative factors if the language of causation goes all the way down as well as all the way up?
It is considerations such as this that leads me to think that Tom Nagel has much more reason on his side in his recent book Mind and Cosmos than many seem prepared to allow. Of course, he is wrong, I believe, about evolution, and expresses in his subtitle more than his concerns give him a right to claim, but he has, nevertheless, put a question to the naturalistic programme that needs to be answered. So long as we abstract from mind, as science learned in the 16th and 17th centuries to do, there is nothing to hold up the progress of scientific discovery. The problem with science up to the point when the scientific revolution kicked in, is that the scientist began, as Descartes did, with human consciousness; and if you layer the physical world with human consciousness you end up with a hodgepodge which is neither beast nor fowl. Colour the world with feeling, and with the emotional cathexis that various items in the sensory field have for the individual, and science can get nowhere, for it all ends up being about human beings, and in order to find out about the physical world you have to shed all your human responses to things, and merely become a mirror which reflects the world from any point of view (the view from nowhere, as Nagel calls it) – which goes a long way towards explaining Leibniz’s monads, or the objects of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. This was the problem, as Koestler saw in his history of early scientific cosmology, The Sleepwalkers. Kepler, for example, could not separate his cosmological theories from Platonic ideas of the five perfect solids. Even when he realised that the planets orbited the sun in ellipses, and that his observations did not confirm his preconceptions, he still struggled to fit them into ancient metaphysical schemata.
However, if we continue to abstract from mind in dealing with mind itself, then we are likely to be faced with the opposite problem, of trying to fit mental language into the language of physics, even when it does not fit. So when Nagel argues that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false” (the subtitle of his book Mind and Cosmos) he is arguing, not that physics is wrong about the physical world, but that extending that paradigm to the description of the nature of mind is simply wrong — almost certainly false, as he puts it — a point that he puts fairly clearly in the following words:
What this means is that if we hope to include the human mind in the natural order, we have to explain not only consciousness as it enters into perception, emotion, desire, and aversion but also the conscious control of belief and conduct in response to the awareness of reasons—the avoidance of inconsistency, the subsumption of particular cases under general principles, the confirmation or disconfirmation of general principles by particular observations, and so forth. This is what it is to allow oneself to be guided by the objective truth, rather than just by one’s impressions. It is a kind of freedom—the freedom that reflective consciousness gives us from the rule of innate perceptual and motivational dispositions together with conditioning. Rational creatures can step back from these influences and try to make up their own minds. [Mind and Cosmos, 84]
I find myself agreeing with him, because I cannot see, either, how we can allow for all the language that I have placed in scare-quotes above without acknowledging that it provides us with a “kind of freedom,” as Nagel puts it with restraint.
I think I’ll leave it at that, except to add that I had begun this post thinking that I would speak about how like a fish out of water I felt having transferred my blog from a free-standing one to one associated with Free Thought Blogs. I was going along quite nicely by myself, and finding some modest reward in feeling that I was speaking to a group of people — not large, but not exiguous either — who were at least sometimes on the same wavelength with me. What it allowed me to do was to explore ideas that were important to me, and to develop them either fully or only in part, as I was moved to do so. I guess I never did work well as the member of a group. In the church I was either ultra-orthodox Anglo-Catholic, and thus a thorn in the flesh of those who wanted to see the church move gradually into modernity, or, after Elizabeth and I met and married, ultra-radical, and thus a thorn in the flesh of practically everyone, though someone who attracted a small amount of support for a conception of Christianity that was, in some sense, godless, whilst it retained the trappings of tradition that formed a narrative basis for godless living.
So, moving into a group context, such as Free Thought Blogs, has raised all the ghosts that I thought had been firmly laid — something that has brought me face to face, in a way that I would have rather not have happened, with the loneliness at the heart of my life since Elizabeth died. It was this floundering that I set out to explore with you here, and then found myself thematising it through my disagreement with the kind of determinism that seems to be regnant right now in the new atheist community, a determinism that has a tendency to isolate me more and more. For I cannot see my life through that lens (especially the kind of lens that denies even compatibilist free will). It is simply inaccessible to me. People talk about determinism, and that simply distorts everything that I thought was important about both my relationship with a remarkable young woman, but about that woman herself, who shaped and fashioned a life so deliberately and with such care that her distinctiveness was unmistakable, and the richness of her personality made such a vital contribution to my own life and to the lives of others who came into contact with her. Yesterday, this sense of floundering around in a reckless world of gales, completely out of my element, came to a focus, and led me almost to despair. I even thought — and this may yet happen — that it was perhaps time for me to bid blogging adieu. Time will tell. But whatever happens, it will be because I have reasons to do something, not because I was tossed willy-nilly into the maelstrom of causation over which I have no control at all. Like a fish out of water I may be, but my floundering is to some purpose, and that came out in what I have written. My present sense of disorientation is not just the product of causative factors over which I exercise no control, a view which, I think, simply trivialises the human, and, as I think about this process of trivialisation, I can understand why religious people respond with such horrified disbelief to the desiccated world that this deterministic view of the mind seems to provide. This aspect of Nagel’s critique of naturalism seems to me undoubtedly right, and I wonder why scientists, who benefit from abstraction from the human, should then turn their sights back on the human and try to apply the same abstraction to the human, the same abstraction from the human which allowed them to explore the natural world so successfully, which, by applying it to the human, threatens to undercut the very human creativity and control which is exemplified so fully in the scientific endeavour.
I’ve been puzzling over Eric’s angst. I can understand and support his dislike of scientism, I agree that the supernatural doesn’t exist, yet I struggle with Eric’s desire to put the ‘knowledge’ of philosophical Free Will and morality on to the same footing as knowledge derived from the scientific process.
By some not altogether strange coincidence I came across the Wikipedia entry for Hume’s Fork. Now I am not a philosopher (IANAP), and I understand that Hume’s Fork has limitations, but it seems to get to the heart of this long running debate. Oversimplification: Hume’s Fork is the division between “relations of ideas” versus “matters of fact and real existence”. Relations of ideas may be necessarily true (by definition) but uninformative about the state of the world, whereas facts are true contingent on the world.
So it is possible to have ‘true’ morals or free will in relationship to other ideas (i.e. held by other people) which may be supremely valuable, even if uninformative about the state of the world. At the same time naturalism and determinism may be provisionally true contingent facts about the world but they need not align with relationships between ideas. So facts cannot became values, but similarly values cannot be proven. Is is not ought, and ought is not is.
Now to assert that reductive naturalism can explain everything is one version of scientism, and Nagel has a point. But to anticipate that further scientific work may explain more and more about how we interact with each other and the world is not unreasonable and Nagel is wrong to prematurely reach for some unexplained teleolgy to settle his personal disquiet.
I appreciate the the difficulties, emotional and intellectual, that you lay out so nicely. I too have trouble even making sense of what hard determinists are thinking — I usually feel that I am making progress only when I identify various errors that they are falling into.
Here are my suggestions (for whatever they may be worth) for staying clear of the traps they’ve fallen into:
1) Use the term “hard determinist” or “incompatilbist” to refer to hard determinists like Harris. Don’t cede the term “determinist,” because that only compounds the confusion.
So then why use the term this way? I don’t think it’s required as a gesture of charity towards the incompatibilists. They know (or should know) that soft determinists aren’t denying determinism; “incompatibilist” and “hard determinist” are entirely clear and non-pejorative terms.
2) Distinguish between eliminative materialism and non-eliminative physicalism (whether non-reductive physicalism, or the more reductive variety that I defend).
I take it that the “naturalistic assumption” you’re referring to here is one held by the hard determinists, not by you and me and other soft determinists. But in that case, why suppose that it’s an assumption of naturalism that leads us to deny reason and choice, rather than a mistaken commitment to incompatibilism?
3) Recognize that many times the problem is not really understanding how reason, choice, etc., fit into a physical world (per se), but rather the problem is understanding reason, choice, etc. themselves. Assuming supernaturalism doesn’t really help us understand choice or reason, it just lands us in a circumstance where we’re so confused that we don’t even know how to ask the relevant questions.
Physicalism allows us to understand how the world is put together, but that also highlights the features of the world that we don’t really understand. It’s not surprising that we won’t see how to fit consciousness into physics if we don’t even have a grasp on what consciousness is.
The answer isn’t to question naturalism or physicalism; the answer is to focus our attention on the points where the real confusion lies. When it comes to free will, those points are the metaphysics of powers and causal efficacy of rational choice.
I just found your blog when you started at ftb, and I’m in the process of catching up with your previous writing. I hope very much that you will not have to stop blogging!
If you could think about how your blog can be something of an anchor to other people, then you will know that you are not really alone and rather than give way to despair, you can accept that you give hope and help and joy to others through your writing.
I understand your distress, Eric, but nothing I have read by the ‘hard determinists’ to use Physicalist’s good term (I am reminded by what an Irish acquaintance of mine, brought up in Derry, called the ‘hard men’ of the IRA) makes me think that what they assert is anything more than an assertion. I recall Jerry Coyne asserting something along the lines that to make a good and persuasive argument is merely to change molecules or patterns of molecules in people’s brains – but this is of no explanatory value, and seems to be a mere verbal game (as are some of Jerry Coyne’s suggestions, such as not using the words ‘moral, morals and morality’): I once remarked that what he was saying an argument did was no different from what the word ‘persuade’ meant, and asked what was gained by putting the matter in his terms. Of course an argument changes molecules or or patterns of molecules in one’s brain (as does a rabble-rousing speech), whether one finds oneself persuaded, left cold or lukewarm, or in furious disagreement, and so what? Any stimulus at all changes molecules or patterns of molecules in one’s brain. No doubt the universe is headed towards a state in which nothing is distinguishable, but we’re not there yet.
I’ll speak up for determinism.
We’re computers with a complicated and conflicting set of utilities acting to maximize our satisfaction within a structure of physical and social restraints. Freedom increases the number of possible solutions to the conflicts among our utility functions, while laws and morals restrict them. Over time the rules governing behavior have become ever more complex, requiring lengthy education and for the last hundred years presuming literacy.
For various reasons some people behave in ways most find intolerable. Some have needs whose satisfaction is impossible or unconscionable; some simply can’t hold onto the scaffolding of society. Our criminal justice system does a terrible job of taking care of such people, but it also does a terrible job of taking care of people for whom what we call crime they call business. All the public is willing to offer is punishment, which does no good to anyone.
Even the simplest system is liable to oscillate due to the least perturbation. We are far from simple and none of us, perhaps, can reconcile all the competing demands we face, nor can we predict with any confidence all the consequences of our actions, but we go on, making decisions all the while, faulty sloppy meat machines.
And to press the point home: the mechanics of the universe cannot distinguish between cogent argument and one of Hitler’s speeches to the faithful or between the theory of evolution and creationism or between Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and a dirty joke, but we can.
And, again: ‘faulty, sloppy meat machines’ …. I’m sorry, bad Jim, but what would you like to be? In comparison with what are we ‘faulty, sloppy meat machines’? This sort of talk strikes me as lazy and adolescent in its supposed daring, and I do not believe that you live your life as though you believe this to be true. And to say that human beings are not faulty, sloppy meat machines is not to pretend that they are just beneath the angels, either. It is to suggest that we try to understand what human beings actually are, and also to suggest that instead of leaping to dogmatic assertions about ‘hard determinism’, we should simply seek to understand how the human brain works; its workings have, after all, resulted in great achievements like the theories of evolution and relativity, the plays of Shakespeare and the poems of Du Fu, as well as in horror and stupidity. If you seriously believe that human beings are what you assert they are, then what possible interest can there be in studying them? You close off intererst. You close off effortds to make things better. Your attitude seems very little different from the Christian asssumption that human beings are marred, abject, sinful creatures, and, I suspect, the sensibility that likes to think in this way is in the end not very different between the declared atheist and the declared Christian.
I should add that neither Eric nor I are denying that what we do is determined, and are therefore not against determinism; what is being criticised is what Physicalist has called ‘hard determinism’ – the sort of thing espoused by such as Sam Harris.
“Because there can be no reasons, as such, in such a deterministic world, but simply causes, and if we cannot choose, because choice implies that we are somehow freely able to do so, we cannot really give reasons either, for what are reasons, if they are not meant to provide justification – and not merely a causal theory of why one behaviour occurred instead of another – why one course of action would be preferable to another?”
Eric, I think the burden is on you to defend the claim that reason giving requires indeterminism, given that there’s every reason to think the brain is a deterministic system when it comes to behavior control, including speech and decision-making. Rationality actually *requires* that our beliefs be reliably caused by external states of affairs via reliable mechanisms, otherwise they would not faithfully represent the world. Our reasons are neurally encoded representations of our motivational states, intentions and plans, and thus are effective *causes* of behavior. The “stepping back” from “innate perceptual and motivational dispositions” that Nagel refers to can be accomplished by a deterministic cognitive system that, as Dennett would put it, can represent its own reasons. Adding indeterminism to the system would just add non-adaptive noise.
Of course Harris and Coyne are wrong to say we’re merely puppets of determinism, since our internal behavior control capacities (which puppets don’t have) are just as causally effective as the factors that create us. Seeing that we are indeed (at least sometimes) rational, effective agents, and that we need not be exceptions to determinism to be so, is to walk the middle way of a mature naturalism. But of course in the unlikely event that indeterminism *does* play a role in rationality, that would be naturalistic as well.
http://naturalism.org/resource.htm#rationality
Tom, you say:
That ‘every reason’ seems to be sticking your neck out a bit, especially since there is nothing that constitutes evidence for the claim. The point, I think, that Nagel is making is that it’s all very well to abstract from consciousness in order to get the “view from nowhere”, and that, once this is done, the conclusions are, within those constraints, fairly called facts (at least within limits which allow the possibility of later revision). But it is not clear how we could show this for consciousness without abstracting it away. Of course, rationality depends upon learning, memory, and a whole lot of things that go to make up consciousness, so there are causal ancestors of the decisions we make and the reasons that seem conclusive. Reason has to have something to work with and on. So rationality can’t be a kind of prime mover. That would make no sense. But I cannot see that rationality depends upon causality. That seems a stretch too far, and even dogmatic, without any evidence. It’s an article of faith, based on the kind of scientific work that has been done on physical reality in abstraction from mental content — feelings, emotions, qualia, observational perspective, and the rest.
However, as I mentioned parenthetically, I did not want to speak in terms of incompatibilism, and did not suggest that we have non-determinist free will. My point is that, on hard determinist terms, such as Coyne’s or Harris’s, it makes no sense to speak in terms of action, reasons, understanding, etc. All these must be merely epiphenomena, and completely inscrutable, as Harris says. Consciousness simply seems to be the froth on the surface of the brain’s electrical impulses, which themselves, while giving us the illusion of doing things for reasons, govern behaviour, which only, in illusion, belongs to a subject of experiences.
But this wasn’t the burden of this piece. The real punch in it comes from my own sense of (for want of a better word) alienation, that seemed to spread over me like a pall in my move from my free-standing blog over to FTB. That is the experience behind this post, which is more in the nature of a cri de coeur than anything else. But I do have the thought buried in there that the kind of naturalism that Coyne and Harris and perhaps others are trying to develop makes human life completely and utterly pointless. Everything that makes life radiant and alive is, on their terms, merely illusion. I see why the religious struggle against this view of life and the world. Like Nagel, I do not believe in a god, and do not want the universe to be that way. But without the radiance that I knew, if it was only mere illusion, there is not much of value left. I suspect, from the way I feel just now, that this will be the end of blogging for me for the time being.
Eric,
I think we know for sure that reason is at least compatible with being fully caused (at the macro level) creatures, since the evidence is overwhelming that we are thus caused and that we are rational. I think it’s likely that reasoning can be reduced to algorithmic processing, given the success of AIs like Watson, but if it turns out that there’s something non-reducibly emergent required, that’s fine by me. However, I don’t see how being exceptions to determinism (is there evidence we are exceptions in a way that matters for behavior control?) would enable us to be more rational – please explain if you like. As for the role of consciousness (phenomenal experience) in behavior control, that’s a bit tricky (I’ve got a chapter on that in “Exploring the illusion of free will and moral responsibility”, Greg Caruso, editor), but the disagreements among naturalists aren’t justification for Nagel’s anti-naturalism, seems to me.
I’m of course sad to hear about your recent disenchantment and hope it alleviates soon, but I suspect it doesn’t lie in determinism, since naturalist-determinists can be a pretty cheerful bunch (see the naturalism Facebook group sometime). Naturalism rather re-enchants the not-so-merely physical world, since we see that all we’re capable of doing and feeling – all of which *isn’t* illusory – arises from sub-personal elements that are completely constrained by physical law. How cool is that! Anyway, some worldview cognitive therapy is available at http://www.naturalism.org/therapy.htm and re determinism, see http://www.naturalism.org/determinism.htm and http://www.naturalism.org/demoralization.htm Hang in there, we need you!
Eric, I understand your cri de coeur, perhaps more than you might guess from my posts. But I’ve found that my values have survived my realisation of the reality we live in. It is possible to live a fulfilling life even though there is no Grand Purpose.
There’s one quote from Susan Blackmore which I have been pondering:
After all Jerry Coyne and Sam Harris still seem to have their own purposes and values, and appear to live fulfilling lives. I think that it is down to the ‘facts’ versus ‘relationships of ideas’ that I mentioned up thread. We exist through an oxidating metabolism, supplied with complex molecules. We live through exercising our values, rewarded by our experiences.
Revealing thing, language! Of course, they seem to have purposes and values. That’s what illusion would offer, after all. But they would not really have purposes and values; it is merely illusion. An illusion, contrary to Blackmore, is something that does not exist. Like the “illusionist” magician, whose tricks are merely sleight of hand; they do not really exist (as magic).
But that’s not the point. The point simply is that I cannot believe, as some people seem able to believe, that our values are illusions, and that our choices are compelled. If consciousness is just froth on the surface of a stream, and the current something below, hidden, unseen, then life is really simply an illusion, and we play our part upon the stage, and then, if we must face this truth — for the truth counts, does it not? — and how does it count, if we are but epiphenomena of the real? — then we must simply face it, mustn’t we? Let’s not sugar coat the pill with imaginary resolutions. … But, if so, there is really too much pain to make it worth the candle. And then, is that a choice, or not? What a weird wonderful world that has such illusions in it.
And what is it to ponder, I wonder, when it is just the empty froth upon a stream, sea foam at the bow of a ship?
Tom, I am quite prepared to grant that human beings are the product of causation, but whether it is true that the “evidence is overwhelming that we are thus caused and that we are rational,” is not quite so clear to me. That causation is compatible with freedom of choice I acknowledge, but that is not what Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne are saying. It is not even, I think, what Dan Dennett is saying either, if what he says about the nested homunculi (in the moving naturalism forward meeting) is true — or, if he thinks it is necessary to posit homunculi all the way down, why won’t he acknowledge a real human being at the level of thought and decision? I simply don’t think your causative house is all in order, somehow, and it seems to me that you are sailing along on a wing and a prayer. At least, it still does take theory and testing and confirmation/falsification, doesn’t it? And do we have that? Or do we have the deterministic thesis which works very well on everything from which mind and secondary qualities are abstracted, but does not seem able to be tested on mind itself. I still can’t accept, without better evidence, that mind and brain are identical. How would we show them to be so?
But, of course, for me, at this point, it’s not a matter of argument. It’s simply a matter of emotion, and while I may not have my thoughts all in order, my own sense of floundering is very real. And that has nothing at all to do, in the end, with determinism or indeterminism, as I tried to make clear. However, the emotional turmoil comes in that context, so it is not, after all, completely irrelevant.
That doesn’t mean that I see the re-enchantment that you speak of. I hear Dawkins speak of the poetry of science, but he is so numbingly unpoetic about anything other than evolution and other “magics” of reality. Indeed, some of the things he says about poetry seem to suggest that that is all the poetry we need. As I devoted reader of poetry, this seems very impoverished. And while I find science (and evolutionary theory) fascinating, I am still puzzled, as Nagel is, that it is possible for matter to become self-conscious in this way. But, of course, the self is only an illusion. I forget myself. Mere froth an the surface of time (or is time itself an illusion?). The problem is, here, that is never quite clear, once naturalism gets its foot in the door, whether the house collapses or whether it is left standing, after a fashion. Sam Harris’s determinism is, I think, destructive. I increasingly find his style so dessicated that there isn’t anything left to make sand. I’m not sure that I know exactly where Jerry Coyne stands. I can almost accept compatibilism, but it seems to shift, ever so slightly, towards a very radical determinism after a glance or two. A very unstable position, I suspect.
I wholly agree with your remark about Dawkins and poetry. I suspect that for ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’ he got some graduate student to look up poems that would go with the points he wanted to make. I have never got fromhis writing a sense that he is much interested in, or appreciative of, the arts. Rather, he seems to take one side in the old ‘Two Cultures’ battle. There is of course no reason why he should be appreciative of the arts – lots of people aren’t
If a mental process represents a real thing then how is it an illusion? If you call it a purpose and that leads to action that changes the real world then it is a genuine purpose even if it was created in your brain.
The first time I read of the butterfly effect I thought it made a trivial point and forgot about it. Then I realized that I misunderstood what was being said. It’s not that the butterfly wing on it’s own caused the tsunami, it’s that it does it in concert with a nearly infinite number of other events at that time and around it. So hard hard determinism is disproved.
In Douglas Hofstadter’s I am a Strange Loop he figures prominently and often the idea of turning a video camera to point at a monitor that displays what the camera sees. The result is an endless series of the same image within an image out to an infinite distance. He’s comparing consciousness to this but adding a crucial difference. Where the electronic signal is a single one repeated endlessly, the mental loop has practically endlessly multiplied sources and loops back differently each time. To say that what is in your consciousness can be shown to have originated in your unconscious milliseconds before doesn’t make it determined if what that unconscious process itself is is the result of what you were conscious of before that in one of the endless iterations of looping process that Hofstadter calls mind.
If a tsunami is caused by an indeterminably complex chaos then it isn’t really determined and if your mind is the result of a similarly convergent infinite series of events then it is as free as anything can be.
Purposes and values are real, you created them.
Eric, just a few points:
“if [Dennett] thinks it is necessary to posit homunculi all the way down, why won’t he acknowledge a real human being at the level of thought and decision?”
On Dennett’s strategy, the operations of homunculi will be eventually understood mechanistically, so they disappear, replaced by sub-personal processes. And of course he *does* acknowledge that we’re real human beings at the level of thought and action. It’s just that the manifest image of ourselves as contra-causal immaterial conscious controllers needs replacing with a naturalistic account consistent with science.
“I still can’t accept, without better evidence, that mind and brain are identical. How would we show them to be so?”
There are reasons to think that phenomenal experience and brain activity are *not* identical, given that the former is categorically private, the later public, about which see “Respecting privacy” at http://www.naturalism.org/privacy.htm This means, strangely enough, that consciousness can’t be epiphenomenal with respect to behavior control.
Consciousness ain’t froth. The primacy and significance of consciousness is demonstrated conclusively by your very own emotional state, which you can’t step out of. That’s because it supervenes on (but is likely not identical to!) neural states which you (partially) consist of as a physical creature. From a 3rd person scientific perspective, consciousness doesn’t play a role in behavior control (but yet is not epiphenomenal, see the article linked above), but subjectively it will never be froth, unreal, or cease to provide us with subjectively crucial reasons to do what we do. There is no *illusion* about being a conscious self having conscious purposes and values since consciousness is just as real as the physical world. It isn’t Harris’ determinism that’s destructive, it’s his attempted demotion of consciousness as something that plays second fiddle to the physical, when in fact it’s one of two ineluctable primary realities, http://www.naturalism.org/appearance.htm
Don’t let Harris’s mistaken metaphysics get you down! (not that mine are necessarily correct)
“You can be good without god” is a hard enough sell for some people, but I have no idea how to even interpret “you can be good without the ability to choose.”
If this was your last post, let me say that your writing and interaction with readers has been among my favorite on the web (I should say that anyway). Cheers!
I don’t think the flapping butterfly thought experiment shows that hard determinism is false. I think it shows that even if the difference between state 1 and state 2 can be calculated by the hardest and most determinate process (e.g. mathematical equations) because the initial state cannot be known exactly the final state may not be predictable.
Now this makes me happy about reconciling determinism with the ‘higher thought processes’. Start with an assumption that free will, self, identity, love, beauty, etc. are the ‘public face’ of brain states (either to the first person POV, or in interpreting the social cues of others). The waking brain shows waves of activity at around 40 Hz (a very rough approximation. If it is possible in principle to predict the next brain state at the peak of each wave based on the state of the brain at the previous peak, then the brain is fully determined. But with around 75 billion cycles in a lifetime, plus the interaction with all the other people with 75 billion brain states, accurate prediction is impossible, so we learn rough and ready ways of dealing with a fuzzy environment by using statistical ideas like agency, self, identity, free will, love, purpose etc. Just as weather forecasters have to use samples and patterns to predict weather – because they cannot know each prior state accurately enough.
Evolutionary processes “reward” people who can use these statistical ideas the most efficiently in producing the next copy of genes. I suspect that evolutionary processes also strengthen the apparent reality of these ideas. A firm sense of self is probably provides an evolutionary benefit over the more easily distracted. People find a firm sense of agency a useful fiction in dealing with the world from a first person POV. A sense of love and companionship is probably vital for a species like ours which tends to have fewer offspring that need greater infant care. I would predict that elephants have similar feelings, but mice have less.
So, still the hard deterministic crunchies at fermion and boson level, but not incompatible with the warm fuzzies at statistical level.
Tim Harris, my little piece about determinism doesn’t represent my actual thinking. It was a botched attempt to explain why, even if we are mere automata, cultural norms and the opinions of fellow humans are profoundly influential as part of our programming. Usually I either get existentialist or point out that, since we can interact with ourselves socially, and can reprogram our brains in all sorts of ways, from compensating for sensory perturbation to falling in love to inventing entirely new schemes for nearly anything, we exhibit a plasticity which we are not yet able to model or employ in our designs. We don’t know how we work.
The hard determinism sometimes on display insists that phenomena are only random at the quantum level, but in practice we treat a whole host of behavior statistically. It’s only an assumption, which is to say a matter of faith, that it must be the fixed, inexorable result of the finite history of past interactions. For all practical purposes, it’s random, and perhaps that ought to be our default assumption.
That might not give us free will, but if we rewound the tape and started it over at noon yesterday, perhaps if I’d seen one less dolphin or one more bikini, I might have had a gyro instead of a bowl of soup and a piroshki.
The following two posts from Tim Harris arrived after I had exported from FTB. Sorry Tim.
Tim Harris
bad Jim,
Thank you for that, and I’m sorry if I was a bit over the top in my response to your earlier comment . Now, ‘We don’t know how we work’ I can live with, as I can with your remark about ‘for all practical purposes, it’s random’, though I don’t think it is quite as random as all that, since all sorts of factors influence our behaviour. Now in the end it may not be random at all, but what I object to with people like Sam Harris is that they assert they know when they bloody well don’t. And there is – to me – a peculiar and dislikeable mixture of a lack of imagination as to the implications of what they are saying and what Richard Fortey (an excellent scientist in his own right), in a review of one of Dawkins’s books, called, as I recall, ‘machismo’ (I may be wrong about the actual word used, but it amounted to that) – the sort of intellectual machismo one used to find, and perhaps still does, among convinced and committed Communists and Freudians: ‘We know the bitter truth, and, unlike you lily-livered peasants, we’ve got the guts to face up to it.’ I find that attitude despicable.
Tim Harris
I would add that I find the attitude narcissistic.
We don’t have to *always* view the world through a particular framework in order to accept that framework. Indeed, sometimes it would be quite cumbersome (and perhaps disquieting) to do so. For example, it is true that I am the product of contingent evolutionary processes. But I certainly don’t picture a tiny leaf on a dense and multifariously branching tree of life each time I think of myself. Similarly, I don’t have to recognize at every waking moment the truth that I am but a tiny cosmic speck, or that my actions eventually trace back to causes which I do not control. But at times when I consider such questions, I can nonetheless acknowledge these truths – despite some risk of vertigo.
It is possible to take multiple perspectives. If I had to *always* view myself as a leaf blown on the winds of history, I’d turn down the offer. But it’s an interesting and true observation, which I think offers an expanded view.
Also, regarding the charge that a hard determinist line is incoherent (if you do not mean to claim this, then my apologies):
Our language can be taken to presuppose many things, but this means neither that such presuppositions are correct nor that our language collapses when these presuppositions are discarded. For example, the term “origin” might have presupposed a divine act of creation before 1859. Does this mean that Darwin risked meaninglessness by this term? Of course not – he gave it a new sense. Similarly, a hard determinist might speak quite meaningfully of reasons, or decisions, or deliberation – just with an understanding that eventually, these things come back to causes which we do not control.
Perhaps these aren’t *really* reasons in your view – but that’s okay, right? Otherwise, aren’t you just begging the question? A complaint that you find this all very disquieting would survive this reasoning (if it is correct), but not a charge of incoherence.
A *fatalist*, I think, would be vulnerable to this charge. But that is not a position that I have seen defended.