On June 25 I took issue with a piece by Scientific American columnist John Horgan. Horgan attacked biological determinism on the grounds that it was both wrong (empirically and morally!) and robbed us of free will:
Biological determinism is a blight on science. It implies that the way things are is the way they must be. We have less choice in how we live our lives than we think we do. This position is wrong, both empirically and morally.
I responded that truth is truth, and that Horgan’s view that all biological determinism—including studies of evolutionary psychology—is “pseudoscientific ideology,” is simply silly. Clearly at least some of our modern behaviors—most notably sexual behavior—reflect selection pressures on our ancestors.
At any rate, Horgan has responded to my critique on his website, in a piece called “In defense of wishful thinking.” Horgan’s defense is this: “Actually, science itself demonstrates that our hopes and fears about reality often shape it.”
He gives some examples of how “hopes and fears about reality” change our behavior:
- The placebo effect: if patients think a pill or spray will work, even if it’s completely inert, it will work to some degree.
- Denigrating ethnicity or gender adversely effects the performance of members of the maligned groups. Women do better on math tests when they’re told in advance that both men and women score equally well on such tests.
- Students who believe that “wars are inevitable because human beings are naturally aggressive” tend to be less involved in disarmament and antiwar activities. (Horgan uses this result to argue against the idea that war stems from the innate aggression of males. I agree with Horgan in part, for war doesn’t necessarily reflect individual aggression, but the machinations and ambitions of politicians—and many soldiers are conscripted unwillingly.) Nevertheless, evolved male aggression is a viable hypothesis, supported by evidence that the hormones associated with human “maleness” induce aggressive behavior. It’s also a reasonable hypothesis that this connection was created by natural selection in our distant past. We may not like this, but that doesn’t falsify it a priori.
- Denying free will has adverse consequences. As Horgan notes,
A recent experiment shows that belief in free will has measurable consequences. The psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler asked subjects to read a passage by Francis Crick , co-discoverer of the double helix, that casts doubt on free will. Crick wrote in The Astonishing Hypothesis (Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1993) that “although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.” Subjects who read this passage were more likely to cheat on a test than control subjects who read a passage about brain science that did not mention free will. Mere exposure to the idea that we are not really responsible for our actions, it seems, can make us behave badly.
Note: most of these students probably conceive of free will as a “ghost in the machine,” not in the way that most compatibilist philosophers conceive of it.
To me, none of these assertions pose the slightest problem for biological determinism. Let us first dispose of the “problem” that scientific truths may sometimes induce adverse behavior. That may be the case, but empirically-determined truths do that all the time. A woman who gets proof that her spouse is cheating may poison him, but that doesn’t change the facts. We always must worry about the consequences of scientific truths, but let us not argue that things are less likely to be true because of their consequences. I know that I am going to die, and I really don’t like that truth, but it doesn’t make me deny the fact or embrace the notion of an afterlife.
More important, biological determinism reflects not just our genetic endowment, but our environments (both physical and social), and the interactions between our genes and our environments. As a biological determinist, I believe that these factors completely explain our behaviors. All of the observations mentioned above above are simply environmental interventions that affect our behaviors. That they do so is not an argument against biological determinism, any more telling than the argument that when you hit someone on the head, he becomes unconscious.
Horgan then takes up “free will” again. (I’ve previously given my notion of free will, which involves our ability to really make choices; that is, rerun a situation and you could just as well have chosen otherwise.) Horgan, however, ascribes to Dennett’s notion of free will, one that I’ve previously discussed:
(Horgan): This finding supports a sensible defense of free will mounted by the philosopher Daniel Dennett in his 2003 book Freedom Evolves (Viking Adult, 2003). Dennett argues, first, that free will is “not what tradition declares it to be: a God-like power to exempt oneself from the causal fabric of the physical world.” Free will, he contends, is an emergent property of the brain, like consciousness, that allows us to perceive, mull over and act on choices; in fact, choice, or even freedom, are reasonable synonyms for free will. Dennett calls free will “an evolved creation of human activity and beliefs” that humanity acquired recently as a consequence of language and culture as well as consciousness. Our free will grows along with our knowledge, material well-being and political freedom. Dennett’s most subtle, profound point is that free will is both an “objective phenomenon” and dependent on our belief in and perception of it.
In other words, the more we value and believe in free will, freedom and choices, the more we actually have. This is both wishful thinking and an objective, empirical truth. Wishful thinking works!
I do like Dennett’s pithy definition of “traditional” free will, but I’m not on board with either Dan’s solution or Horgan’s agreement with it. What they are saying is that the mere appearance of choice (an appearance that Dennett sees as reaching its acme, via evolution, in the complex ruminations of the human brain) is the same as “free will.” (As I remember Dan’s discussion in Freedom Evolves, he doesn’t think that any animals have free will.)
To be frank, I regard these conceptions of free will as attempts to evade the depressing fact that we really don’t make choices—that, with perhaps some quantum-induced but irrelevant exceptions—our choices have already been made before we think we’ve made them. (There is, of course, some neurological evidence for this.) Yes, if you define free will as the appearance of choice—that a woman stands before a gelato counter and appears to ruminate about which flavor she wants—and that human choice involves more complex “calculations” than that of, say, a bacterium (“Hmm. . . . I had the lemon last week. I’ll try the blackcurrant now”), then yes, we have free will. But that’s a definitional ploy, meant to keep us from thinking about the inescapable fact that such decisions are “made” long before we think we make them, and to preserve the status of humans as unique and morally responsible animals.
Horgan’s assertion that the more we think we have free will, the more free will we have, is simply wrong. We don’t have free will, at least not in the way everyone thinks we do. We are biologically determined creatures, with “biology” conceived broadly as “genes + environments + gene/environment interactions). Our brains—and therefore our choices—are as biologically determined as are our livers or kidneys. The appearance of choice is no more “real choice” than the “appearance” of a Western movie town, with its thin storefront facades buttressed from behind, is identical to a real town. Biological determinism is a fact, and Horgan should deal with it. But let no one think that biological determinism means that our behavior isn’t influenced by our environments.
A facade: the exterior of the Cleaver house, where Beaver, June, Ward, and Wally supposedly lived.
If I have free will then why am I about to donate money to DEC despite not actually wanting to? I really would rather spend that money on something fun for myself, and I am pretty certain that my individual donation won’t make the slightest difference and yet I am about to do it anyway.
On the other hand, if a man put a gun to my head and ordered me to donate money could we really say I had the free will to refuse? What about if the man wasn’t really there but I just believed he was, and instead of shooting me in the head he was going to throw petrol on me and set fire to me….forever?
Now you’re just making my head hurt. 😉
You subconsciously note that if 100 others do the same as you it will actually make a slight difference?
If we were automatons at the whim of determinism, then we should repeatedly find ourselves aghast to be doing things despite what we think. But if we’re self determined, we would find purpose in our actions and forethought in our plans and we would not be in the least surprised to find that our plans were executed successfully (if not with adjustments) yet again.
The fact is: the repeatable ability to conceive and execute plans is empirical evidence for self determinism (i.e. free will constrained, in scope, by causality).
Isn’t biological determinism disproven by neuroscience? True, genes + environment + all their interactions shape our behaviour, but when you zoom in, there’s also the enormous stochastic element in any nervous system – especially one as redundant and screwed up as the human brain. In a strict philosophical sense, biological determinism is valid, but it’s not really a realistic view (or a practical one, not that that matters).
Or do I have it all wrong?
That doesn’t get you free will, just unpredictability. They aren’t the same thing.
I’d argue the “stochastic element” is part of the environment part of the equation, so I’d agree with SteveC it just adds unpredictability.
I think you’re a bit confused. “Stochastic” can mean different things. It can mean that something is “random in the sense that it’s too hard to predict,” as in the collisions between trillions of molecules in a solution, or it can mean “random as in not caused by anything,” as in the movements of quantum particles.
The first meaning has nothing to do with determinism, because determinism just requires that all effects have causes. The stochastic element in the nervous system that you’re talking about is really just the complexities of chemistry – that stuff isn’t truly random, it’s just complicated.
Quantum indeterminacy is said to be (and is the *only* thing that is said to be) truly random, as in “caused by nothing.” This undoes determinism, but doesn’t seem to much affect the discussion of biological determinism, because it hasn’t been shown that quantum indeterminacy affects the functioning of the brain in any significant way.
Ah thanks (and StevieC and Clemmie). I was a bit confused, yes. I was going by your first meaning of stochastic, but you and StevieC are correct that it determinism =/= predictability.
I still hold that in any realistic sense, determinism is a useless viewpoint. I know nothing about how the human brain works, except that it’s orders of magnitudes more complex than any organisms I study. All my observations on insects, scorpions and even nematodes (not just C. elegans) shows quite a lot of “free will”-ish (random, not genetically-determined and not environmentally-determined) behaviour – give a beetle the choice between 2 paths with no incentives, and it will choose where to go at random (with different beetles raised from the same stock, 100 times per beetle, of course; I have no real social life, you see). Plot the decisions and you see that it’s all random – not even a “try this one, then try the other” pattern. Same with ants.
Is it wrong to call that “free will”? Philosophically unsound, definitely, but I find that being pragmatic is more important 😛
But just your handling of the beetle, moving it back to the starting line, and setting the test running changes the inputs in the beetle brain. These are things you cannot know, and what seems random is just the result of those inputs. Perhaps the “choice” is determined by which side of the beetle you touch last. Or where the beetle feels the forceps used to move the beetle. Or a combination of inputs. It appears random, but perhaps you don’t know all the inputs.
Also true. I better stop digging my hole now ^^
Thinking about it some more, my opposition isn’t to the denial of free will (since there really is no such thing), but the extrapolation of that position to something like a 100% predictive model of behaviour, which I hold for impossible (even with super-lightning-fast-quantum-computers, the stochasticity is just too much to calculate). But that has nothing to do with the post anyway, just something I hear everytime free will comes up.
You are probably correct about the ability to do the calculations. With 100 billion neurons in the brain, not counting glial cells, and all the connections, calculating the inputs is “large”.
I’d be happy if I see one model of a single neuron. Achieveable within my own lifetime, I’m sure. Maybe even the interaction between two neurons. But it’s an enormous step from those to even a C. rhabditis’s 302-neuron nervous system. Not just a matter of computing power, but of programming. There’s just too many different processes, from the purely physical (voltage changes across the cell membrane) to the chemical (neurotransmitters, etc.) to the organismal (what’s controlling the expression of neurotransmitters, etc.). And we need to find out about all of those processes before we even hope to get a basic porgrammable model down.
Marc (or anyone else that might comment),
I would be interested in any thoughts about these ant observations. Please disregard any humanism as descriptive artifact.
Recently I’ve cut the bottom off a clear plastic juice container, made a hole about an inch above the cut edge and inserted a short plastic tube (so there is a one inch drop once an ant gets to the end of the tube). The other end of the tube is inserted into an ant hole, such that, the ants can either by pass or enter the tube (although at times crowding at the entrance/exit ant hole may make the tube hole more attractive by default). Observations:
– Ants weren’t marked, so I’m just using words to describe the observation, not intended to imply that I know them individually. Also, ants weren’t contained and could easily go under the plastic edge of the juice container after dropping from the tube, to return to the colony or whatever.
– At first most ants slipped a lot while climbing the grade from ant hole to container but, some would scurry up quickly without slipping (guessing that some ants were placing their legs in more supportive configurations). The ants seemed to get better at climbing over time but, too many variables (weight they were carrying, ect.) to know.
– Initially, most ants were hesitant upon reaching the drop off at the end of the tube, turning around and back down. Some ants would hook a hind leg to the tube, while trying to contact the ground with their front legs (none recovered from this position to reenter the tube and would eventually drop to the ground.)
– Few, but some ants would get to the drop off and stop for several seconds before turning around or dropping off.
– Some ants would move quickly through the tube, then drop out the other end without any hesitation, slowdown, or leg hooking. This action seemed to increase over time but not above about 50% and the increase was not consistent over time. That is, sometimes there were few leapers for significant periods. This action was not observed at all during the early observations.
– Observations were sporadic and only a few minutes at a time over a three day period.
– All ants seemed basically fine after dropping, none were known to go to ceiling cat.
I’m thinking of doing some food reward experiments. Is there an ant food that they could eat but could not carry back to the colony? Melts upon contact with mouth parts or something like that. Also, how can I mark them for individual identification?
I may be wrong, but from what I remember, it depends on the ant species. I think many of them live off fungus grown on the food brought in to the nest, but there are so many species I may be thinking of a limited group. Even those that milk aphids bring the milk back into the nest rather than eat it (I think, I have memories that the milk is digested and the waste is what is used, or the milk is stored and regurgitated). My guess as to an attractive food would be something sugary. Sorry I’m relying on memory, but I am lazy :).
Only attine ants (leaf-cutters) do the fungus-agriculture. The workers cut leaves, carry them back to the nest, where they are used to fertilise the fungus garden, where the larvae (and pupae iirc) are kept.
On ant food: foragers eat only what’s given to them in the nest by the workers in there. You could try with some kind of honeydew-like liquid (honey made less sticky with a lot of water?), but I doubt it would work.
Marking is tricky. If you’re dextrous enough, you could wrap little threads around the thorax/leg. Assuming you don’t have tens of tiny RFID transmitters lying around 😛
On the experiment: I’ve seen similar experiments done with pitfall traps. There was a paper published with video recordings of behaviour of various arthropods around the trap (citation at work, sorry). IIRC, they observed three types of behaviour: walk straight into the hole; cautiously look over the edge and fall in by accident; look at the hole and go away. All behaviours were exhibited regardless of species. Of course, the focus of the paper was on implications for the sampling method and potential bias, but it can all be interpreted (note: personal opinion from now) as idiosyncratic behaviour. If done rigorously enough, I’m sure your experiment will show pretty much the same as my path-choosing experiments: “random” choices, due to personal preferences we don’t/can’t decipher.
I would expect learning to come into play over time though. As a tip, try to do your observations at the exact same time – ants follow strict daily patterns, they may be out and about one hour and by the next hour they’re all in the nest 🙂
Re: ants
Marc and Badger3k thanks for your replies to my questions about ants, sorry about the delay in responding. I tried undiluted honey spread on a 2″X1/4″ firm plastic strip, just to get an idea of how they would react. Some ants, particularly initially, seems a little distressed after touching the honey. Eventually, one stopped and stayed, with others joining after a time. Looked like a pew full of christians waiting for jesus biscuits and blood to be served.
The honey will likely work for my needs. The thread marker sounds great if I can get it attached without causing problems.
We also see stochastic variation in gene expression via DNA methylation. It’s just complex and difficult to untangle, not truly random.
I think I must just not understand this. But how do you account for, say, this argument you’re having right now in this post? Is your argument entirely pre-determined by your genes/environment etc? Or is there some *thought*? Isn’t that free will?
Am I just entirely not getting this?
It’s all about definitions.
The way I look at it, events are either deterministic, random, or a blend of the two. That applies equally well to dualistic “ghost in the machine” phantasms.
“Free will” is generally supposed to mean something that’s neither deterministic nor random, and I’ve yet to encounter anybody who can offer a hint of a clue as to what that’s supposed to be.
Everybody gives the appearance of knowing what they’re talking about with regards to “free will,” but I’ve yet to be convinced that the concept is any more coherent than “married bachelors” or “square circles.”
Curiously enough, the term, “god,” suffers from the exact same problem….
Cheers,
b&
Indeed–the categorical fallacy continues.
Everything is, well every discussion anyway. If more people understood this there’d be a lot less confusion and disagreement.
A good start, if your interested, is Galen Strawson’s article, “Luck Swallows Everything.”
http://www.naturalism.org/strawson.htm
Thanks very much. Will read.
Compatibilists like Dennett aren’t saying that we have the appearance of Free Will. They are saying that what we have is Free Will, corresponding to our pre-theoretical conception of when we are “acting freely”. I don’t see why you continue to simply assume that the Incompatibilist’s contra-causal action conception of Free Will is the right one. We don’t let Dualists impose their scientifically-impossible conception of the mind on us, why should we let the Incompatibilists impose their scientifically-impossible contra-causal action conception of Free Will on us.
Then again, I think Horgan’s argument is (again) very bad. As a medical practitioner someone can exploit wishful thinking in order to help her patients, but qua scientists and theoreticians, we have to take the world as it comes to us based on the evidence, not our desires. Wishful thinking has no place in science.
Yes — and I don’t understand why Jerry doesn’t seem to get this point. We have the only ‘free will’ worth wanting, for it does everything we want it to do for us, and avoids all the dangers we worry about. A deterministic free will allows us (our desires and intentions) to become part of the deterministic process, significant causes in the stream of cause-and-effect.
I think Jerry has been seduced by that silly, high-falutin’ spiritual nonsense view of Free Will called the Libertarian or Contra-causal version. For some reason he’s buying into the idea that this is the REAL free will, and interactions between matter and energy and environment can’t be choices, and really can’t be our choices, because “we” have become too small.
This is like an atheist agreeing that yes, our lives have no meaning, because the only way life could have any real meaning would be if it were deliberately constructed for a purpose by God. Since this is not true, an honest atheist should never bother getting out of bed. It’s all so pointless, really. Atheists are lying to themselves every time they think or act like something means something to them, because it really can’t. Not REALLY.
Come on. If you can see what is wrong with the “atheists can’t believe their lives have meaning” argument, then you ought to be able to see why the “atheists can’t believe they make free will choices” argument is also problematic. They both rest on a similar fundamental misunderstanding of the concepts involved. They both externalize meanings.
Don’t let religious ways of thinking limit how we understand reality; don’t let our sloppy instincts define limitations for us which we don’t have.
“We have the only ‘free will’ worth wanting, for it does everything we want it to do for us, and avoids all the dangers we worry about. A deterministic free will allows us (our desires and intentions) to become part of the deterministic process, significant causes in the stream of cause-and-effect.”
Well said.
“We don’t let Dualists impose their scientifically-impossible conception of the mind on us, why should we let the Incompatibilists impose their scientifically-impossible contra-causal action conception of Free Will on us.”
I would claim that much of the criminal system is structured by belief in contra-causal free will. Many of our “reactive attitudes” are uncritically accepted, and therefore structure the organization of this society (American and Western and most other).
Why do we not overhaul the education and socialization structures in this country? Because we are unwillingly to reject Libertarian free will, and belief in the power of the individual to overcome their “situation.”–now, individuals, can overcome some kind of general “situation” (a gang infested neighborhood) but when they do they are just being “controlled” by some other beneficial factor or “situation” (whether that be a caring grandparent, a caring teacher, (some hidden kind of environmental structure that has structured the individual’s brain to be the way it is) or some genetic blessing).
If we accept that an individual is nothing more than the product of their genes and their environment, surely, we should pay more attention to the structure of the environment for any one individual. Surely, we would not justify the (end) disparities between individuals who “luck” into the lives they have. (A side note, I think Malcom Gladwell in OUTLIERS illustrates this pointedly in his example of Marita and her friend in the NY public/charter school system. The “chance” difference between the two individual’s education and socialization he calls nothing short of heartbreaking, and he is right.)
Our social structure (your way of life) is testament to dualistic conception of the self and free will. Sure, society cannot impose definitions on you, but they have organized the world around you, through belief in libertarian free will, in ways that are endless, including affecting much of your belief structures that come from social norms and peculiarities.
When a jury of 12 asks the question, did this individual commit this crime of their own “free will,” (do they actually ask this question?) do you think they wholly believe in your “compatibilist” free will? Given that, percentage wise, they most likely believe in God, the Soul, rarely read or think about complex issues and social contingencies, certainly makes me doubt that they do.
“We don’t let Dualists impose their scientifically-impossible conception of the mind on us, why should we let the Incompatibilists impose their scientifically-impossible contra-causal action conception of Free Will on us.”
I would claim that much of the criminal system is structured by belief in contra-causal free will. Many of our “reactive attitudes” are uncritically accepted, and therefore structure the organization of this society (American and Western and most other). Why do we not overhaul the education and socialization structures in this country? Because we are unwillingly to reject Libertarian free will, and belief in the power of the individual to overcome their “situation.”–now, individuals, can overcome some kind of general “situation” (a gang infested neighborhood) but when they do they are just being “controlled” by some other beneficial factor or “situation” (whether that be a caring grandparent, a caring teacher, (some hidden kind of environmental structure that has structured the individual’s brain to be the way it is) or some genetic blessing).
If we accept that an individual is nothing more than the product of their genes and their environment, surely, we should pay more attention to the structure of the environment for any one individual. Surely, we would not justify the (end) disparities between individuals who “luck” into the lives they have. (A side note, I think Malcom Gladwell in OUTLIERS illustrates this pointedly in his example of Marita and her friend in the NY public/charter school system. The “chance” difference between the two individual’s education and socialization he calls nothing short of heartbreaking, and he is right.)
Our social structure (your way of life) is testament to dualistic conception of the self and free will. Sure, society cannot impose definitions on you, but they have organized the world around you, through belief in libertarian free will, in ways that are endless, including affecting much of your belief structures that come from social norms and peculiarities.
When a jury of 12 asks the question, did this individual commit this crime of their own “free will,” (do they actually ask this question?) do you think they wholly believe in your “compatibilist” free will? Given that, percentage wise, they most likely believe in God, the Soul, rarely read or think about complex issues and social contingencies, certainly makes me doubt that they do.
“I would claim that much of the criminal system is structured by belief in contra-causal free will.”
I don’t buy this argument, since behavior that’s immune to causation must therefore be immune to correction. For the concepts of deterrence and rehabilitation to be meaningful, you must accept some causal basis for criminal behavior.
I cringed when I re-read that too. I was just overstating the case and being sloppy.
Certainly deterrence and rehabilation require causation of criminal behavior, and we should do our best to deter– we should really do our best not to provide the types of environments that we can assume lead to criminal behavior in the first place; poverty, weak families, weak education and socialization, homelessness, drug-use, undiagnosed mental illness, etc.
Dessert, though, such as “the criminal deserves to be locked away for the next twenty years” gets murky without contra-causal free will. I think most people (at least non-philosophers) who engage or think about what it is the criminal “deserves,” are probably accepting such dessert in a retributivist way, especially if the crime is horrific to some extent. That is people who think of the criminal justice system only in terms of deterrence and rehabilitation are few in number. They do this because they accept (uncritically) the reactive attitudes that we have as the creatures we are being raised in this society.
I agree with others that whereas people believe in contra-causal free will, that the notion in itself is incoherent. And, so, many people just simply have non-coherent views about the behaviors of others and of their self. And I think this is seen in how we think of criminals.
“We don’t let Dualists impose their scientifically-impossible conception of the mind on us, why should we let the Incompatibilists impose their scientifically-impossible contra-causal action conception of Free Will on us.”
I think this sums up the entire confusion. Jerry, care to respond?
Jerry, you say
“I regard these conceptions of free will as attempts to evade the depressing fact that we really don’t make choices…decisions are “made” long before we think we make them.”
Not so, as I’ve pointed out on a number of occasions here. Choice making is just as real as any other deterministic phenomenon, which is why our decisions are made when we make them, not before. We don’t merely appear to go through a process of deliberation, we really deliberate, which adds causal value to action, making it effective.
Not sure why you continue to discount the reality of human agents, who although fully caused, are just as causally effective as the factors that created them, often more so. Is it because you still hanker after some impossible sort of freedom and responsibility, that of contra-causal free will? If you don’t, then the fact that choice-making is deterministic should be perfectly fine with you, not a depressing fact. What more could you reasonably want?
http://www.naturalism.org/demoralization.htm
But apart from this, your response to Horgan is right on, thanks.
Tom,
I like to put it this way.
You are fully determined to choose exactly and only that which you most want to choose by the standards you most want to use. Why is that depressing?
Jack M.
Exactly! But some folks find the idea of being determined, even by their own character and desires, as limiting. They imagine they’d be more free and effective if they could act outside the causal nexus. But if they thought carefully about having contra-causal free will, they’d see they’d have no reason to choose one way or another – they’d be completely at a loss. Being exempt from causation is no way to be an agent, http://www.naturalism.org/fatalism.htm#The%20Flaw%20of%20Fatalism
So maybe consolation isn’t the most helpful response to distress on this account. Maybe a sound upbraiding for arrogance would be more effective.
To paraphrase Nietzsche “the extravagant pride of Jerry has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense.”
Dunno, but in any case I hope Jerry can see his way clear of depression about not having contra-causal free will. That this is perfectly possible is illustrated by first person accounts at http://www.naturalism.org/living1.htm
Seems like wishful thinking given the evidence from neurological studies indicating that our brains make decisions before we are aware of them being made.
That’s only the case if you identify yourself with consciousness alone, but why do that? You’re the whole shebang, conscious and unconscious processes, all of it neurally instantiated. Moreover, it isn’t clear that consciousness per se (phenomenal experience) could add anything to what the brain does in behavior control, http://www.naturalism.org/privacy.htm
That’s something I can not understand – if our subconscious/unconscious/whatever brain makes a decision and our consciousness justifies it (or accepts it, or does not stop it) – it is still us. We are everything that is us, just as we are part of the world and beyond. I just don’t get it. Maybe this has to do with the idea that our consciousness is more godlike, and our unconsciousness is a more basic, animalistic thing and thus earthy and bad – more sinful?
“Decisions are made when we make them” sounds pretty much like a tautology to me, so I fail to see how it’s false. As someone wrote below, all we can conclude from the Libet experiments is that there is brain activity before the time that someone reports awareness of the decision. That’s the bare description of the data. Everything beyond that is interpretation of the data and there are many different ways to explain what is going on to account for that data.
I was thinking that maybe people have gone beyond the science on this too, though I don’t know as I’m not familiar with it. Like when Jerry says “…meant to keep us from thinking about the inescapable fact that such decisions are “made” long before we think we make them..”. Has neuroscience conclusively shown that all seemingly consciously-made decisions are in fact made pre-consciously?
I don’t subscribe to “free will” but I tend to think it that the conclusion that we don’t have it is largely an inconsequential philosophical abstraction. I know people like Tom Clark see things very differently. I don’t that conclusion in itself doing very much. It is deeper scientific understanding of human nature (psychology, behavior, etc.) that really has potential to change aspects of our world.
“I don’t subscribe to “free will” but I tend to think it that the conclusion that we don’t have it is largely an inconsequential philosophical abstraction.”
The conclusion that we don’t have contra-causal free will runs counter to a basic belief about human agency held by many (not all) folks on the planet, namely that you could have done otherwise in a given actual situation as it played out (as distinct from future or counterfactual situations). So I don’t think it’s inconsequential or abstract. But Richard Carrier agrees with you, see http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2009/08/does-free-will-matter.html
I agree that a “deeper scientific understanding of human nature (psychology, behavior, etc.) …really has potential to change aspects of our world.” It might do so by uprooting the contra-causal conception of ourselves, giving us greater self-control, individually and collectively, and leading to more enlightened, more effective interpersonal attitudes and social policies, http://www.naturalism.org/applied.htm
I come at ‘free will’ from another direction. I expect that we infer that other people have free will because we don’t see all the genetic/environmental/interaction factors affecting their behaviours. Hidden causes, if you will.
We think we have free will ourselves because we imitate their apparently ‘free choices’ – yet our conscious minds rarely do more than justify the behaviours our unconscious minds have already initiated. Our own hidden causes.
Hidden causes all the way down…
It’s awkward when scientists resist ideas, not because they legitimately question the interpretation of the evidence, but because they don’t like the implications (religious people do this all the time).
It seems to me that Gould had a bit if this. He seemed to find the fact that human intelligence and behavior patterns have a significant hereditary component hard to rationalize with his egalitarian political ideals so he pretty much denied that evidence.
It’s ironic that Gould—who so clearly recognized the problem and tried to deal with it—is more often accused of bias and prejudice than those who won’t even admit that their personal prejudices could be influencing their science.
One thing I always find curious about citing that Vohs and Schooler paper is that the paper kind of implies determinism, at least the “soft” type. After all, if choices were simply a matter of the will, it is not clear to me why psychological priming would have a significant effect.
Mind you, I believe that the dispute really lies in determining which version of determinism is true.
Since decisions are made seconds before conscious awareness of it then it is governed by biological determinism. Neuroscience has shown this.
To be specific, some experiments have found that neural firing corresponding to a short-term decision seems to slightly pre-date the subjects’ report of consciously making the decision.
I don’t know how you are using the term “biological determinism”. If you just mean that humans are biological systems that obey the same physical laws as any other clumps of matter, then everyone except delusional Dualists agrees as much. So what?
Jerry: “We don’t have free will, at least not in the way everyone thinks we do. We are biologically determined creatures, with “biology” conceived broadly as “genes + environments + gene/environment interactions).” You write that as in opposition of Dennett, however if I remember correctly is exactly that recognition that compelled him to write Freedom Evolves rejecting the traditional definition of free will. I get that you don’t like his redefinition, but that’s all your disagreement with him, I think. And of course, Horgan’s use of Dennett argument I think is a complete non-sequitur.
In essence I think John Horgan is saying the following:
You have free will, now do what you are told or you will be tortured.
PS: And it will be your own fault.
Indeed that is the whole point, assigning blame. The religious and others feel that without free will they can’t assign blame and that without blame everything falls apart. Perhaps understanding why and how things happen and then taking steps to fix it is more useful than assigning blame. Assigning blame is more about exonerating certain individuals than about doing anything constructive. Without biblical free will we all have to take a measure of responsibility for the societies we live in rather than just blaming the poor and ill for their own plight.
Jerry, I really don’t understand your repetition of the claim that “we don’t really make choices”. Saying we don’t make choices is like saying that rocks don’t fall downhill, it’s a denial of something we are routinely observed to do.
Now, _how_ do I make choices? Turns out my choices are the output of a very complex stochastic system, and the activity of that very complex system is me. So, I make choices.
Free will is a theological dodge and irrelevant.
But “rocks fall downhill” isn’t strictly true either, is it? A rock doesn’t actually do anything. It’s not an actor, it’s acted on by gravity. Yet we seem to favor describing this as if the rock is the actor.
Same thing with making choices. Some brain process unwinds due to chemistry and physics, and results in some action. We like to describe this as if an actor made a choice. But where is the actor?
But rocks do fall downhill.
No, they just follow the path of least resistance in spacetime, which is determined by the laws of physics and the arrangement of particles & fields. Deen was right (and succinct). If we could account for 100% of the molecules and quantum interactions (a practical impossibility), I’m pretty confident we’d find the same is true of human neural nets.
“Where is the actor?”
I’m a reliably identifiable, self-maintaining, mobile and autonomous constellation of characteristics and capacities that has effects on the world – thus an acting agent that actually does things in a way that rocks don’t. I’m just as real as my components, so we can justly say *I* make choices, even though I’m utterly dependent on and instantiated by physics, chemistry and biology.
http://www.naturalism.org/determinism.htm
Or, to put it another way: the “actor” is the exact same type of “place” as the currently-executing code in the computer you’re reading this on. That is, in a particular dynamic pattern of electronic (electrochemical in the case of the meat) impulses.
Cheers,
b&
Right, we’re damn effective dynamic patterns, just as real as the instantiating physical processes!
Being the referrent of the subject of a sentence doesn’t require that something is an agent, at least not in English. Rocks fall downhill, but rocks aren’t agents.
Yes! This exactly.
Consider an autopilot computer. These days, they can pretty much make it, all by themselves, from gate to gate — entirely without human intervention.
Along the way, the computer is constantly deciding how much to adjust all the controls — throttles, flight surfaces, brakes, the works. I’m sure they can even make detours around bad weather.
Simply because it’s a deterministic Turing-equivalent machine, are we really going to say that it’s not constantly making decisions? Shirley, no!
The humans who do the same thing are “merely” far more complex Turing-equivalent machines “designed” for more than an unmarried porpoise.
Whether or not any of that deciding qualifies as “free will” is about as relevant as whether or not the porpoises cast off their flippant frier mires.
Cheers,
b&
Someone has recently watched Airport!, I see.
Not recently, no. I’ll have to remedy that….
But I’ll have you know that, if the autopilot does go down on us, it’ll have to be somebody else who goes down on it.
b&
“Looks like I picked the wrong day to give up compatibilism…”
Compatibilism? What is it?
b&
It’s an attempt to reconcile free will with determinism, but that’s not important right now.
What can you make out of all this?
And don’t call me shirley!
Also, I can make a hat, a brooch, a pterodactyl…
Actually, an autopilot isn’t making decisions, it’s computing. There is no single processor instruction that we can point at and say “that’s where a decision was made”. We may call the outcomes of the computations “decisions”, but that might just be an anthropomorphism. Not that this supports free will, of course, because the same is true of the processes in the brain. It may be more fair to say that we name choices, not that we make them.
Indeed, it seems much of the argument here boils down to how people define, or at least what connotations they understand by, the word/phrase: “choice”/”decision-making”.
Group A:
“Our actions are a result of purely material causal processes, involving innumerable inputs. Therefore we only seem to (but don’t really) make choices, and free will is an illusion.”
Group B:
“Our actions are a result of purely material causal processes, involving innumerable inputs. ‘Choice’ is what you call it when certain of these processes result in a certain, specific action. Therefore, we can retain the idea of free will in a certain sense.”
There seems to be agreement on the actual state of things. The argument is more or less a semantic one.
Right – if there are differences over matter of fact, rather than description, as regards decisions, then they’re rare and likely not to be found among the majority of people arguing over these things.
I think we’re more likely to find more differences when we talk about the implications. There’s a linkage from free will, to moral responsibility, to the propriety of our standard practices of praise and blame, reward and punishment. Depending on whether one regards what we have as a matter of fact as “free will”, you get different claims down that chain of implications – _if_ you accept the chain of linkages.
For my part, I think contra-causal free will is a total nonstarter as something to ground moral responsibility and what flows from it, but compatibilist “free will” – or the very same matter of fact, as described by incompatibilists – is exactly what does the trick. You get praise and blame assigned to the sort of decision (or “decision” process if you feel the need to throw scare-quotes over most of our folk-psychological talk) making process that’s doing well or doing badly.
Deep Blue is electronically determined. Therefore (by Jerry’s argument) it doesn’t really play chess, but merely gives the appearance of playing chess. Yet somehow it manages to win real tournaments.
“Chess”, “playing”, and “winning” are human concepts. You won’t find any of them in Deep Blue. Instead, you’ll find a lot of search algorithms and a massive database. So yes, I think you could justifiably say it only appears to play chess.
You could say the same thing about Garry Kasparov. If you look inside his head, you’ll find a lot of neurological activity and various sorts of memory retrieval. There’s nothing in there that you could point to and say, here’s “chess”, here’s “winning”, and so on. But you’ll be hard-pressed to make sense of what all that activity signifies without reference to such concepts. So in that sense, such concepts are implicit in Deep Blue’s algorithms just as they are in Kasparov’s neurology.
Similarly, I claim, you’ll be hard-pressed to make sense of much of human cognition without reference to such concepts as intentions, choices, deliberation, etc. Of course it’s all grounded in neurology and physics. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a higher level of organization that has causal power in the process.
Indeed you can, and I was well aware of that. So?
Yes, but the concept is not the thing. Just because we have a concept of something, doesn’t mean that that is what is really happening. We also have the concept of “sunrise”, which we find a useful concept, but it’s not actually the sun that rises, it’s the earth that spins.
So your argument then is that Kasparov doesn’t really play chess either, but merely gives the appearance of it?
Let’s put that to the test with a thought experiment. Let’s send a series of independent observers into Washington Square Park to wander around the chessboards and report back on what they find. My expectation (and yours too, I presume) is that we will get universal agreement from them that the behavior on display there exhibits a particular pattern of regularity known to specialists in the field as “chess”. So there is after all an objectively verifiable fact of the matter as to whether chess is being played. Seems to me this is about as solid a scientific finding as you could ask for, so if you want to dismiss it as “mere appearance”, then you’d better be prepared to dismiss all of science the same way.
Exactly. It’s pointless to argue about what it actually means because a consensus will never be reached. It wouldn’t even be discussed here if it wasn’t something the religulous throw out when challenged how their loving omnipotent god could have allowed a [Holocaust / equivalent]. It’s a contrivance and can be rejected on those grounds.
It is commonplace among believers to believe or disbelieve something based on the consequences of that belief. Horgan falls into that trap. I once had a student tell me with a straight face that his particular religion (which is riddled with palpable nonsense) MUST be true because it makes him happy.
This is not a new form of silliness. Hume summed it up in a wonderful way:
“There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of dangerous consequence.” David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
The “dangerous consequences” are almost always the result not of learning the truth, but of misinterpreting what is learned. Horgan needs to reconsider the crux of the problem.
If you are successful in music school but quit it when you discover that you are not, as you always thought, a direct descendent of Mozart — was your unhappy choice forced on you by the revelation? Or did you have an unrealistic and unnecessary “romantic” view on musical talent which you ought to have revised, rather than giving up what you were clearly well-suited for? You didn’t find out you were no good after all.
We can and should work on our hasty, sloppy, intuitive misinterpretations. I think that’s where the real damage takes place.
QFT
And not just misinterpreting, but also misapplying. Unfortunately (in my own debate-watching experience), the “science-has-disastrous-consequences” canard is rarely refuted with such succinct effectiveness. I’ve seen even rational heavyweights get tied up in a Gordian Knot of ultimately pointless considerations. I really don’t think there is “bad knowledge” which we should keep ourselves from learning.
“Our brains—and therefore our choices—are as biologically determined as are our livers or kidneys”
We’d probably agree that statement is an oversimplification, but just in case:
I’d think the degree/sensitivity of the organs varies. Livers & kidneys mostly respond to what we ingest, whereas brains respond almost constantly (except during sleep/unconsciousness/comas) to sensory inputs, and pretty much constantly to their own innumerable electrochemical feedback loops. But sure, for a broad definition of “environment” the statement is fair enough. There’s no sense in denying that thoughts are bound by underlying physics and chemistry… but the number and types of inputs means the hard science is far messier and more convoluted for brains than for other, simpler organs. So behavior is not just biologically determined, but stochastically determined (as in, the sort of mathematical headache a biologist would be forgiven for never wanting to touch).
I don’t really understand free will.
Suppose we replay (somehow) a scene where a deranged madman stabs a woman in the heart.
And we find he now stabs her in the neck.
Has he actually chosen differently, or do philosophers count different actions as being the same choice?
Not only do I not understand how people can choose differently, I am not certain what counts as a different choice.
Nor do I find philosophers very helpful on telling me what a different choice is.
If I choose to punch a philosopher in the face or choose to punch him in the kidneys, are those 2 different choices, or just the one choice ‘Punch a philosopher.’
Who can say? Certainly not philosophers, as far as I can determine.
What philosophers are you referring to? Have you actually looked at any of the Philosophy of Action or Cognitive Psychology literature before you decided a priori that no one has anything to say on the issue. That strikes me as a very unscientific attitude to take on the issue.
This interpretation of the MRI experiment is just bunk. All it shows is that there is measurable neural activity five or ten seconds before people report a decision is made as to which button of two to press. And even this is only a strong enough effect to predict it right ~70% of the time. There are several more reasonable explanations as to what’s going on here, and it certainly isn’t any evidence for or against free will.
Certainly it’s evidence against free will. The evidence is not as strong as people sometimes imply, but if you can predict someone’s choice of two options more than 50% of the time on the basis of something happening in their brain before they realize they’ve made the decision that is certainly evidence that the ultimate self-reported decision is at least heavily constrained by upstream neurological events. There are, as you say, many possible explanations and interpretations of this evidence, but most of the reasonable ones that I can think of are qualified versions of “free will ain’t free.”
Emphasis on “qualified.” I’m quite sure you’re right that it’s not as simple as “this MRI shows the decision making process happening 5-10 seconds before the realization that a decision has been made”. But evidence is only rarely either/or, and predicting human decisions at a rate better than chance using MRIs really does provide evidence that at the least our choices are heavily constrained by deterministic processes.
I’ll have to disagree with you on that.
The evidence isn’t against free will, but is evidence that we make our decisions pre-consciously and then have them reported to the consciousness.
That says nothing about whether or not the brain could have gone in a different direction or not; only that the background processes are at work and only “check in” with the consciousness (awareness) when needed. Nothing deterministic about that at all. You can still decide to avoid the freeway on your way home from work.
we make our decisions pre-consciously
If a decision is pre-conscious, can it be said to be free? I don’t think so.
Kevin, we seem to have different ideas of what constitutes “I” and what constitutes “choice.”
Nice rebuttal, Jerry, but I think this part is off-point:
To be frank, I regard these conceptions of free will as attempts to evade the depressing fact that we really don’t make choices—that, with perhaps some quantum-induced but irrelevant exceptions—our choices have already been made before we think we’ve made them.
As far as free will is concerned, it doesn’t matter if our choices are made before we think we’ve made them or not. In either case, we are robots following our programming. Choices are made according to rules about what factors to weigh and how much weight each factor should get. Whether that process occurs in real time or prior to our conscious awareness of it doesn’t change the fact that it is a deterministic process.
Horgan appears to think the following supports free will:
I would actually argue that it refutes free will. An external influence is applied to some brains (in the form of a suggestion), and the brain consistently produces a different result (in the form of worse test outcomes). Where’s the free will? Surely, Horgan can’t argue that anyone chose to get a lower test score, can he?
It hardly “refutes” free will. It just demostrates that environmental conditions have an important influence on our actions, something that no Compatibilist denies.
Maybe “refute” is indeed too strong, but it still appears to be more compatible with an absense of free will than a presence of it.
It’s perfectly compatible with free will. Any conception of free will that requires complete independence from environmental factors is a bad one.
Bernard, I think a lot of people are using the handle “free will” as a short hand for “the classical conception of free will.” I think a lot of people who actually are compatibilists, at least in spirit (and I’d count Prof. Coyne based on his arguments on the subject) believe that the phrase “free will” is so overloaded with the baggage of incoherent classical notions of free will that it’s useless or even misleading to use it in discussions of how decisions and choices are made. That’s my position, actually, and while I’ll play along if a compatibilist wants to use the phrase to describe his position, I wouldn’t do so myself.
Don’t get caught up in the language. You’re agreeing with Deen — that choices and decisions depend on environmental factors. All you’re disagreeing about is how the phrase “free will” is being used.
No, I don’t think Dr. Coyne is a compatibilist in spirit, since he keeps referring to something like the illusion of choice, and talking about how depressing it is that we don’t have free will.
Sorry, but there is no “classical conception of free will”. There are competing accounts, one which requires a contra-causal “ghost in the machine” and one that is consistent with seeing humans as part of the natural world. It’s not an argument about words. It’s an argument about the world. The Compatibilist account of free will is the right one, in that it meets the criteria of adequacy for such a theory. The Incompatibilist one doesn’t. I think the analogy to minds is apt here. We don’t give the Dualists the word “mind” or “mental state” and then say there are no minds. We say that mental states just are physical states of the brain, and that the Dualist has just been wrong about what mental states are all along.
If people want to argue that there is no contra-causal free will, I certainly won’t disagree, but that is very different from arguing that free will doesn’t exist.
You’re making this into a Humpty Dumpty argument. “‘Free will’ means just what I say it means!”
By “classical free will” I meant exactly what you describe as contra causal free will, which I think is a stilted and somewhat pretentious phrase. I don’t mind other people using it and I know what it means, but I don’t like to use it. And I think if you had just tried to meet me halfway you would have understood what I meant by “classical free will.”
This is exactly one of the reasons I don’t like using the phrase “free will” at all; or only to refer to old-fashioned contra causal. When I talk about compatibilist models, I talk about “choice” or “decision making” because it’s not clear that there’s anything involved that can be rightfully described as “free” or “will.”
People sometimes use different words to refer to the same ideas. It’s really not a big deal if they make some effort to understand where the other person is coming from.
If you have some time to kill, take a look at Dennett’s Edinburgh lecture here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKLAbWFCh1E
It’s about what free will would mean in a completely deterministic world. I think I remember him calling humans “evitability machines.”
Unfortunately, Dennett draws some unjustified conclusions in this lecture concerning the the imagined dangers of reforming criminal justice to be more consequentialist and less retributive. A very smart guy, but not infallible, http://www.naturalism.org/revolution.htm
If some criminals shouldn’t be punished for their crimes because they’re not responsible, then on what basis do we continue to punish and reward anyone for anything? I must be missing something. As far as I can tell, capital punishment stands on a continuum with commending someone.
Secondly, it seems to me that the concerns of justice and good outcomes are really at odds when talking about how a CJ system should be in light of the fact that people don’t have free will. As I understand Green and Cohen (and Harris) they are basically saying that it is unjust to make criminals suffer because they could not have done otherwise than to commit their crimes. But then they seem to be willing to abandon their commitment to ‘justice’ completely if injustice leads to better outcomes. So torturing a person who has molested children is wrong, unless the torture turns him into a swell guy, in which case it is eminently right.
I want to note that I am not necessarily in favor of capital punishment or retribution of criminals generally. And I should say that I have not read the Green paper (it is printing now). These are my thoughts having read Sam Harris on this topic and from hearing a little from you and from Josh Greene.
I think the “They are not responsible” is shorthand for “Any punishment we give them will not have the effect of changing their future actions” – with others, there is always the hope that by instilling new (negative) experiences in them, then if the situation comes up again, they may have different responses and not “choose” the criminal choice. Ok, so maybe that doesn’t answer your question, but that’s a summation of the determinist view of criminal punishment. Somewhat – at least that’s a fast run-down as I see it.
Hogan is a tool. Here is some interesting research. No Virginia, we do not need magical beleifs to keep people from murdering each other! Duh.
Virtual World Study Reveals the Origin of Good and Bad Behavior Patterns
“We interpret these findings as empirical evidence for self organization towards reciprocal, good conduct within a human society,” they say.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26967/?nlid=nldly&nld=2011-07-07
He’s not, actually.
He’s written several things with which I’ve disagreed over the years (for example, his book, “Rational Mysticism” made me itch). But he’s predominantly written thought-provoking, well-written material that makes a decent contribution to science writing.
Pardon. I was replying to sleeprunning, not to the original post.
ben in his reply to comment # 3 is as usual “on the money”
people very seldom are cognizant of precise definitions they use when they communicate
and not only “laymen” but “scientists” do so all the time
they are not to blame: “strict adherence to unambiguous definitions” have not yet been forced upon them by the reality
very soon (several generations at most) this intellectual sloppiness that ultimately results in slow institutionalization of science will run its course to its logical consequence – we will have too many replicas of “homo sapiens” and the system will no longer be able to support further appropriation of organic matter by one species
at that time there will be very real selection pressure for “strict adherence to non-ambiguous definitions” because that would be necessary and sufficient condition for
implementing true sustainability under the mantra “least population with least environment corruption”
and all “philosophy-talk”, “religion-talk” and “morality-talk” with debates on “existance of god”, “free-will” and “-ISMS of all kinds” will simply be “luxury” that homo species will not be able to afford
Jerry, I promise, truly, that I am going to respond to your earlier response to me, so this is not my final response. Thought I should say that right up front, lest there be any misunderstanding.
However, it seems to me that your claim, that we are biologically determined (whatever that rather odd locution means) entities, does not make a lot of sense.
First, as I’ve pointed out before, this is, in effect, unverifiable, so, in a scientific sense, merely a confession of faith.
But, second, it makes some of your posts unintelligible, those where you not only speak about food with such evident relish, but present photos of the food you chose. What is it about a menu that you do not understand?!
Surely, from an evolutionary point of view, the fact that we do have big brains and can entertain alternatives, is evolutionarily significant. It’s really quite hard to believe that this is all a useless byproduct of evolution. But if it’s not a useless byproduct, then the appearance that we choose is not misleading, and we actually do get to choose. That’s at least one of the reasons, one might surmise, that Homo sapiens has been so successful in adapting to so many different ecological niches.
Eric,
I agree that Jerry’s use of “biologically determined” is confusing, and I think his conceptualizing of it is slightly off or overstated.
But, the question of “choice” is a little more complicated than you give it here. I believe (accept) that our conscious activity, including during “choices,” is important, and probably affects that choice or at least later choices. I also believe that what we are consciously aware of about that choice is closely connected, or the same as, certain underlying brain activity. But the “conscious choice” that happens, for instance when choosing from a menu, is more complicated than what our “consscious self” believes it is doing when it chooses. In that sense, the connotation that many people give to the word “choice”, which is usually simply the phenomenal feel of making that choice, which individuals take uncritically and unanalyzed by scientific and philosophical conceptions, means that what they believe happens when they “choose” is wrong.
Which is why the Libet experiment (and other neuroscience) is so dangerous to some people’s view of conscious choices and our conscious experience in general. This new view of the brain/mind/self shows that the conscious self is very disconnected from understanding much of our behavior, our brain, and even our “reasoning,” since that “reasoning” is misrepresenting what the body and brain and sensual phenomena actually are. And, thus, the underlying factors of choosing from a menu, say, are disturbed by experiments that explain why a great many people choose the item in “bold,” or the one first listed under the first section, or why they will choose meat or sugars (evo. psych. claims). See “situationism” and other problematics of advertising, and why most of us find these things disturbing that “trick” or control our “conscious” choosing and reasoning, that channel such “conscious choices” into certain choices that we believe come from the prima facie reason we give to why we chose such a reason, when in fact causal mechanisms other than the “conscious self” are really the more important factors of the decision.
So, with all that I probably agree with Coyne in the end, but simple claims that it is all “biologically determined” is misrepresenting the complexity of the choosing process and complexity of the brain/mind, which I think Coyne is tapping into appropriately.
“the appearance that we choose is not misleading, and we actually do get to choose”
Quite so, see #5 above, among others in this thread to the same effect.
But of course all the evidence suggests that this real choosing is a fully deterministic process based in biology, chemistry and physics, and any random component wouldn’t help, unless you’re trying to escape prediction by an omniscient opponent.
Well, Tom, I’m not denying causality, but I’m wondering about “fully deterministic”. I should have thought that if choices were real choices, while they may be caused, they would be unpredictable. And I think this is Dennett’s position too. Unpredictability is an aspect of the possibility of choice, even though the system is deterministic. In other words, my actions may be fully caused, and yet there be an element of unpredictability in it, not because of quantum indeterminacy, but because choice, in itself, is something that deals with culture and meaning. I obviously haven’t thought this through yet, but I think that a choice can be caused — the end of a causal chain — and yet not be predictable, because the causal chain includes a lot of cultural variables, and the outcome, just as the outcome of sexual reproduction, may produce a new variant.
I think the unpredictability stems from our lack of knowledge of all the factors going into the “choice”. If we had some way of figuring out all of that, then we would remove that unpredictability. I don’t see that happening, so we can say we “choose”, even if (given the same circumstances, etc) could take no other action than the one we did. However, if one thing was changed, then perhaps our “choice” would have been different. To me that is why I see choice as an illusion, but since the illusion is all we have to go with, the word “choice” is as good as any other – it just has a slightly different meaning than what most people think.
In short, yeah – the whole chain of circumstances et al makes the choice determined, but since we don’t know all of them, it does not appear to be determined. Gah – I hope that’s clear – I missed one of my pills, so I’m not 100% now, and this topic makes my head spin anyway. 🙂
Eric – why do you think there’s a conflict between determinism and genuine choices? Or is it that Jerry’s talking as if there is? There’s a lot of room inside any of your heads for different notions of freedom, decision, choice to be competing and tripping over themselves.
Here’s a deterministic account of Jerry’s choice of foods. Jerry chooses this food instead of that (or going hungry, or burning the menu, etc.) because that food is what Jerry really wants at that time. What Jerry wants at that time is a result of a variety of influences, including his recollections of things that he’s enjoyed that resemble that in relevant ways, a desire to try something a bit new or a desire to try something familiar, maybe a consideration of what’s a dining experience he’ll only easily get on this particular occasion, and so on. “And so on” might go a long, long way, because we’re complicated creatures, or it may not because maybe something just smells really good and Jerry is content with a snap decision. And all of those factors are in turn determined by myriad aspects of Jerry’s current and past circumstances.
There’s deterministic choice. The proximate causes are all in Jerry’s brain. Jerry’s brain is quite biological, and I think that’s the sense of “biological determinism” at work here. (Do correct me if that’s misreading Jerry.”
Eric,
I agree that Jerry’s use of “biologically determined” is confusing, and I think his conceptualizing of it is slightly off or overstated.
But, the question of “choice” is a little more complicated than you give it here. I believe (accept) that our conscious activity, including during “choices,” is important, and probably affects that choice or at least later choices. I also believe that what we are consciously aware of about that choice is closely connected, or the same as, certain underlying brain activity. But the “conscious choice” that happens, for instance when choosing from a menu, is more complicated than what our “consscious self” believes it is doing when it chooses. In that sense, the connotation that many people give to the word “choice”, which is usually simply the phenomenal feel of making that choice, which individuals take uncritically and unanalyzed by scientific and philosophical conceptions, means that what they believe happens when they “choose” is wrong.
Which is why the Libet experiment (and other neuroscience) is so dangerous to some people’s view of conscious choices and our conscious experience in general. This new view of the brain/mind/self shows that the conscious self is very disconnected from understanding much of our behavior, our brain, and even our “reasoning,” since that “reasoning” is misrepresenting what the body and brain and sensual phenomena actually are. Furthermore, what that conscious self claims about its “self” is also very distorted. And, thus, the underlying factors of choosing from a menu, say, are disturbed by experiments that explain why a great many people choose the item in “bold,” or the one first listed under the first section, or why they will choose meat or sugars (evo. psych. claims). See “situationism” and other problematics of advertising. Most of us find these things disturbing because they “trick” or control our “conscious” choosing and reasoning, they channel such “conscious choices” into certain choices that we believe come from the prima facie reason we give to why we chose such a reason, when in fact causal mechanisms other than the “conscious self” are really the more important factors of the decision.
Well, as for Libet, I think Dennett has given reason enough to question whether Libet’s is the right interpretation of what is going on. Of course, there are lots of things going on, so that we never know all the things that enter into our choices. But this doesn’t mean that we never choose. Why should it? I don’t know all the things that are behind the precise words that I am typing just now, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know what I’m saying or why. Why should it? So, I think the fact that our decisions are very complex psychologically does not subtract from their being our decisions. Again, why should it?
I’m not sure what people have in mind when they are talking about free will. Certainly, from the time of Plato and Aristotle and the Greeks, the problem of akrasia, or weakness of will, has been a problem of philosophy. How is it possible to have weakness of will, to know what one ought to do (rationally) and yet do something else that one knows one ought not do? This seems to contradict the basic premise that reasons are sufficient to cause actions, and yet we know very well that there are things that defeat reasons — by yearning for another piece of cake, even though I’m overweight, my blood pressure is high, and I really know I shouldn’t have one.
On the other hand, there are things that are simply impossible for me, or very nearly so. Telling lies is very difficult for me, though on occasion, where it seemed that no one would be harmed by not knowing the truth, and might even be harmed by know it, I have been able to tell what is often called a “white lie” (whether that’s got racial overtones, I don’t know — if so, we need another name). But there are things which decency and honour would forbid me do. Are those things causes of my inaction when in such situations? What are the causes involved when people talk about contra-causal free will? Are they our principles, already adopted? Are they unnoticed psychological influences? Just what role are they thought to play and how do they play it in the context in which I am considering reasons for acting or not acting in a certain way?
Certainly, we are often misled, often by our biases, to conclude things that are simply untrue, but we also know that there are ways in which to avoid this, if we choose. Scientists do it all the time, although sometimes they fudge the figures so that their own theories look more true than they are. But it is possible, with discipline, to prevent many of the errors of confirmation bias to slip into our calculations. We can do this when we are thinking morally as well.
I think the important point here is that, if we think we can’t do this, then there is very little point in talking at all, or arguing about anything. What point would it make, if what I say is not chosen but caused, and if what you say is not chosen but caused? We would be just repeating things that we must of necessity say, and what chance is there that, in this process, the truth will come to be revealed. Even saying that we have intersubjective agreement wouldn’t do, since that too would be just the end of a set or series of causal chains. Alvin Plantinga may have been wrong about the self-contradictory nature of naturalism, but only, I suspect, if naturalism does permit choices to be made for reasons.
I mostly agree with you here, and some of these things are very complicated and I do not claim to have some clear understanding of what is happening during “choices” (I do not believe our gods of Dennett, the Churchlands, et al, are there either).
I tried to say this before, but perhaps I did not say it well. I agree that consciousness, including while we are choosing things or making decisions is important. For instance, when I am reading if my mind wonders off into a daydream and I am not consciously focussed on the reading, then even though I will “read” the words, there is certainly a lack of comprehension going on (I assume this is the same for anyone). I assume, contra-sublimal messages, that in fact the brain is taking in less of the words and the meaning behind them. Little things like that convince me that consciousness plays a major role in the proceedings of the self at most times.
I like theories that propose that our consciousness is lined up close with the activity that our brain/self has determined to be the most important to us. So, when we are reading our greatest awareness and memory storing and memory organization and analyzing of the situation before us, is going to be of the book if that is what we are concentrating and conscious of. During choices, we usually want to consiously engaged in making that choice because it will focus and recall the sector and structures of the brain that we need for making that decision.
There are certainly problems with the Libet experiment, procedurally for example. But there is more than enough literature now to claim that what it is our conscious “self” believes of its self (body, brain, essences of character, reasons why we chose something, etc.) and its behaviors and its powers are wildly fanciful.
————What point would it make, if what I say is not chosen but caused, and if what you say is not chosen but caused? We would be just repeating things that we must of necessity say, and what chance is there that, in this process, the truth will come to be revealed. Even saying that we have intersubjective agreement wouldn’t do, since that too would be just the end of a set or series of causal chains.———–
I do not see the difference here between “chosen” and “caused.” The “self” cannot be set aside and claim to be “choosing” in some way that it is not caused to choose. I think, in the absolute largest sense, assuming determinism, we are saying “things that we must of necessity say.” We say them “better” than the Greeks because of the long history of human beings and our strivings to flourish, which have blessed us with science and better philosophical and historical understandings to say them in a way that helps lay out the situation before, and, hence, will help us continue to do better and better things, like flying to Mars– which maybe we’ll do when we stop fightings wars, listening to those preaching peace.
Eric:
“Even saying that we have intersubjective agreement wouldn’t do, since that too would be just the end of a set or series of causal chains.”
I’m not sure why you think there’s a conflict between reaching true conclusions about the world and those conclusions being reached deterministically. Logical reasoning can be modeled algorithmically, and there’s no evidence that our evidence-gathering capacities transcend or evade causal chains moving from sensation to concepts. So we can make choices for reasons and know truths about the world and still be completely determined in doing so. Both naturalists and supernaturalists are determined in their beliefs, but the former have a better grasp of reality, http://www.naturalism.org/resource.htm#rationality
philosophy and science have the same relationship to production of knowlege as
masturbation and sex-with-a-woman have relationship to production of children
both employ the same physical faculties and with similar success
the only difference is that it is easy to engage into the “word-game-of-definitions” about knowledge and not possible to do the similar activity with regard to “what constitutes a child”
for whatever reason I cannot post in the thread
this is a question to eric @ comment 23
“What do we get to chose?”
Do we get to chose the parents we are born to?
Do we get to chose the kind of crap they teach us because the did not know better?
Do we chose the particular language as mother tongue and going with it subtle differences brain connectivity when we reach maturity and brain plasticity slows down if not halts?
What do we get to chose?
Well, AT, for one thing, between some of the sumptuous repasts that Jerry has photographed and shared with us here on WEIT, and something less delectable, say, a hotdog from a corner stand — that’s if we’ve got the money. Just because we don’t get to choose our parents, or our indoctrination, or a whole lot of other things, doesn’t mean we never get to choose, only that our choices may be influenced by things that others chose for us. But of course they are, and they will be influenced by many of our other choices, and by their consequences.
But none of this is to the purpose. If biologically determined means we never get to make the same choice again, because the circumstances will be different, and the influences changed, then that’s irrelevant to the question of choice. If free will just means an act which is not influenced by anything, then of course we don’t have free will, but what use would such free will be to us, if it couldn’t respond to the situations we find ourselves in, where we have some knowledge or at least a dim memory of how things were the last time we were in a similar sitution, and what the effects of choosing on that occasion were.
Have a look at Tom Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul, and his chapter on free will, and the conditions that he thinks are necessary to speak plausibly about agency, and then ask whether, in the world as we know it, agency like that is possible. And then ask yourself what more would you demand of freedom. He first lists the conditions on page 104, and discusses them in detail in the chapter. Go through the whole process, and then say what more is needed, and then ask youself whether this is a choice.
Yes, Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul is a great read on naturalizing human agency. He argues that we retain our individuality, remain rational, are capable of self-control and effective action, and can still be held accountable for our wrongdoings and rewarded for our virtues, even if we aren’t God-like first causes. Reviewed at http://www.naturalism.org/reviews.htm#Flanagan
It is “Owen” Flanagan (not Tom) and it is a very good book.
I think, and Flanagan very much helped me believe this, that once we start analyzing our lives, our society, and many of our other beliefs (for instance blame and praise, and what it is our “reactive attitudes encourage us to believe about other agents) through the scientific image, that many of those attitudes towards others change, and, subsequently many of our behaviors and institutions should change.
I say this above, and perhapts AT is hinting at it, but once we accept this “image” of human beings we change, or should change, as a people, as families, in our relationships, in our “selves.” We should question the way our “consciousness” is reporting the world to us– and this is not new, a different model of the solar system helped us understand the phenomenal image of the sun “moving”. That aspect did not thoroughly change our lives because the structure of the solar system was not terribly responsible for how we saw our selves and others. A new understanding about the capacities of individuals, a newunderstanding of the brain, should change many of our daily behaviors and attitudes.
As far as choices are concerned, it should change how we go about “choosing,” including what we “consciously” believe about choosing. For instance, being on guard against advertising, which is probably impossible, or at least pracically unnecessary, to always be on guard against. But, understanding structures of the brain/mind changes endlessly beliefs that we hold, because those beliefs were being structured by naive, naked phenomenological aspects.
I agree nothing more is needed for human beings than the type of “free will” and choosing capacity that you describe, but it also clashes with how we as individuals and as society are living our lives at the moment. And I think Flanagan would agree with me there, though, I probably demand change in a more stringent fashion than he. But, maybe I do not enjoy the luxuries that he has . . .
Mixed up Owen and Tom, since I had just been reading Tom on John Haught on new atheism. Sorry about that. I’ve got Flanagan’s book open on my desk too!
I wanted to say, I think you are aligned with Owen Flanagan in your thoughts. I think his “easing people into the scientific image” and his call for “this is all that humans need” may be one place where I slightly disagree with him. I did not mean to single you out and say you are reading Flanagan wrong. I read his Self-Expressions (1994?) a few months back and found that excellent as well. I think Flanagan brings a broader perspective, such as anthropological findings, to the naturalist discussion of the mind and is amply awarded for it in clarity.
And … so much debate for so many centuries about Free Will, but why so little discussion of Caged Won’t?
Has anyone read Stuart Kauffman’s speculations about free will? Are they entirely crazy?
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman09/kauffman09_index.html
I haven’t, but I will.
about “success of homo in adapting to ecological niches”
in evolutionary terms homo species is not in any way father down the road that the particular strain of hominids in which evolution yielded “deliberative capability” and made it into “homo sapiens”
h sapiens is still in diasporating mode – we are still to experience effects of saturation and coming with it _evolutionary_ pressure
the classical evolutionary process stopped with arrival of homo sapiens – homo sapiens in its natural pursuit of survival continues disturbing evolutionary process and continues to meddle with the dynamics of the system without understanding it
evolution of homo sapiens is yet to happen
evolution of homo sapiens is evolution of his “deliberative capability”
the quantitative dimension of this process is SCIENCE with its accumulation of knowledge that is machine-that-goes-by-itself
the qualitative dimension of this process is _institutionalization_ of “belief-free science” that is nowhere near in site on two accounts:
(a) science is only remotely belief-free because we do not have individual scientists that are aware of their own beliefs and willing to excercize discipline of whatching their own thoughts and language for “beliefs”
(b) proper institutionalization of science cannot begin until “belief-free” scientists do not realize that they have no other choice but _move_ into government and implement laws that promote proper institutionalization of science
for now we still have the time to “talk”
but in two or three or five generations we will hit the wall and the system will rebalance itself with homo sapiens subspeciating into HOMO COGITANS (the belief-free scientists)
Now, that’s theology.
I think it’s fascinating that the most intense discussions on this “web site” (oh no, not a blog) are about what is fundamentally a theological concept.
“Free will” was invented to try to describe why men act in violation of what are perceived as god’s desires. Since an all-powerful god could easily just program us to not murder one another, not steal, not lie, vote Republican … and on and on … the fact that humans are perfectly capable of behaving in contravention to god’s “will” is clearly a problem for the whole omnipotence attribute.
So a little fable was appended to the Adam & Eve story. It wasn’t merely knowledge of good and evil that they acquired when they ate the IQ-raising sin-fruit: it was something called “free will”. Why god was powerless then and is still unable to rein in this instant outcome from consumption of a peculiar form of carbohydrate is not explained by anyone.
Free will vs determinism is ultimately meaningless. I have all the free will I need … but my status as a biological creature living in a certain time and place puts necessarily deterministic constraints on my behaviors. I can’t fly like Superman, nor spin webs like Spider-Man. But I can decide whether to have the fish or the chicken for dinner, change my mind about what movie to see afterwards, and allow my date to decide if coffee at her place is to follow.
People really are getting too tied up in knots about this.
BTW: I totally agree with Dr. Coyne about Dennett’s “solution” as proposed in Freedom Evolves. It’s a nice argument, but didn’t really solve the issue. I think he basically just redefined “free will” to mean what he wanted it to mean.
I think Dennett’s argument goes deeper than that. He defines free will to mean what we all want it to mean — namely that we are effective agents in the world and that our deliberations matter — and then shows that you don’t need to give up physical causality to get that.
I’m not sure I got that from Dennett. I tried … really and truly tried … to give him the benefit of the doubt. But so much of that book was what I considered a tangent unrelated to the issue at hand. In the end, it was rather like a prosecutor who didn’t have nearly enough evidence to convict someone, but who wanted the jury to buy his arguments nonetheless.
I have enormous respect for Dennett. I think he reached for the moon and came up more than a little bit short.
That’s simply not true. As early as the Stoics, there was interest in what made action free. Epicurus also infamously thought that free action was accounted for by a swerve of atoms. Both obviously pre-date Christianity, and both concerned free will of humans not gods. There is nothing intrinsically theological about the concept.
He doesn’t really “redefine” it, he uses a definition of free will with a long tradition. He does also argue that the Libertarian type of free will doesn’t get anyone anything else worth wanting, though.
I’ve mentioned a few times that I think the one thing Libertarian free will gets you that Compatibilist free will doesn’t is something for an immaterial, magical, possibly immortal soul to do…and something that only such a soul could do, I guess. So if not having an immortal soul is what some people think is depressing about not having free will, then fine. But otherwise, no one has explained what they think is lacking in the Compatibilist definition of free will.
to eric and his answers at 25 and 28
I understand your reappropriation of the meaning of “free will” and agree with you that wioth those qualificationsyou make we can use “free will” without cognitive dissonance
but I still think (which of course is a matter of personal preference) that “free will” is a redundant concept and we can easily do without it
i side with people that it is all about definitions and prefer to avoid “free will” as “useless” rather than give it “better meaning”
for your comment that my 28 is “teology” i invite you to explore material at http://www.condition.org
the basic assumptions are
1. there is “matter” (the world is material, no-supernatural)
2. everything we can ever know is a property of matter
what i posted follows _logically_ from those two with adhearance to Occum’s razor, analysis of language and application off Godel incompleteness theorems to language and “human condition”
I would be very much obliged to you if you could show the flaws in the logic or show that assumptions are unreasonable
PLEASE!
Our genes and our environment build our brains. Our brains and our environment combine to make decisions. Call this free will or don’t, it seems pretty irrelevant to me. It’s what we do and every other living thing does their equivalent.
This whole “rewind the clock and make a different decision” sounds to me like you have been reading way to much theology. Not really a definition in any meaningful sense, as you are invoking an impossible condition. I’m sorry, but “do-overs” is not a scientific concept, any more than god is.
at Lyndon’ s comment at thread of 25
Lyndon says
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We should question the way our “consciousness” is reporting the world to us– and this is not new, a different model of the solar system helped us understand the phenomenal image of the sun “moving”. That aspect did not thoroughly change our lives because the structure of the solar system was not terribly responsible for how we saw our selves and others. A new understanding about the capacities of individuals, a newunderstanding of the brain, should change many of our daily behaviors and attitudes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excellent anology and thank yo for looking for ways “to agre” rather than “disagree”
Yes your interpretation of my comments is good.
I would add that the time is of the essence.
We are running of time very fast.
The pace with wich science institutionalizes and progresses is very slow as compared to our “meddling with dynamics of the planetary black box while simultanuosely trying to understand those dynamics”
this is the problem.
We first need to stop _any_ activity so that we can tease out the relationships of level of population, quality-of-life and corruption of informational content of our environment (the biodivercity is just one aspect of it)
But we cannot stop because we belive in
“humans have the right to multiply”
“economy has to grow”
“poverty is “bad” and we have to “fight” it”
“we have “god-given” rights and freedoms”
why?
what is these “rights” mean to our _continuos_ viability?
what do they mean to people that will be born in 2050 into 10 billion planet?
could they ever go back to 2 billion people?
will the planet be the way it was in 1800 – ties?
Were is the _integrity_ of the _meaning_ to thoses so-called “rights”?
What is the “criteria of integrity”?
In 1906, Mark Twain published an essay titled What is Man? which was intended to demonstrate that there is no such thing as free will. In 1910, the year he died, he published another essay titled The Turning Point of My Life concerning the circumstances that resulted in his becoming a writer and a humorist. As he saw it, our lives are ruled by circumstance, in fact an almost endless chain of circumstances, including, of course, the circumstance of one’s temperament. As he saw it, he didn’t choose to become a writer; he became one as a result of circumstance. It was just common sense to him, and he didn’t feel compelled to make it all mysterious by calling it something like determinism.
I always think of “free will” as a theological trick to get God off the hook for all the bad things he’s supposed to know about but fails to act upon.
At t=0 my hand is on the table.
At t=0,1 it is 1 cm above the table.
When did my free will had its ‘decision moment’?