David Barash, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Washington, had the temerity—imagine!— to question the existence of free will in today’s New York Times op-ed section. His piece, “Who’s in charge inside your head?” has an unusual take: he begins by citing the increasing number of cases in which parasites are documented to manipulate the behavior of their hosts to the parasites’ advantage: cases of zombie ants, zombie bees, and so forth. To me these are some of the most fascinating findings of modern biology, for we have no idea how something like a fungus can produce a chemical that affects the behavior of its ant host in such complex ways.
He then segues to one possible conclusion: the only thing manipulating our behavior is not our souls, not some immaterial “will,” but our genes:
Think about having a child, and ask who — or rather, what — benefits from reproduction? It’s the genes. As modern biologists recognize, babies are our genes’ way of projecting themselves into the future.
Unlike the cases of parasites or pathogens, when genes manipulate “their” bodies, the situation seems less dire, if only because instead of foreign occupation it’s our genes, our selves. But those presumably personal genes aren’t any more hesitant about manipulating our bodies, and by extension our actions, than is a parasitic fly hijacking a honeybee.
Here, then, is heresy: maybe there is no one in charge — no independent, self-serving, order-issuing homunculus. Buddhists note that our skin doesn’t separate us from the environment, but joins us, just as biologists know that “we” are manipulated by, no less than manipulators of, the rest of life. Who is left after “you” are separated from your genes? Where does the rest of the world end, and each of us begin?
Let’s leave the last words to a modern icon of organic, oceanic wisdom: SpongeBob SquarePants. Mr. SquarePants, a cheerful, talkative — although admittedly, somewhat cartoonish — fellow of the phylum Porifera, “lives in a pineapple under the sea… Absorbent and yellow and porous is he.” I don’t know about the pineapple or the yellow, but absorbent and porous are we, too.
It’s an okay piece, but I think much of his point is lost in the verbiage, and especially in the neglect of the environment. Yes, we are the product of our genes, but also of our environments, and of how our genes interact with our environments. It’s the combination of both of those factors, neither of which is spiritual or immaterial, that is in charge of our behavior and “will.”
And I suppose he might have been a bit clearer about the implications of the lack of a homunculus riding a saddle atop our brain. I’m talking here about implications for punishment and reward, and for those issues the environment is critical.
h/t: William
The selfish gene approach is elegant and potent when applied to the scientific theory and fact of evolution, but becomes clumsily simplistic in understanding the interface between us and the environment.
Have you read The Extended Phenotype? Genes promote behaviors (e.g. interactions with the environment) that facilitate their own survival. A great example is the dam-building behavior of beavers. That’s a straightforward example of the selfish gene approaches success in explaining the evolution of particular interactions between an organism and its environment.
Could we replace the dam for the beavers by music or internet for humans?
We have been doing a deep dive into brain > behavior. Higher order concepts like free will, consciousness, choice, emotions, etc are now laughable. Charming and now quaint fairy tales.
Interesting the NYT is so far behind the science.
For example, it appears the go/no go transition that leads from stimuli to behavior occurs in 150 ms. Not much time for much of anything let alone “thinking.”
To describe this, for example, in terms other than “thinking” – say as some kind of stimulus/behavior chain – is to carry reductionism to an absurd extreme. Religious loonies say that this kind ‘materialist’ thinking removes the “meaning” from life. They, of course, want to justify God as a supplier of purpose – that is what they call meaning. In that sense of the word (“meaning”, that is), they are deeply deluded. If you’re going to throw out the emergent properties of will (“free” or otherwise), emotions, consciousness, and thought because we are learning ever more about the biochemical mechanisms whereby those things arise, then I think you have sacrificed meaning, but what I mean when I say that is that throwing all that out is to become just plain incoherent. So what if you understand the biochemical basis of will, emotions, or thought? It doesn’t mean that these things are illusory or “fairy tales”.
There is no such thing as reductionism. That’s just dishonest name calling.
We are talking about data not words.
It’s all electrons flowing thru neurons, very fast, the rest is ideology, local and carries no information/predictive value.
By “meaning” ppl are just referencing solipsistic warm fuzzy feelings. They are meaningless.
sorry, in my world “warm fuzzy feelings” are not meaningless…
They don’t predict anything. Try using them next time you or loved one goes to a doctor.
didn’t say they predicted… anything. but that doesn’t make them “meaningless.”
Sure they are.
Such feelings are meaningful *to me.* But feel free to have the last word on the sugbject!
Eggplant
I wonder if you two are disagreeing on what the meaning of ‘meaning’ is? I can agree with you both if I think of ‘meaning’ in one case as “having coherent logical implications or connotations”, and in the other case as “having importance or significant emotional or conceptual associations within a personal subjective experience of reality”.
Kevin seems to think that meaning is an illusion while suwise gives some credit to the meaning he experiences.
What is the meaning of a sunset? I think this question is quite similar to asking what is the meaning of ‘lkuwsqzxdbrtuybel’? This string has little or no meaning. I’d say no intrinsic meaning, but since I typed it with the intention of creating “random” characters with no connection to any known linguistic meaning, the string could say something about how my brain works if examined by a psychological or linguistic expert. So that would be limited meaning in relation to my brain only. To most people it’s meaningless. It could be that to a speaker of Lingala or French that some substring resembles a word or phoneme sequence that suggests an association with some meaning, but that would be projected meaning, not intrinsic meaning. The sunset is the like this string: we project meaning onto it. We place importance on color and light and transitions and day and night, and we may have more complex poetic associations that depend on layer upon layer of meaning we create in our own minds.
One person might look at the sunset and say it is data that has some predictive power, since how it refracts light can tell us something about the composition of the atmosphere, and it tells us it will soon be dark. Other than that, it has no meaning.
Another person can look at the sunset and associate it with poetry, with a memory of a kiss, with a trip taken years ago and now only vaguely remembered, or with God (shudder). You can say this is “meaningful”, but it is only in the mind of the beholder. It’s not meaning intrinsic to the sunset. This kind of meaning can be shared by people who have had similar experiences, who share culture, but in an important sense it is unique to each person how they generate and project their own “meaning”.
In a sense this latter meaning is solipsistic because it is personal and created in the mind. And in a sense the former kind of meaning is decoded from nature with an eye toward filtering out ‘noise’, with a sense of, I believe, what Buddha meant by “emptiness”: the appearances before us are aggregates, dependent arisings, with no intrinsic meaning or reality, only conditional existence relative to other contingent phenomena. In this Buddhist sense the sunset is a meaningless illusion. I think if Buddha were a scientist living today he might say all emergence is an illusion. He would be called a reductionist by people in the humanities.
In both kinds of “meaning” there is potential for fun, joy, satisfaction. There is no need for an either/or fork; there is plenty of room for people to enjoy the aesthetics of art or the rigors of science without confusing one for the other, just because they both are associated with the same word for historical reasons. But excluding either entirely seems unhealthy to me.
Buddhism don’t believe in free will, unless you are awaken. The doctrine of karma explains well how we are driven by a long chain of causes and effects. Buddhism says you can only be free from karma once you realize that there is no doer or no thinker.
But a lot of atheists just don’t want to see that if buddhism agrees there is no ghost in the machine, the no ghost and the machine in question are both illusions that are coming from an uncreated source, a no-thingness that language can only fail to describe, and that can only be experienced after a long deprogramming process that should you make realize there is no doer or thinker. It is a thing to believe it, but it is another thing to experience it and living it.
Buddha’s description of nirvana as “the Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated and and Unformed” shows that if you are in Nirvana, then you have free will because what is uncreated can’t have a cause. That is why you are free from karma once you are awaken. So Nirvana is not a place, it is a state of mind that can be reached even in this life.
Are you saying that Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem was “predictable”? Predictable in terms of “electrons flowing through neurons”? Show me a single a priori prediction (is there any other kind?) of an important mathematical theorem or musical composition or piece of art or scientific achievement that you can usefully predict by keeping track of “electrons flowing through neurons”. No one does that. Ask Jerry who the most promising young biologists in his field are and ask him to predict which ones will make the most important advances in the field in the next twenty years. Then ask him why he thinks so. I’m guessing that you won’t hear anything about how their neurons function differently then lesser young biologists.
Everyone acknowledges that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle prohibits simultaneous single particle position/momentum measurement, and hence prediction. But the way quantum mechanics works is to *classically* measure the behavior of *groups of particles* and then derive the probability equations from that completely causal behavior in order to arrive at quantum mechanical predictions for single particles.
subjectively, we cannot predict much in nature because of our ignorance regarding certain values which would be required. However unpredicability by subjective beings or instrumentation does not mean objective acausality, or events happening for absolutely no reason – an absurd prospect conceptually and empirically.
I never said that events occur for “no reason”. I merely said that explanations for how or why (human) events occur that involve emergent properties of human brains are not speaking in terms that are “illusory”. Mathematicians think when they devise proofs for theorems – knowing the biochemical processes by which such thinking occurs does not make the fact that they are thinking an “illusion”.
It’s funny, in a very recent thread here on WEIT, we were virtually unanimous in mocking William Lane Craig for his claim that no animals other than humans or primates are aware that they feel pain. If “consciousness” is an “illusion” then not only was WLC right about other animals, then not even we are “really aware” of feeling pain, right? So why all the disdain for WLC?
By the way, if you will actually read what I wrote you will see that my use of the word “meaning” had nothing to do with warm fuzzy feelings.
Ask a particle physicist to describe the theory of evolution solely in terms of interactions between elementary particles. Then read Why Evolution is True. Surely there is nothing in evolution by natural selection (or JAC’s book) that contradicts elementary particle physics. So, when JAC wrote Why Evolution is True did he merely expound “illusions”? If not, are you sure that there is no such thing as reductionism?
Name calling like reductionism is just a dishonest rhetorical trick by philosophical types.
Implicit in the labeling is the contention that statements made about the fundamental, mechanical and predictive constituents and explanations are based primarily in an emotional and ideological agenda first and foremost. That is a simple lie.
In fact, evidence-based statements are the opposite of any ideological rhetorical form since they are based in data, inter-subjective and primarily mathematical. They can always be disproven are contingent on objective proof and facts and will be changed, by definition.
Ideological claims and statements can never be disproven since the only logic they follow is internal and self-referential. They are only word and never data based.
Any ideological statement that can possibly be disproven cannot be ideological. The difference between philosophy-religion and science = data.
The statement that behavior can be explained by electrons moving thru neurons and nothing else can clearly be disproven.
Flagrant strawman. No sensible compatibilist believes in an order-issuing homunculus. Indeed, the whole thrust of Dennett’s work has been to demolish that idea once and for all, while retaining room for human agency.
What is this human agency then? The mind?
“No sensible compatibilist believes in an order-issuing homunculus. Indeed, the whole thrust of Dennett’s work has been to demolish that idea once and for all, while retaining room for human agency.”
I can’t let this assertion pass unchallenged. No choice.
It’s not only compatibilists who don’t believe in a homunculus. Huge percentages of the human population still hold concepts of free will based on dualist notions that satisfy some kind of functional equivalence to the homunculus. So why respond as if the only audience are compatibilists? That’s a little surprising.
Dennett does these things while pretending this agency still deserves to be called free will, since the depressed person has total freedom to decide to be happy, the murderer has total freedom to suppress raging hatred and anger, the smoker has total freedom to quit right now, the homosexual is totally free to decide to be straight, the left hander is totally free to decide to be right handed, the introvert is totally free to decide to be an extrovert, the person who hates the flavor of garlic is totally free to decide they like it, the person in the habit of frequently punctuating their speech with “you know” is totally free to stop on demand, the person who always feels nervous and fearful when meeting strangers can decide to become unusually gregarious if they want to, and the person with fear of public speaking or stage fright or fear of flying is totally free to decide to think and feel differently. The stutterer also is free to decide to stop, the person who rubs his chin or twists her hair between thumb and forefinger reflexively while thinking is free to decide not to do this, the person who gets butterflies in their stomach before an exam or an interview can simply decide not to, the person with a southern accent is free to switch to Brooklynese, and the Bostonian is free to talk like a Glaswegian.
Most of these phenomena involve learned habit or neurosis or various physiological/neurological factors that we can easily perceive as somehow driving our behaviors and choices. But in many of these cases the person can make a concerted conscious effort to change the behavior and still fail, unless enough time and enough practice is allowed for brain plasticity to enable actual physiological changes to neuron connections needed for the altered behavior to be accomplished.
If we can agree that an individual is not really free in the above cases, I don’t see why we can’t agree a person is no more free when deciding to quit smoking, deciding to try a new hair style or brand of shampoo, or deciding which food item to order from a menu. In the case of quitting smoking for example, that is not just an arbitrary, random, or “freely” arrived at choice; it is inevitably driven by a cause: a loved one can’t stand how you smell or your concern for health becomes a higher priority as a result of any number of possible triggers, and this new impulse overrides in intensity the older desire for stimulation and gratification associated with the smoking habit.
Quitting smoking is a positive change (in my view), and if we accomplish it we may feel proud that we did it of our own “free will”, but I can’t see anything “free” about the choice, even though we may call it a choice. There is nothing inherently free about choices. It seems calling it “free” is merely conforming to linguistic convention initiated long ago when people still really believed in the homunculus, and is not identifying any real phenomenon that can be sensibly categorized as “freedom”. Meanwhile it’s obviously true that we go about setting goals and meeting our needs and considering consequences of our actions, and adjusting future choices accordingly, none of which is done any more freely than is lighting a smoke to feed a nicotine addiction. It is trivial to point to non-coerced external freedom, which is our default state. Even at gunpoint we are not really any less free internally than we are without the external factor. We are just responding to a different set of constraints. But to call our typical choosing, intending, wanting, dreaming behaviors “freedom” is to discount or disregard the amount of internal forcing and inevitability that is actually present as the brain does its job.
It’s obvious how linguistic convention, for reasons pragmatic or poetic, can be deformed to refer to these human behaviors. But for the life of me I can’t see how a person with a complete grasp of determinism can honestly claim there is a real correspondence between this deceptive usage of the word “freedom” and what actually happens inside the brain. The best hope to draw this link is to place a tremendous amount of importance on the internal feeling we have that we are doing things freely, but it should be clear that this feeling is no more what it seems to be than are the internal feelings we have that we are actively seeing or hearing things, even though seeing and hearing occur based on a great deal of entirely involuntary unconscious brain work. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to not hear sounds that enter our ears when we are conscious. We feel like we exercise will when we focus attention by looking or listening. But to think this will is “free” you have to imagine there is a fundamental difference between how the unconscious brain presents heard sounds or seen sights to our conscious mind involuntarily, and how the unconscious brain presents the will to listen or look to the conscious mind.
If I carefully observe my brain at work there is a sense that acts of will materialize out of nothing in my conscious mind, including even the will now to focus attention on how my brain is working. This is the experience our traditional linguistic term “free will” seems to refer to. Yet on careful consideration it seems that sounds heard or sights seen arrive equally spontaneously in our conscious mind. Yet we hesitate less to agree that these sounds or sights are being presented to our conscious mind as a result of a complex set of unconscious causes in our environment, our senses, and our unconscious brain work. I’m at a loss to understand why, unless it is just emotional attachment, we have such a hard time agreeing that our will is presented to our conscious mind in a way that is just as involuntary as the sounds and sights presented to our conscious minds. And where is the freedom in a will involuntarily presented to our conscious mind, even if we are unaware of the unconscious work, and we have the experience of it seeming like we created that will in our conscious mind out of nothing for our own very personal and particular reasons? I think it is this experience of seeming like we spontaneously created that ‘will’ that we are used to calling “free will”, but incompatibilists are the only ones willing to recognize there is no freedom but the illusion of freedom caused by the way ideas, experiences, and impulses arise into consciousness from below the surface of the unconscious.
Clearly you have some issues with Dennett. But I don’t see how any of that contradicts what I said about homunculi. Rejecting homunculi is not “heresy”, it’s mainstream philosophy, and it’s disingenuous of Barash to imply otherwise.
It’s probably heresy among a majority of non-scientists and non-philosophers, where the homunculus is just standing in for the soul. I think the potential audience has to include at least all NYT readers.
I agree it’s main stream for scientists, philosophers, psychologists, and many others not committed to theological ideas. Certainly it’s not unique to compatibilists.
I like Dennet. I think my problem is with compatibilism. I’ve never seen a persuasive case that we have free will. It seems our brain just simulates free will, which allows people to pretend we have free will if you regard the brain as a black box.
In the example of the smoker, why is it that he doesn’t quit the first time he intellectualizes a reason to do so (“My wife hates the smell; it’s costing too much; I don’t want to die of cancer, etc.”)? There may very well be a few individuals who have done so, but the vast majority of people have to “wait” until certain experiences are had; certain conditions reached. This is proof positive that, even if we do have a “little man in the control room”, he is subject to outside conditions and therefore not “free” in any sense of the word (one of the definitions of “free” is, “Not affected by any outside condition or circumstance.”). Smoking may not be the best example as there are the factors of the physical addiction to nicotine and the subsequent withdrawal symptoms (along with the fear of these symptoms)- it’s a little different than deciding you’re going to stop cracking your knuckles, but even that is an example of how actions that run counter to a strong “reward-scenario” (and to avoid withdrawal by NOT quitting is to avoid a loss: avoiding a loss is perceived by the brain as a “gain”) are more difficult to initiate; once again demonstrating the determinist role of the “outside” world on our ability to make choices.
I think you are right, the fact that having the intellectual realization that we should stop smoking doesn’t always make us stop, is a very apt demonstration that we don’t really have free will. We wouldn’t do lots of stupid things if we really had free will. There are parallel independent processes and factors that struggle for control in the brain, and only after the “protect my health” component develops sufficient strength or resonance or whatever you want to call it, does it win out over the “I want sensory gratification NOW” component. Nothing free at ill in that scenario. I hope it was clear I said those scenarios demonstrate free will sarcastically; it was merely rhetoric, because I pointed out those scenarios as evidence that we have no free will.
If having the intellectual realization that we should stop smoking always made us stop, would we then have free will?
@Larry Cook
I would say possibly but not necessarily to this.
But it seems true in reverse: if we had free will, then the realization that smoking hurt us would make us stop.
Implicit there is an assumption that if there was no impediment to our will, if it was frictionless and all choices were equally probable, that a rational self-interest would prevail. The fact that rational self-interest doesn’t always prevail is at least a plausible argument against the existence of free will.
This I believe is true for sure: when we make a decision, the physical state of our brain right before that choice determines the outcome, not an abstract ‘I’ with absolute freedom to steer our mind instantaneously in any direction it likes. Our internal experience of being a conscious human makes it feel like the latter is happening. This is the illusion of free will caused by the fact that our conscious mind doesn’t have access to everything our brain is doing.
If we are buying a car, and we have a choice between identical models in red, green, or blue, what makes us prefer one color over another? We say “I just like blue better, it makes me feel better, it reminds me of water” or something like that. We can come up with lots of rationalizations for why we like blue better, but none of that explains the more basic fact that the one we like just ‘feels’ better or ‘tastes’ better. Something unconscious is creating these feelings and we don’t know how or why. I think the choice is more like watching a horse race than a free choice. Our conscious mind doesn’t really pick the winner, it “watches” while red, blue, and green have a race in the unconscious. As we mull it over in our conscious mind we may catch glimpses of the progress, but ultimately a stronger signal or resonance of liking attaches to one color or another for reasons we can’t fully grasp.
Sometimes “the numbers” tell us A us better than B, yet in our “gut” we just like B better. We don’t really know why. That we can decide to go with the gut or the numbers makes us feel free, but even that preference for numbers or gut us a “taste” or “liking” we can’t quite explain. The conscious choice we experience seems to be more like a stage where the involuntary underlying unconscious processes play out the narrative that tells our conscious mind which outcome we like better, then we consciously carry out the consequent action feeling like it was an act of freedom when really it was an act of computation. It’s not like that computation is something foreign or hostile to us; it acts with some sense of what is in our best interest; it simply isn’t the kind of internal freedom we feel it is, or we like to tell ourselves it is.
@Jeff Johnson, I think perhaps I misunderstand something. Either that or I completely disagree with your point regarding a smoker. If a smoker has the intellectual realization that he should quit smoking (this is not the same as saying he decides to quit), he could still decide not to quit for other reasons. I don’t seee where this shows a lack of free will. Often we want to do things that we know we shouldn’t do. To me, the key word would be “want”. I think we always do what we want to do despite the fact that we often protest that we had to do something we didn’t want to do. Maybe we would have preferred to have a different set of choices, but in the end we do what we want to do even if we want to because we feel we have to. Showing me people doing things they truly didn’t want to do would , to me, be evidence of a lack of free will. Again, though, I’m afraid we are talkinbg semantics or I am missing something. If that’s the case, then I didn’t want to write this.
Jeff, this is a reply to your 10/09/12 12:21am post
“Something unconscious is creating these feelings and we don’t know how or why. I think the choice is more like watching a horse race than a free choice. Our conscious mind doesn’t really pick the winner, it “watches” while red, blue, and green have a race in the unconscious.”
Over the last year or so, I’ve been presenting the idea on my TV show called Exploring the Illusion of Free Will that *all* decisions are made *completely* by the unconscious. Are you saying the same thing? This may be important because I am not aware of anyone other than myself making this claim. If you (or anyone else reading this thread) is aware of someone else having made this assertion, I would definitely like to know – with a link if possible.
All I have ever read are claims that our unconscious is involved in all decision making, not that it is completely making all of our decisions. We could be breaking new ground here! Also, constructing a refutation of free will that is far more understandable to people who don’t get why causality makes free will impossible.
Jerry Coyne, if you happen to see this comment, I’d definitely appreciate your expertise. Does the idea of a *completely* unconscious will have any history in the literature?
The idea that that consciousness plays no role in decision-making is not new or ground-breaking; as I indicated earlier, it’s Zombie World — an idea that has long since been discredited since it leads to obvious absurdities such as unconscious zombie philosophers writing learned papers about the nature of consciousness.
On the other hand, if you’re using “unconscious” as a synonym for “the entirety of our mind” (per this comment), then it’s trivially true that that all decisions are made completely by the “unconscious” (so defined).
Isn’t that, “simulates … will”, just about the minimum definition of compatibilism? If so, if you agree that this is what we see, where is the problem between your (I assume) incompatibilism and compatibilism?
The main problem with compatibilism is that it evades the fact that determinism makes free will impossible by offering a redefinition of, and hence a strawman argument for, free will.
Better than suggesting that our brain “simulates” free will, it’s probably more accurate to say that our brain mistakenly concludes that we have a free will.
It’s wrong to call the compatibilist notion a “redefinition” of free will because “free will” has never had a clear definition. The dualist notions of free will are largely incoherent when examined, and alternative compatibilist notions have been advanced for hundreds of years.
“It’s wrong to call the compatibilist notion a “redefinition” of free will because “free will” has never had a clear definition.”
Coel, dictionary definitions of free will provide compelling evidence that there is a traditional and established definition of free will. Here are a few examples.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/free%20will
1: voluntary choice or decision
2: freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/free+will
1. The ability or discretion to choose; free choice: chose to remain behind of my own free will.
2. The power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will.
1. (Philosophy)
a. the apparent human ability to make choices that are not externally determined
b. the doctrine that such human freedom of choice is not illusory Compare determinism
c. (as modifier) a free-will decision
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/free+will
2. the ability to make a choice without coercion he left of his own free will: I did not influence him
1.
free and independent choice; voluntary decision: You took on the responsibility of your own free will.
2.
Philosophy . the doctrine that the conduct of human beings expresses personal choice and is not simply determined by physical or divine forces.
Compatibilists are fully aware of these generally accepted definitions that render human beings robots or puppets to the universal will. Because they cannot accept that we human beings are not autonomous, they have invented strawman notions of free will that they can more successfully defend. Notions, however, that are not in question, and are irrelevant to the standard, traditional, and generally debated meaning of free will.
Many of your definitions don’t entail dualism and are compatible with compatibilism. It is a fact that compatibilist notions of “free will” go back centuries and many popular usages are compatible with this.
For example, the question “Did you sign this contract of your own free will or were you coerced?” is *not* asking about a dualistic interpretation, it is asking about environmental constraints.
Since our decisions are not in fact constrained by divine influence, we do clearly have “free will” under some interpretations of some of those dictionary definitions. Although note that dictionary definitions aren’t meant to be a complete descriptions of complex topics.
My problem comes from the concern that insisting determinism and free will really are compatible (as long as we change the meaning of free will), is a confusing obfuscation of what what humans really are. I wonder what the impulses are behind this insistence on the success of compatibilism.
It seems like for compatibilists that have a deep grasp of determinism (and I suspect some who call themselves compatibilists don’t; I may have misinterpreted, but some talk as if they think some magic creeps in (emerges) somewhere between deterministic brain functions and observed behavior), the only important difference from incompatibilists is perspective and word usage: the compatibilist tends to view the brain as a black box that exhibits behaviors that match various linguistic concepts embedded in our language that developed over a long history of assumed dualism, going back to the origins of language. That history of dualistic interpretation was still based on the actual observable behavior of deterministic non-free willed humans. So in this sense, viewing the human from a purely external standpoint as an object, there is a sense in which what we conceptualize as “free will” via language (which appears to be a matter of great importance to compatibilists) is represented by or simulated by observable human behavior. After all the language was based on a real experience of human behavior but an imaginary dualist assumption. Compatibilists borrow the whole linguistic edifice of our dualist past, which is made possible because the source of that linguistic edifice in the first place was real human behavior and an illusory dualism. This allows them to be linguistically consistent by making a substitution for the original concept of “freedom and independence” that supported word meanings such as choose and intend, by using an alternate underlying concept of “rational control and self-interest”. In a very real sense it is no longer free, but they are for various reasons willing to accept that as a kind of freedom worth having. I agree these capacities are worth having, I just can’t call them freedom.
That whole picture ignores the actual internal workings of the brain, which seems to be a habit with compatibilists. So I feel that modern compatibilism is based on a kind of linguistic sleight-of-hand that, like most magic tricks, relies on diverting attention. In this case they divert attention from the reality of the deterministic functioning of the brain and pretend that “what you see is what you get”, or something like that.
So there is a way to harmonize these two by simply keeping in mind that compatibilists place priority on how we use language, and incompatibilists place priority on how the brain works, on neuroscience and chemistry and physics.
What are the possible motives for insisting on this term “free will” as something real, even though it is an illusory freedom? One could be attachment to professional commitment that has been maintained so long it can’t be renounced, even if there is full understanding that the “new compatibilism” relies on a kind of equivocation on word meanings, while originally compatibilism, going back to the stoics, as I understand it, actually believed there was some kind of freedom independent of causation and wholly unique to humans. Another motive could be a concern that the layman somehow can’t handle the truth, and that chaos could arise if people no longer believe they have free will. I don’t share this worry. I think the Vohs/Schooler experiment, in which students informed they had no free will tended to cheat more, is an indication of this kind of worry. I suspect the experiment has problems. It seems compatibilists, whether they will admit it or not, have a concern for the fragility of the human ego having to contend with not only accepting that we are descended from apes, but also that humans do not have the kind of specialness we want to flatter ourselves with, that our consciousness and intelligence is not fundamentally different from that of animals in kind, but only in complexity and degree. I can’t really imagine other reasons for insisting on saying we have “free will” even though they seem to fully acknowledge determinism.
So to sum up, at base my problem with compatibilism is the suspicion that it creates confusion and that its motives are not fully explicit, and that the motives are something less than absolutely honest. Perhaps not very nice, but I think it’s true.
My motives stem from a dislike of the prevalence of religious faith. I think making the scientific knowledge that we don’t have free will into a matter of common knowledge will help break down faith in the soul and afterlife. I view this as a good thing, though there are many who might see it as a kind of despicable nihilism. It’s not though; it’s a concern for truth and reason, and a desire to see public policy and other matters of great human concern be addressed rationally and compassionately.
Jeff, I think you’ve overlooked the real motivation for compatibilism, which is the recognition that words like “free will”, “choice”, “decision”, “intention”, and so on do in fact capture useful social realities and classify behavior in meaningful ways. Those behaviors we label “free”, for instance, are amenable to change by social pressure, while those we label “unfree” are not. These are important distinctions for social animals to be able to make, and that’s why such language evolved.
This is why I think it’s a mistake to simply assert that free will doesn’t exist, rather than saying it’s not what you think it is. Saying it doesn’t exist makes it seem like you’re denying the social dimension of behavior, and I don’t see how that’s productive. Compatibilism acknowleges that that dimension does exist, and that the words we have historically used to describe it still retain useful meaning, even if our ideas about how behavior originates have changed. It’s not about protecting anybody’s feelings or pulling the wool over anybody’s eyes. It’s about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Wrong. These appear to be trivial fallacies used mainly for manipulation rather than tracking or predicting anything useful/real or of predictive value.
Your appeal is to retain delusions so as not to make anyone uncomfortable, without any proof of usefulness and contrary to mounting evidence to the contrary.
The same appeal can be made to keep ideas like the tooth fairy, earth as the center of the universe and gods. All simple lies.
This is one of the best arguments for our illusory sense of free will that I’ve seen.
“Flagrant strawman. No sensible compatibilist believes in an order-issuing homunculus. Indeed, the whole thrust of Dennett’s work has been to demolish that idea once and for all”
The term free will, as those who refute it always mean, is the ability to make decisions independent of factors we cannot control. In that sense, it does not exist. We are all robots, or puppets, acting out the will of the universe. The strawman in this matter is clearly Dennett’s using the term free will in a way different from the above sense that makes nothing that we humans do *essentially* “up to us.”
It’s kind of pathetic to see someone have an epiphany 36 years late (“The Selfish Gene” came out in ’76’). I must remind myself, however, that the truth that was there all along is going to seem fresh and brand new to those just learning to see it!
I like epiphonies. I had one! Ooops, nope I was just drunk – again. She WAS cute!
What’s that old saying? “I was on a bad drunk last night, but she left before I woke up.”
“I swear she looked 18 your honor.” Old blues lyric.
The “it must be the genes!” thing always gets my eyes rolling. The genes are only part of the story; the chemical environment plays a part as well. Nor is anything so simple or easy to establish as many people seem to suggest (especially in today’s documentaries). I would say “the suggestion that the genes did it is nice, but where’s your evidence?” Argument by analogy is only good for getting laughs – it works well in religion but not in science.
If it isn’t in the genes, where is it then? The chemical environment? Do you mean just the environment generally? Those are the two choices… and the genes one makes your eyes roll?
Clearly the text of Barash’s article (to take just one example) is not encoded in his genes in any form. There is no gene for writing NYT op-ed pieces.
So obviously the vast amount of information stored in brains and in external cultural artifacts must play a significant role in generating behavior (such the behavior of typing specific strings of words into a computer).
If you want to lump that in under “environment”, fine, but to say that genes made him type those words deserves an eye-roll.
I may be wrong, but I think, if I understand the terms properly, it may be correct to say phenotype or gene expression made him type those words, not just genotype or genes. This would include how the genes have interacted with all environmental factors as well as the cumulative effects of development and growth over the lifetime of that individual organism named David Barash.
I think you’re lumping in too much under the rubric of “phenotype” and “gene expression”. My ability to learn language as a toddler was a product of gene expression and a part of my phenotype. The fact that I learned English is not; that’s something I got from my culture.
Gene expression built my brain and keeps my neurons running. But the information processed by those neurons originates elsewhere, and genes don’t get the credit for that.
But the way your brain reacts to the information it encounters in its environment is determined in part by genes in a constant feedback interaction, which is aided in shaping the brain by development and brain plasticity. The tendency to be introverted or extroverted, or a capacity for math or music, could be genetically determined. The extent to which your math or philosophical capacities are expressed would vary according to what information and opportunities you are exposed to. So couldn’t it then make sense to say that becoming a philosopher rather than a mathematician, a musician, or a journalist is gene expression, part of a phenotype resulting from the long term interaction between genetic and environmental factors? What else can we be other than the growing changing product of genes continually interacting with environment?
Sure, a tendency to become a philosopher could be genetic at some level. But the day-to-day activities of actually being a philosopher (or anything else) are driven by the flow of information through the culture in which you’re embedded. Behavioral tendencies are one thing, but actual concrete instances of behavior (like writing an op-ed) are far more detailed than that, and I claim it’s overreaching to give all the credit to genes and none to culture.
What else can we be? We are machines for processing cultural information (“meme machines” in Susan Blackmore’s phrase). Built by genes, yes, and shaped by natural selection, but that’s not the whole story by any stretch. Indeed, that’s why Dawkins coined the word “meme”.
I think that genes and environment are the basis of the mind, and the mind is, as Jeff Johnson says, an effect of gene expression. I agree that genes don’t compose op-ed pieces and think that minds do. And to me, that is free will.
It certainly looks like free will. But it may be apparent, not actual, free will, which is what I believe.
The big question remaining is that if you accept that the brain is the only thing responsible for our consciousness, and accept that the brain’s operation is based entirely on bio-chemical processes which are entirely deterministic, where is there any room left for free will? The alternative is that human intelligence is complex enough that emotions, wants, needs, goals, including self-restraint, the ability to estimate future consequences and compare these against prioritized goals, the ability to assess results of actions and feed that information dynamically back in to future decision making, the ability to learn and remember, all combine into an effective deterministic simulation of what we conceptualize to be ‘free will’. In short, our deterministic brain is complex enough to produce the appearance of free will.
We agree that the brain – the mind – is a meat machine, utterly natural. Machines can’t have free will? I don’t even know what that question means when applied to a machine.
Is the the point of the free will question to get at whether or not we have souls? I understand it there, and the answer is no. But what does it mean to ask that question of a machine?
How do Nature and nurture combine to influence our determined volition. Randomness enters.
My determinants determined that I seek therapy for my schizotypy. Then that took away years later the schizotypy as far as I am concerned.
We make determined choices, thinking we make them consciously. I don’t know what I’ll next write.
How then do we make choices? What is the “I’ who choose?
WEIT, is it alright to use the title Coyne-Mayr Lamberth teleonomic article or should I drop the first name? Erst Mayer in ‘ What Evolution Is,” Paul B.Weisz in ” The Science of Biology” and George Gaylord Simpson in ” The Life of the Past,” decry the use of teleology as do Thales and Strato in science, so that theistic evolution is indeed an oxy-moronic obfuscation. Science first, then philosophy notes no divine intent so the NSCE is wrong in finding compatibility instead of incompatibility of religion with science from the side of science whilst from the side of religion, religions can combine with most anything. The NCSE instead should say that many of the religious find them compatible.
Again, as those three authors note, teleology is out of place in science.
Science rejects the Deus ex machina!
Aristotle is ever wrong on this point!
No intent gave us determined volition!
What a blasphemy against humanity to squall about the need for Him to give us purpose. We are not His possessions. That need is just twaddle.
Skeptic Griggsy-Carneades
There is no time to “choose.” There is no entity to choose.
Randomness is dangerous. Behavior was invented to feed. Randomness and feeding = starvation.
“How do Nature and nurture combine to influence our determined volition. Randomness enters.”
By randomness, I’m assuming you mean determinism’s only conceptual alternative – events happening without a cause. That prospect, however, is incoherent. How could anything, including human acts, happen without having been caused? There may be many cases where we human beings are ignorant of the causes of a certain event, however that ignorance in no way supports the contention that the event was uncaused. There has, in fact, never been any empirical, anecdotal, or any other kind of evidence supporting the notion of an uncaused event.
Randomness, incidentally, makes free will more impossible than does determinism. An uncaused act cannot, in any meaningful sense, be ascribed to a human will, free or otherwise.
I mean random in the sense not planned for as the asteroid was not planned for the demise of the dinossaurs. Yes, to determinism!
Do post again.
“I mean random in the sense not planned for as the asteroid was not planned for the demise of the dinosaurs.”
That raises the question of whether the universe, whose beginning vs. eternal past transcends our ability to logically understand, is self-conscious, or self-aware. If so, everything would necessarily be “planned,” again with the “beginning” still in question. I would prefer that it were not planned, however, so that we would be freed the necessity of blaming the universe, or God, for what is wrong with reality. I’m left thinking that the universe must be aware of itself to govern itself, and so everything does, according to logic, seem planned in the sense of known in advance to whatever made everything happen.
Science finds no intent as the teleonomic argument notes,George.Google the Coyne-Mayr-Lamberth teleonomic argument to see a full-scale defense. I’ll put that defense here.
Boy, he really beats around the bush in that article. I had a hard time following. Pretty much a stealth position.
My understanding is the neurocognitists are long past settled on this. I’ll bet they’re afraid to go public.
This is our version of the Copernican Revolution. Our “I” is not the center of our behavior or brain or even social lives. It’s just another self-flattering delusion. RIP
Buddhism told the story century many centuries ago. The “ego” has no solid foundation the Buddha found.
But that doesn’t make buddhism a materialist philosophy, atheist yes, in the sense that it doesn’t accept an exterior divinity, but it is certainly not a materialist position…
Well, we’re not into ideological labels since they carry no information value but that is interesting that the felt experience was codified into something that brain science is now supporting.
However, there is an “ego” as a self-referential delusion but not anything that affects behavior. It appears.
I’d like to know what you would be something free from ideology? How can you interpret what is codified in the brain without ideological or cultural references?
“Who’s in charge inside your head?”
Mu.
Seriously, the question can only be called either nonsensical or already loaded. My head is me; I am in charge, even if “I” am not literally in charge inside my head. This is like asking what calculated 2+2=4 inside a pocket calculator and then, when you have located the precise chip that did the calculation, concluding that the sentence “the pocket calculator has calculated 2+2=4” is therefore incorrect.
My head is me; I am in charge, even if “I” am not literally in charge inside my head.
The problem with that assertion is that the causal regression preceding anything your head does spans back in time to before you, including your head, were created. That’s why determinism makes free will impossible. The chain of cause and effect, in fact, spans back to at least the big bang. That’s why we don’t ever choose or decide anything. We simply play out what the causal past long ago decreed.
By way of analogy, you (and your head) are like the next to last domino in a string of a gazillion of them that spans back to at least the big bang. The last domino, incidentally, represents what that very long chain of dominos made your head do.
The kind of Laplacean predeterminism you’re talking about is an artifact of classical mechanics, which we know is not an accurate account of reality. Quantum mechanics tells us there is no unique history that must inevitably unfold. Depending on your interpretation, there’s either one history that includes genuinely uncaused events (such as spontaneous radioactive decay), or there’s an ensemble of parallel histories embodying all possible outcomes, with no single outcome predetermined in any sense.
This doesn’t rescue dualist free will, of course (unless maybe you’re Deepak Chopra). But it does rule out your linear chain of dominoes stretching back to the Big Bang. The fact that human behavior has physical causes does not mean that there’s only one possible way your life could have turned out.
“Quantum mechanics tells us there is no unique history that must inevitably unfold.”
Some interpretations of quantum mechanics claim that. Einstein, Bohm and others disagreed.
As with radioactive decay, to claim uncaused activity for an event about which we are ignorant regarding how and when it comes about is just non-scientific, sloppy thinking.
Just try to conceptualize how something happens in an uncaused manner and you come up against the absurd nature of such a claim.
(sigh)
You appear to be under the impression that any significant number of people commenting on this site disagrees with determinism. To repeat what has been written here for ca. five million times before: That is not the case.
The thing is this. JC and many others look at the domino that falls last, see that it has been set in motion by the previous domino, and then phrase their observation in terms of “it is an illusion that the last domino fell, because it was just made to fall from the outside”. Which is nonsense, because the domino itself still fell down, even if it is part of a network of cause-and-effect.
Even worse, for humans it is often put in terms of “you are a puppet of your genes / environment / the laws of physics”. But what is the you in this sentence? For the sentence to make any sense whatsoever, the you has to be envisioned as a kind of immaterial soul sitting in the head of a person and watching helplessly while the body does its predetermined thing. But that is, again, nonsense, because the you is really the body that does those things. You are not a puppet, you are an integrated part of the network of cause-and-effect.
There is a misguided allergy here to certain terms that have very clearly compatibilist definitions:
decision
freedom
free will
Oh stop sighing; my posts are aimed not at comapatibilists (whom I regard as trying to make the best of a bad thing for the benefit of dualists), but at those many people who still are dualists. And make no mistake, there are many, even among my scientist friends. Philosophers would do better to dispel determinism, and then talk about the consequences of determinism for our system of judicial reward and punishment, or for the notion “moral responsibility,” than to engage in convoluted philosophiclal lucubrations to try to somehow give us “freedom.”
Sadly, we don’t have “freedom”. We are indeed puppets: our actions derive solely from the physical actions of our genes and environment. Where is the “freedom” in that? You really have to stretch the term if you think our decisions are “free”.
If you want to tease some kind of “freedom” out of that, fine, but it doesn’t get my juices flowing. What’s important here is determinism and its consequences, not how clever philosophers can be in trying to extract freedom from determinism.
I am sorry if this has been insufficiently clear, but the sighing does not refer to you either, but to many commentators here who indeed, as I know from any previous threads, love to argue against an imaginary dualist while having a monist and determinist in front of them.
As for the rest:
(1) I recently read Hume’s Enquiry and think that he made (in 1748, long before neurobiology) a rather good argument that nobody, as a matter of practice, really disbelieves determinism even if they claim otherwise. The argument is that we all assume other people to be dependable, i.e. to be the sum of their character (incl. genes) and experiences. For example, even a fundamentalist Christian arguing for dualist free will in theodicy does not actually consider it equally likely to be attacked by their spouse or to be hugged by them. Thus our fellow humans who claim non-determinism and dualist free will as an intellectual exercise betray the hollowness of that claim through their own everyday behaviour.
(2) As you will surely know, and as the links I have put in my previous comment amply demonstrate, terms like “decision” and “freedom” have commonsense definitions that are entirely compatibilist, and thus some of us simply see no reason to throw them away just because the word freedom has been used by a narrow group of people to imply something supernatural in one very specific area. In fact, one might wonder how physicists, statisticians and judges would even comfortably communicate if they were told that they should not use “degrees of freedom” or “free” (= not incarcerated) any more because these terms could supposedly be interpreted to mean that, say, an airplane is outside of the laws of physics because it has three degrees of mechanical freedom…
“terms like “decision” and “freedom” have commonsense definitions that are entirely compatibilist, and thus some of us simply see no reason to throw them away just because the word freedom has been used by a narrow group of people to imply something supernatural in one very specific area”
I don’t think any one is denying freedom in its accurate usage, but to apply the term to our human will is a highly confusing, perhaps intentionally obfuscative, misuse of the term. Our human will is clearly not free of constraints over which it has absolutely no control.
We ultimately don’t even “decide” anything, since we simply play out the causal history that precedes us. While we may want to colloquially refer to ourselves as making decisions, to colloquially refer to our having a free will confuses the matter so profoundly as to lead many to the mistaken conclusion that we humans are not, in fact, very much like robots or puppets having absolutely no control over anything we do.
It is most fundamentally this tendency to confuse the issue by advancing a strawman defense of free will that renders the compatibilist argument ultimately so inconsequential to the proper understanding of human will.
Sorry, but I just find it hard to communicate without using the word decision for, well, deciding between different options, and I see no problem because I would use the very same term to say that a computer decides what move to make in a strategy game, a situation where literally nobody would doubt that determinism is true.
And as I have mentioned in another thread, the German word for voluntary is “freiwillig”. That means in my native language there is really no (sane-sounding) way of expressing the difference between me handing over $100 because I want to make somebody a gift and me doing the same because I was forced to at gun point without using the term free will; nor would any German conclude that you are free from causality just because you have done something freiwillig.
Maybe that goes some way to explain my relaxed position on the issue in the English language. Or maybe it just shows that I should shut up and let native speakers of English decide…
Alex, it’s the same in English. How else would you ask “Did you sign this contract of your own free will or were you coerced?”?
And is “decision” another word we’re supposed to drop from the language, because nothing ever “decides” anything?
The incompatibilists here are never consistent on this; they’re stuck at the point of telling dualists that there is no ghost in the machine, but they haven’t yet thought through what happens when that is accepted.
If would be good if the incompatibilists would state exactly what changes they want to the language, and specifically what changes they want to the judicial system.
You mentioned earlier frustration at the incompatibilists who want to debate an imaginary dualist. Well, I think that when compatibilists start to say incompatibilists want to eliminate words like choice, decision, intention, predict, estimate, guess, etc. it is a similar straw man. Compatibilist even have a list of words they claim are “compatibilist words” as if they claim them as captured territory. Extremely annoying.
That out of the way, I don’t see Hume’s argument as very good. It assumes that if people had a notion of free will, it would have to assign an equal probability to every possible option. This would indeed make people seem wild and unpredictable. People instead feel free yet also feel obligated to exercise their freedom prudently. They are able to intuitively recognize that having absolute freedom isn’t a toy or something to be abused, but is something to be used judiciously and responsibly. People don’t feel their good habits are a result of causality and lack of freedom, they believe that they exercise wisdom every time there is a choice, and that they do so in an act of contra-causal will. It reinforces the self-flattery of perceived virtue. They don’t feel like the neural patterns in their brain have been shaped into habits that seem to have good payoffs when repeated; they feel like “I have learned to do the right thing, make the right choices, when I’m absolutely free to do otherwise. That freedom is what makes my choices even more virtuous”. Every time go straight home and pass the pub they think “I’m making a virtuous choice.” If they go in the pub, they rationalize “I deserve this, I know how to drink responsibly. There’s nothing wrong with a spot of ale.” There’s nothing strange about saying: “I walk home this way from work everyday, but today I chose the longer scenic route just because I felt like it”. We still have a high degree of predictability with a little spice of freedom. Hume’s argument falls apart when viewing people as they actually are, not as hypothetical chaotic randomizers.
Regarding compatibilist usage of language, I wrote more on that in this post.
The bottom line is that it seems to me compatibilist take words like ‘choice’ and ‘decision’, which had an original conceptual underpinning involving “freedom and independence”, and substitute a new conceptual underpinning of “rational control and self-interest”. You use the same words, but you’ve changed the conceptual foundation of the words.
By doing this you get consistency in language. You get the huge convenience of not having to reinvent language. But by doing this you at least partially obscure the actual absence of freedom from causation.
I don’t think we should abandon words like choice, decision, intention, or hundreds of other terms in which the concept freedom may resonate in the meaning. But we should be able to abandon one term, ‘free will’, and not pretend we have it. We can talk about ‘freedom’, and ‘will’, and understand that we mean control, agency, and self-interest. But why the conspicuous attachment to this one term: ‘free will’? It’s kind of obvious why dualist theologians are attached to the term. It’s less obvious why compatibilists find it so important.
Yep, agreed! Indeed I’ve proposed this several times on previous WEIT “free will” threads.
I don’t think compatibilists are so attached to that one term (though it is wrong for incompatibilists to assert that it has a clear dualistic meaning, when the history of its use is far more complex).
But then incompatibilists such as our host insist on “appearance of choice” rather than “choice” and insist we’re not actually making “choices”, we’re not actually in “control”, we’re not actually making “decisions”. At that point we compatibilists baulk at just how much rewriting of the language is being requested.
And it seems to me that incompatibilists still seem to believe in a little homunculus that is “us”, but this one has no power, can’t change anything, and so just sits there not in “control”, not making “decisions”.
Once you realise that “we” are not a homunculus, but are fully part of the causation network, and thus just as much causing things to happen as anything else can be said to be, then it makes sense to use compatibilist language such as “will”, “choice”, “decision” and “control”.
I don’t think this is a fair characterization. It would be more accurate to say that it is an illusion to think the domino could have fallen in a way differently than it did. To say it didn’t fall is just stupid (which is why your phrasing is unfair).
We are puppets, but we own the puppeteer, so we can rely on the puppeteer to act in our interests to the best of its capabilities. And even the puppeteer is not free. We are not puppets of external forces, but of internal forces.
Jeff, may I suggest that if you have to add that many qualifiers to the “puppet” metaphor, then it’s a bad metaphor and ought to be discarded.
If you want to say we are robots, I have no problem with that, because the key difference between robots and puppets in that robots are self-motivated, operating under their own internal control.
Agreed, robot is a better metaphor.
“robots are self-motivated, operating under their own internal control.”
That’s inaccurate. A robot must be programmed in a way similar to how human behavior is programmed by our genes. The key point here is that a robot cannot choose how it is initially programmed, and we human beings cannot choose what genetic makeup we inherit.
Without such control neither human beings nor robots can be said to be self-governing in any real sense.
A robot can regulate its own behavior (within the contraints of its design) without requiring moment-to-moment instructions from some external agency.
A puppet can’t do anything at all without an external puppeteer.
That, to my mind, is a real sense in which the former is self-governing while the latter is not.
If you object to using perfectly serviceable words like “control”, “self-governing”, “agency” and so on to describe these real differences between robots and puppets, then what vocabulary would you suggest?
Intelligent robots can learn. So at any given moment, the content of the robot’s program and data memory has a possible set of states, and thus a possible set of deterministic reactions to external inputs. If its prior programming allows it to assess the result of that reaction, compare that with desirable goals, and then modify and extend it’s own space of reachable states to account for any deficiency in previous response or action, it can improve with time and repeated trial and error, and react differently to the same inputs next time they are encountered.
This seems like self-governing in some real sense.
And humans excel at this; brain plasticity and ability to compare results with goals and feed that back into future decisions allows remarkable improvements to occur. Think about a human learning to play the piano, for example. The skill eventually gets burned into unconscious “muscle memory”, but the process of learning involves lots of conscious trial and error, repetition, and for the brain a continual rewriting and extending of the brain’s set of reachable states. Whenever I hear people belittle the importance of consciousness, I think that for a non-learning machine they must be correct, but for the learning human, consciousness seems to play a pivotal role. It could be that these learning algorithms might be accomplished without consciousness, but I suspect that something about consciousness’ plodding capacity for reflection and meta-control makes this integrative monitoring and oversight role more efficient and flexible. A conscious brain may (pure speculation) require fewer neurons and less energy than an unconscious self-modifying supervisory control system capable of similar feats of learning. This sounds paradoxical, since consciousness remains mysterious to us, and we imagine it must require greater complexity, but it would be consistent with how evolution usually works.
So the human brain is constantly reprogramming itself in reaction to events. This flexible intelligence is not at all free of causation, but it does qualify as self-motivated internal control, in my view. What could be a better self-motivating mechanism than human emotions? Think of the economy: love, fear, anger, can drive us to accomplish multitudes of tasks, from writing poems, to building skyscrapers, to building hellish war machines, and many better uses of our energies. Human emotions are multipurpose, multi-function, and nearly indomitable motivating engines.
Who benefits from walking around? Obviously your legs. You’re a mindless automaton and your legs control you. That’s why all terrestrial animals walk around so much: legs want to be more fit. Babies are nothing but a leg’s way to make more legs, using individuals as blindly programmed vehicles.
Seriously now, why do you use the adjective immaterial for will? It’s not like people who defend its existence think that. It’s a bit like those two strict alternatives further in the post: either no free will or homunculus. You really think those are the only two possibilities? Couldn’t we say the same thing about our ability to reason? Either reason is an illusion and all that’s really happening is gene programming at work, or there’s a magical immaterial homunculus doing the reasoning for you.
Rather than saying “reason is an illusion”, you could say “the ability to reason freely and independently of biological causes is an illusion”. This way, reason itself is not an illusion, but its radical freedom is an illusion, and this is a consequence of the earlier hypothesis that free will is an illusion. It seems pretty clear to me that reason is not an illusion. But free will seems to pop into existence spontaneously in our conscious mind from no obvious prior causes. This could be an illusion caused by our will arising out of the unconscious, so that our conscious mind is not privy to all its causes.
“This could be an illusion caused by our will arising out of the unconscious, so that our conscious mind is not privy to all its causes.”
When you think about it, if the unconscious, by definition and general understanding, is something our unconscious is not even aware of in real time, and since we can only be conscious of one or at most two or three things at a time, consciousness is only awareness and not decision making.
The unconscious, being where all of the data upon which we base any decision must be stored, decides everything for us. It then lets us know what it has decided. It makes us *aware,* or conscious, of what it wants us to be conscious of.
What I’m saying is that our “will” is entirely located in our unconscious. If we really want to be technical about it, we need to acknowledge that our unconscious is as subject to causality as is everything else in the universe, and so it never actually “decides” anything. It is just the last causal link before we humans play out what the causal past has destined.
Nothing biological is free of biological causes. Evidently reason is a product of biology. I think you’re confusing the issue. Who is defending some magical out-of-the-brain reasoning?
It seems pretty clear to me that free will is not an illusion. The rest of your post seems unintelligible, sorry.
Is this in response to me? Because I don’t see how it applies to what I wrote. I said nothing about magic.
Let me try to clarify. I was trying to respond to your question about whether the free will or the homunculus were the only options. I think that they are the only options: either we have no free will, or there is some kind of dualism (represented figuratively by the homunculus). But I don’t think reason is an illusion; I think freedom is an illusion.
I’m confused by you saying nothing is free of causes, but free will is not an illusion. This sounds like an impossible contradiction to me.
Going further in my post, I was trying to explain the illusion of free will; imagine a fish jumping out of a lake. If you are totally naive about fish and what it means to be underwater, you could be tempted to say that the fish materialized in mid-air out of nowhere. I’m saying this as an analogy to our conscious thoughts (fish) and our unconscious (lake): we don’t have direct access to what is happening in our unconscious. If everything is biologically caused, there is no freedom in our unconscious. There is only an apparent freedom in our conscious mind; it appears free because we can’t “see” the causes in our unconscious mind.
We make choices that change caused things all the time. We cut and dye our hair. We study in order to improve grades or work harder to get a raise. Hell everything I can think of involves a choice upon a thing with a known cause. Free will is an individual-level concept just as evolution is a population-level concept.
If I understand Coyne, he thinks that if we had a sufficiently advanced machine to scan brains, we could track brain activity and predict what decision a person will make when confronted with a given choice. So since we can predict what’s going to happen, that demonstrates the person didn’t really have a choice, and we simply do what corresponds to those electric currents and cells working in the brain.
The bad part is the same thing can be said about reason. If I give you a theorem and tell you to prove it, and I scan brain activity and all that while you do it, am I justified in believing you have not truly reasoned at all because all that happened was electricity in the brain caused by photons who collided into the paper and entered your eyes and excited your optic nerves and were transferred into the brain, which triggered a certain cortex area, etc. etc. and therefore it’s all mechanic and you’re an unthinking machine? Isn’t that the same?
“We make choices that change caused things all the time.”
Yes, but the salient point here is that those choices are caused, as are the causes of those causes and the causes of those causes etc., etc., etc. It is the ensuing causal regressing, spanning back to before we were born, that makes free will impossible.
“It seems pretty clear to me that free will is not an illusion.”
More accurately, free will is the mistaken conclusion that anything we humans do is in any way up to us. If a chain of causes preceding any human act spans back to even before there was a human species, free will simply does not exist.
Free will is the concept that anything an individual does is willed by him and not willed by someone else (in violation of his will).
make that “something” instead of “anything”. Free will is not all or nothing. It is situational. In some situations a person exercise his free will, while in other situations there might be constraints such that he cannot freely do as he wills.
moreover, the constraints matter only if they are imposed by someone else. freedom of my will versus someone else’s. a natural constraint not intentionally imposed (think constraint of not being able to walk through walls), is a non-issue for free will. But if somebody locks you up in prison against your will, that is a free will issue.
“Free will is the concept that anything an individual does is willed by him and not willed by someone else (in violation of his will).”
Check out any dictionary definition. The notion extends to being able to choose free of anything one is not in control of. That includes being able to circumvent genetic and biological influences. That is why free will is impossible.
“Free will is not all or nothing. It is situational. In some situations a person exercise his free will, while in other situations there might be constraints such that he cannot freely do as he wills.”
Let’s put it to the test of science and reason. Suggest any choice you believe to be in any way freely willed, and I’ll show you why factors beyond your control, like the causal chain of events that spans back to the big bang, actually made the choice for you.
Free will is an either or proposition, like a door being either open or closed, or a light being either on or off. A door might be slightly open, but that simply makes it open. A light might be slightly on, but that simply makes it on. Even the slightest influence of a single gene is enough to make free will completely impossible.
That makes no sense.
We either have free will or we don’t – and we simply don’t. It’s as clear as that. There are no degrees of free will. For a more extensive explanation of why this is so, you might want to glance at the transcript of one of the TV show episodes I did refuting this contention that we humans have a partially free will –
http://causalconsciousness.com/Episode%20Transcripts/11.%20%20The%20Absurdity%20of%20Varying%20Degrees%20of%20Free%20Will.htm
Chapter and verse is also at The Turning Consciousness Conference. Listen esp to presentation by Paul Cisek.
Time to move on to what actually does direct behavior.
“Time to move on to what actually does direct behavior.”
Your earlier point was a bit cryptic. So, what directs human behavior?
Listen to presentations by Paul Cisek and Joe LeDoux. That’s a start.
It appears tied to survival circuits and happens in 150 ms.
Are we talking about Joe “finger” Ledoux?
After more than a dozen threads on the topic of free will, and being no closer, really, to agreement on what the concept means or even if free will exists, the absolute minimum I can conclude is that the concept is enormously complicated. Complicated concepts are, by definition, not black/white or either/or.
“After more than a dozen threads on the topic of free will, and being no closer, really, to agreement on what the concept means or even if free will exists,”
That statement is simply not accurate. Take a look, for example, of the historical milestone in coverage by major media publications very directly and powerfully challenging free will over the last year. There were more articles challenging free will in 2012 than there were in the combined years between 2004 and 2011. Although I haven’t done the search, I would strongly predict that we could stretch that 2004 figure back at least a decade and the coverage, agreed upon definition, and refutation of free will in 2012 still outnumbers the *combined* past definitions and refutations of free will by major media publications.
http://causalconsciousness.com/free%20will%20in%20the%20news.htm
There is both general agreement about free will as meaning that we are not robots or puppets, and now a general understanding as to why such a free will is impossible.
“There is both general agreement about free will as meaning that we are not robots or puppets, and now a general understanding as to why such a free will is impossible.”
Zounds, if your statement above doesn’t prove my point that the subject isn’t binary, no matter how many times you repeat yourself.
From this, I conclude that you have stepped on a rake, and the handle has popped you a good one on the forehead.
A complex subject can include certain questions that are simple binaries.
Whether or not the Higgs boson exists is a simple binary. Verifying its existence and fully understanding it is a vast and complicated undertaking.
‘free will’ is like this. It is a simple binary to say: either the brain is fully causal, or it is not. In the former case, there is no contra-causal free will. In the latter case there is.
Yet understanding how a fully causal brain produces all the complex behavior we observe in humans is a monumental task. Proving the brain is fully causal is probably also complicated, though it seems obvious to me that it is. This is the source of all the confusion, debate, and disagreement you are witnessing.
I’m finding all your comments particularly lucid, and I appreciate very much your response to me.
It maybe only appear to us in a binary way because it is the only way language is able to speak about (no) free will. Maybe in “reality” it is not a binary issue, like in quantum physics where things can be at different states or places at the same time…
“Zounds, if your statement above doesn’t prove my point that the subject isn’t binary, no matter how many times you repeat yourself.”
Nice try. Now try explaining how exactly my above statement proves your point. Assertions are easy; explanations, a bit more demanding. Repetition is good. It’s how we come to learn what we learn, and unlearn what we’ve thought to be true but is not.
Your explanation says that there is a consensus we are not like robots, and that free will without being a robot is impossible.
It looks like a contradiction, which is why it is not a binary issue.
I don’t have any problem with the existence of paradox in reality, quantum physics shows that it is a natural states, but a paradox isn’t a binary thing…
To everyone who said “determinism” above, do you mean “materialism” or something similar?
Given that our best models of the universe are fundamentally stochastic, “determinism” seems a surprising thing to claim.
“Given that our best models of the universe are fundamentally stochastic, “determinism” seems a surprising thing to claim.”
You may be referring to the increasingly discredited Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics that some say claims certain events to be “uncaused,” a conceptual impossibility.
Also, determinism, better stated as causality for our non-prediction purposes, applies to both materialism and whatever we might term immaterial or spiritual. Because a decision must occupy a space within the universal time-line, it is subject to the physical law of causality.
Finally, if there were such a thing as true randomness or stochasticism in the strong sense of uncaused, that would, as I said earlier, make free will far more impossible.
Right, so by “determinism” you in fact mean “causality”? And these terms can be equated because “true” randomness means, in a sense, uncaused?
I can see where you’re coming from, but I come back to the point that our best (mathematical) model of the universe is stochastic whether you accept the Copenhagen interpretation or not, although maybe you can argue its stochastic in a different sort of way under Many Worlds.
It may turn out, as we learn more, that its all deterministic in the end and the stochastic elements are just the bits we don’t understand yet. Maybe the whole history of the universe could only ever have gone exactly the way it has done. But under our current models our best guess at the moment is that it could have gone differently.
I suppose I’m long-windedly saying that if you say “determinism” is true then it sounds like you are saying that the whole history of the universe from the big bang onward was totally pre-determined. If you don’t believe that, then maybe another word would be better?
Bell’s Theorem says otherwise. There are no hidden deterministic causes that we just haven’t discovered yet. If there were, the probabilities of various outcomes would have to be different from what we observe them to be. So the stochasticism is real and fundamental; it’s not just an artifact of our ignorance.
Bell’s theorem prohibits the measurement and prediction of quantum phenomena through strictly classical means. In other words, it validates the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It presents no theoretical nor empirical model or evidence of how quantum events could ever precede in an uncaused manner.
Quantum prediction of single particle behavior depends on initial and repeated *classical* measurements of *groups of particles.* Without such classical, completely deterministic measurements, the probabilities by which quantum predictions are derived for the behavior of isolated particles would be *impossible.*
For our purposes, nonetheless, uncaused decisions could not be “freely” willed.
“I can see where you’re coming from, but I come back to the point that our best (mathematical) model of the universe is stochastic whether you accept the Copenhagen interpretation or not,”
We need to remember that math refers to measurement and not description of reality. For example, we can mathematically subtract two from one and arrive at a negative one, but we cannot subtract two apples from one and arrive at a negative apple.
In quantum mechanics, the principle measurement of groups of particles is done in a completely causal manner. It is the probabilities derived from those initial classical measurements that thereafter accounts for the stochastic, or probabilistic, method by which we can then predict the behavior of individual particles. In other words, the universe is fundamentally causal, or deterministic.
Arguing stochasticism in principle as an alternative to determinism presents the additional problem of explaining or defining exactly what is meant by something happening uncaused. How would one even begin to do this? The truth is, as you suggest, that there are phenomena we simply do not understand well enough to be able to determine their causality or predict their future. That such phenomena is ruled by the law of cause and effect should not, however, be questioned on account of that ignorance.
“I suppose I’m long-windedly saying that if you say “determinism” is true then it sounds like you are saying that the whole history of the universe from the big bang onward was totally pre-determined.”
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. This universal predeterminism more likely than not precedes the big bang, however our current knowledge of the universe is limited by the big bang event.
I think ‘determinism’ is used because the traditional framing of the compatibilist/incompatibilist debate is in terms of free will and its compatibility or lack thereof with determinism. My understanding is that this debate originated with the Epicureans, and was carried on by the Stoics along with their atomistic materialist conception of reality.
We can reasonably claim determinism for the functioning of the brain at the neuronal level without having to answer the question of whether the universe is in any way deterministic from the big bang. I’m not sure if it is, but that question can safely be ignored in discussion of human free will.
The Epicureans were the atomists (and ‘soft’ determinists – the swerve of the atoms was supposedly to allow some spontainity to the world, inc. human action). The Stoics were materialists (except for “lekta” – “propositions”) too, but plenists.
Once again, incompatibilists and reductionists are falling into the trap of arguing against a mistaken idea of free will.
Once again evolution can be used to shed light on this issue, but why are people on this bl–, i mean, website, still discussing the issue like it’s 1858?
Free will is not about freedom from causation people. It is about freedom from unwanted influence from other agents in the environment. We’re not in competition with rocks, we’re in competition with other intentional creatures.
“Free will is not about freedom from causation people. It is about freedom from unwanted influence from other agents in the environment.”
That statement is simply wrong. Free will is about freedom or independence from causality and any other factor over which we have no conscious control, like our unconscious.
The kind of freedom you’re referring to is political freedom like freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. It is granted or taken away through political laws. That kind of freedom has very little to do with free will, except to show how laws and our general reluctance to transgress them are yet another example of the kinds of influences that make scientific free will impossible.
The meaning of free will that is interesting is freedom of action according to one’s intention. The critical concept is intentional ownership of the action.
Consciousness is a prerequisite of course. We can’t even begin to have something to talk about if there is no consciousness. Hence we don’t talk about free will of plants (except in non-serious metaphorical meaning).
Political freedom has everything to do with free will. Almost nothing else matters, in fact, in the real world. People die fighting to have the freedom to do as they intend, and not have their actions curtailed and coerced. Nobody worries much less fight for “freedom” from causation.
In fact, we have no idea why people die this way.
It is however, self-serving and seems to lead to warm fuzzy feelings that they die because they made a conscious choice to support..guess what? The easy pop ideologies and false promises of the dominant members of the local social group! Wow what a surprise!
That is self-serving and selfish, post hoc story telling to support current power structures and rationalize homicidal and suicidal behavior — nothing more. And simple lying.
You sound like you have lived your whole life never having to worry about your freedom. You can’t imagine what it is like to have to do something against your free will?
Look, whatever ideology you are pushing you are best to know how the brain really works and not how you want it to.
Ah.. a reductionist using reductionism to attack a perceived political position. That’s a new one.
Name calling is the refuge of the weak minded.
You win the irony of the week award. Complaining about name calling in the same breath that you engage in it. Congratulations.
You are talking about freedom from coercion, not freedom from causation. If one is trying to understand the human brain, the kind of freedom you mention is totally uninteresting. In fact, our brain has the same level of freedom with or without a gun to our head. That just adds a new external constraint that might affect the outcome of a decision, but it wouldn’t fundamentally change how the brain operates to reach the decision.
The historical context in which freedom from causation was perhaps most important to ordinary people is theological. If you ask about divine will, you might have the idea that if everything that happens, happens according to divine will, then we are determined by divine will, and unfree. Theologians, to overcome this problem, had to emphasize that humans are gifted the freedom from the determinism of divine will, so that we are free to choose good or evil. It must be free of causation for it to qualify as a truly free choice worthy of infinite punishment or infinite reward.
This kind of freedom from determinism is fundamentally different from freedom from foreign invasion, external political control, or individual coercion.
People just feel like their choices are free from causation, and they take it for granted. Most probably never think about it, yet they assume it as surely as they assume they can breath.
Just curious, Jeff- have you read “Free Will” by Harris? It’s on my list! It seems to me that you’ve given this subject of free will (lack thereof) a lot of thought. I think that your explanations for why free will is illusory are excellent. I have struggled with this issue for quite some time, ever since I learned about Libet’s famous experiments. I’ve tried to understand why it still seems, subjectively, as if I do have free will, despite knowing about the research in cognitive neuroscience which refutes free will. I am grateful for the
fullness of your argument!
I have read Harris’ book. Its good, and very short. I’d recommend it.
I’m glad you liked my explanations. Thanks for the compliments. 🙂
>>You are talking about freedom from coercion, not freedom from causation
Exactly. Didn’t I say so explicitly?
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine you are the only conscious living thing in the whole Universe. To make it simple, imagine there’s no other living thing – so you take out all the gray area with regards to which animals have consciousness and how much of it. So it’s just you, and no gods either. You are still constrained by physical laws – can’t walk through walls, etc. But there’s no one who could ever put a gun to your head and force you to do something against your will.
Would the question of free will be interesting in this scenario?
>>The historical context in which freedom from causation was perhaps most important to ordinary people is theological
Ah.. but notice that divine will is a coercion from another intentional being (which just happens to be divine, and all-powerful, and imaginary). This imagination of divine beings is of course false. But it illustrates that the idea of free will really comes from the problem of competition of wills, not from the problem of causation per se.
>>People just feel like their choices are free from causation
That may be “how” some people think they have free will. But that is a mistaken notion. Real free will is not magic.
Absolutely. Why wouldn’t it be?
I think for a solitary consciousness in the Universe, the problem of free will, along with accountability, punishment, reward, and all other issues attendant to social living will not even come up.
It would be absurd to ask “did I sign that piece of paper of my own free will”. What would be the point of asking that?
But perhaps if the solitary consciousness gets bored he can ask pointless questions.
“But it illustrates that the idea of free will really comes from the problem of competition of wills, not from the problem of causation per se.”
Not true. The traditional argument has for centuries centered around LaPlace’s description of determinism, which refers not to other people but to the evolution of the universe in a causal manner. The only way will makes sense here is that we humans manifest the will of the universe. If you want to say we manifest the will of God, God being synonymous with an omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient universe, I’m fine with that. We simply do not manifest a free will because all our choices are subject to the causality that make such a will impossible.
The question of free will is much older than Laplace. I would say this issue has been a feature of conscious social animals from the beginnings of their development of consciousness. Once it became possible to ask if someone did something intentionally himself instead of being coerced by someone else, then free will becomes an issue.
“The meaning of free will that is interesting is freedom of action according to one’s intention.”
The problem with that definition for asserting that humans are in any volitional way more than manifesters of the universal will is that intentions are just as subject to the causality that makes free will impossible as are all other human cognitions.
“Consciousness is a prerequisite of course.”
Consciousness, being only awareness and not decision-making, exists but only becomes aware of decisions that are made completely at the level of the unconscious where all the data upon which decisions are made, and the processing of that data, must necessarily reside.
>>The problem with that definition for asserting that humans are in any volitional way more than manifesters of the universal will is that intentions are just as subject to the causality that makes free will impossible as are all other human cognitions.
The problem with reductionism is that it doesn’t make room for higher level discussion. And leads to absurdities like “makes free will impossible as are all other human cognitions”. All human cognition is impossible? That would be some strange defintion of “cognition” or “impossible” that you are using.
That’s why I usually say, we have free will only in as much as we can be said to have consciousness, to own intentions, to make choices.
“‘makes free will impossible as are all other human cognitions’. All human cognition is impossible?”
That was a misstatement. What I meant to say was that intentions are no different from any other cognition that is prohibited from having been freely willed by causality. Thanks for catching the mistake.
Your definition of free will seems like the classic compatibilist strawman description. You don’t really “make” any choices if what you choose has already been determined by the causal chain of events preceding your birth.
1) I dispute pre-determination. The fact that you can trace causation backwards, doesn’t mean that you can predetermine events forwards. Analogy: if you walk into a forest leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, you will be able to walk back to your original location, after you have already made the walk. But you cannot predetermine where you will end up before you start the walk. Tracing back causing to the big bang is possible because at each point the wave function has already collapsed. But you can’t do the predetermination going to the future even in principle.
2) There’s no strawman. It’s the problematic compatibilist position which defines “real choice” as the kind that doesn’t exist in reality, and the kind of choices we actually make in the real world are not “real choices”.
i mean “problematic incompatibilist position”
@DV
If an incompatibilist has said we don’t make “real choices”, and I know they have, it is a poor and ambiguous usage of language trying to express something that is difficult to express.
We can say that humans really choose from alternatives if ordering food from a menu, or taking a multiple choice test, or any other example from the enormous set of choices that humans obviously make on a daily basis.
The qualifier “real” is intended to express that the result of the choice is determined by the state of the brain, that the choice is not “free” (or real) in the sense that all possible outcomes are equally probable, or that the brain could simply choose anything without respect to prior causes in the brain.
A computer can make choices. Given the correct sensors and logic, it can distinguish between different sizes and grades of fruit, sort parts by shape and type, and even play Jeopardy and beat experts. Such applications are widely used in industrial processing.
Each such choice is totally determined by the programming, and there is no freedom for the computer to rebel and choose what it is not programmed to choose.
So if computers make choices, certainly humans do, and no incompatibilist should deny this. The argument over whether our ability to choose is “free” comes down to whether the human ability to choose is in some fundamental way less caused and less inevitable than the totally determined choice made by a computer algorithm. For the incompatibilist to say a choice is “free” (or “real”), the human would have to somehow (by no means that can be imagined within a materialist framework of deterministic causality) slip out of the inevitable chain of causality of a decision process and “subvert” causality by a sudden uncaused “free” switch from one choice to another without any explanation that can be expressed within the framework of causality.
The meaning of the word choice has obvious origins in how humans observe each other to live and act. But there are subtle conceptual underpinnings that are implicitly assumed, and compatibilism is just based on teasing out one strand of the implicit meaning while ignoring another.
Choice can mean to select the one alternative from among many that is “best” for the chooser, where “best” means that it optimally satisfies some set of criteria the chooser determines in advance as the conceptual context of the selection process in order to meet some goal or goals that are important to the chooser. This is the sense of having control, but it is not freedom to choose any of the alternatives; the ones that don’t optimally meet the predetermined criteria can not be chosen (unless the criteria change). Note that the chooser could for rhetorical reasons decide that the “best” choice is other than one might assume, simply to pretend they are choosing “freely”. For example, they could choose the one dollar bill instead of the hundred dollar bill simply because they have the motive of trying to prove they are “free”. But really they are still making the “best” choice based on what their primary motives and interests are. They are still following an algorithmic approach every bit as deterministic as any computer, except it has the enhancement of consciousness and superior flexible learning ability.
Here we are seeing what a compatibilist is willing to call “freedom” because the extraordinary complexity and flexibility of human intelligence is in it’s power to hold goals, and to alter the contextual criteria of its determined choices iteratively so that the results of choices converge on better and better satisfactions of those goals. And this makes sense from a purely macroscopic human perspective. From the perspective of peering inside the black box of the brain to see how it really works, this insistence on using the word “free” obscures something fundamental about how the brain actually works.
For a choice to truly be “free” for the incompatibilist, it would have to be free of causation; There would have to be a pathway in the brain where at one instant multiple options were equally probable, where no amount of peering inside the brain and gaining perfect knowledge of it’s physical state would enable a prior prediction of which alternative would be chosen. Traditionally this kind of freedom is associated with the belief that a non-material soul or consciousness is able to perform some kind of meta-selection wholly outside the laws of causation. This is what incompatibilists (and compatibilists too for that matter) agree is impossible. This is what incompatibilists call a “free” choice, which they maintain does not exist, and that our brain deceives us consciously into believing we are making this kind of free choice. It is an illusion that we choose in this way. Incompatibilists agree that humans make every choice that we obviously observe humans to make, but that none of them are really free of the causal forces that are materially determined by exactly what your brain is at any moment.
Look, this is simple. The brain doesn’t have to be conscious, make choices or do much of anything to work just fine in humans and all other animals.
If consciousness was so important why wasn’t it invented billions or millions of years ago? Was their conscious choice before language? Before written logical language and philosophical ruminations-religion? duh
To claim otherwise is delusional misperception mainly supporting whatever ideology and social power/manipulative benefits are local. “Sure, you have free choice so go out to kill to protect it!”
You are asking was there conscious choice before consciousness? Seriously?
Consciousness is only awareness, not decision making. 1) We are not aware of the unconscious. That is why we call it the unconscious. 2) The data on which we decide must be in the unconscious because we could not be conscious of it at a single point in time in order to make a decision. 3) Hence all decision making must be made at the level of the unconscious.
An unconscious will is not a free will because we are unaware, and therefore not in control, of our unconscious.
George, it seems to me you’ve just bought yourself a one-way ticket to Zombie World.
If, as you claim, all the information needed to regulate behavior resides in the unconscious, and consciousness plays no role in decision-making, then it follows that consciousness itself is superfluous. We might as well not have it, because our behavior would be the same in either case.
Which means, by your logic, that learned papers about the nature of consciousness are written entirely by the unconscious, with conscious experience playing no role whatever in the description of conscious experience.
This obviously won’t do. A more reasonable position is that there is no hard line between conscious and unconscious, no circumscribed homunculus watching the show in the Cartesian theater, and that conscious cognition is an integral part of (at least some) decision-making (even if the final moment of choice turns out to be largely unconscious).
“If, as you claim, all the information needed to regulate behavior resides in the unconscious, and consciousness plays no role in decision-making, then it follows that consciousness itself is superfluous.”
Yes, that must be the case.
“Which means, by your logic, that learned papers about the nature of consciousness are written entirely by the unconscious, with conscious experience playing no role whatever in the description of conscious experience.”
A mind-blower, in a sense, but right again, with consciousness being limited to what the unconscious wants the construct we label the self to focus on, or be aware of, at any given moment.
“This obviously won’t do.”
Why not? More to the point. If *all* of the data upon which we base *all* of our decisions is located in the unconscious, and our conscious mind is not even aware of our unconscious, how could our conscious mind possibly gain access to that data upon which we must decide.
A good way to understand this is to envision our mind as essentially being what we term the unconscious, and consciousness being only our unconscious highlighting what it, for whatever reason, wants to make itself focus on during any given moment. That focus is what we term consciousness, or awareness.
“A more reasonable position is that there is no hard line between conscious and unconscious,”
My understanding is that everything that we are conscious of *must* also be experienced by our unconscious (otherwise we could never make sense of anything with any manner of context). The opposite, however, of our being conscious or aware of what we term is our unconscious cannot, by definition, be said.
Again, if you agree that our conscious mind is not even aware of our unconscious (which is why we call it the unconscious) it obviously cannot access the data in the unconscious required for any decision making. I know this seems somewhat counterintuitive, but we simply do not have the real-time conscious access to memories. That being the case, the processing of those memories, as happens with decision making, must be made by the unconsious.
Why should the unconscious want the self to focus on or be aware of anything at all, if the conscious self is causally impotent and all decision-making power resides in the unconscious? Why do we even have a conscious self if it doesn’t affect our behavior?
The only sensible answer is that it does affect our behavior (at minimum, it causes us to talk about consciousness), and that our unconscious mind draws our conscious attention to certain thoughts as part of the decision-making process.
Then why call it unconscious, if it experiences consciousness? Why insist that there’s a separate thing called consciousness that doesn’t actually do anything? How is that not just the Cartesian Theater again in another guise?
“Why should the unconscious want the self to focus on or be aware of anything at all, if the conscious self is causally impotent and all decision-making power resides in the unconscious?”
Think of the unconscious as the entirety of our mind, and consciousness as what the unconscious chooses to focus on from moment to moment. Why it needs such a focus is a good question I don’t have an answer to. It might be a bit like asking why there is life in the universe, or why the universe exists at all. It just does, I guess.
“Why insist that there’s a separate thing called consciousness that doesn’t actually do anything?”
You’re right to question the use of consciousness as an entity separate from the unconscious. I do it simply as a convention for understanding. The better definition, as stated above, is that consciousness (again, awareness) is nothing more than what the unconscious chooses to focus on or highlight at any given moment.
“How is that not just the Cartesian Theater again in another guise?”
This isn’t about dualism, in the classical sense. If you can re-ask this question with a bit more detail as to what specifically you are challenging or doubting, I’ll try to address your points.
So it sounds like you’re now agreeing with me that “there is no hard line between conscious and unconscious” and that “our unconscious mind draws our conscious attention to certain thoughts as part of the decision-making process”, contrary to your earlier position that consciousness plays no role in decision-making.
How would you know if there was or wasn’t consciousness millions of years ago? I suspect there was. I suspect that most, if not all, mammals and reptiles are conscious to a degree, so that would suggest primitive forms of consciousness could have evolved as much as 300 million years ago. It makes sense that it would take a long time to get from the primitive lizard brain to the prefrontal cortex.
Was there conscious choice before language? Do you not think dogs are conscious? Do they not consciously choose to bark at intruders or seek out human affection? For a totally unconscious organism, what would be the point of running in circles barking madly and jumping (apparently for joy) when the master comes home? It’s a stupid irrational thing to do. Is it a purely calculated form of emotional bribery to encourage master to part with more food? That might serve as a kind of ultimate genetic explanation for dog behaviors, but I think the proximate cause of the dog’s behavior is that it feels real mammalian bonding emotions like love and joy of some kind, and I don’t think it could feel these emotions and seek them out if it weren’t conscious. It’s really hard to watch a dog for any period of time and not get the sense that they have many emotions similar to humans. But maybe they are just brilliant cold calculating unconscious cynical actors, doing what humans like to see them do. But I doubt it. I think that conscious emotions are an important part of learning and social behavior, and wolves and dogs demonstrate lots of social and nurturing behaviors.
Conscious choice, by definition, implies weighing options in seconds using language. duh
If you know dogs doing that they are likely aliens. If conscious choice were evolved millions of years ago – mammals and other primates would be blogging and texting, we suspect.
Dogs can learn to respond to language, even if they don’t use it the way we do.
Perhaps we are talking past each other, because I’m talking about consciousness, and you are qualifying it as ‘conscious choice’. I suspect there are pre-language forms of consciousness. I’m speculating though. Do you know sources that contradict this point of view?
Do this. Learn something. Go on google and study the matter. All the latest info is there.
Report back.
So the answer is, you can’t.
You need to teach yourself, or be lazy and don’t.
…or be content with “warm, fuzzy felines.”
Sweet jesus, mary and leonard….here is the whole crazy American evangelical christian delusion laid out, in detail, by a neurosurgeon no less and front page on Newsweek! We are doomed.
“Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife
When a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, he experienced things he never thought possible—a journey to the afterlife.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/07/proof-of-heaven-a-doctor-s-experience-with-the-afterlife.html
At least there are beautiful women telling him he is loved. Gotta love that part!
By definition, he was not dead if he is here to talk about it! There’s more to death physiologically than the heart stopping for a few minutes… If he was a religious man before that explains it; if he wasn’t, then he probably had some brain damage! Sorry for the slam!
I can think of few blogs where “free will” is discussed anywhere near as cogently as here. Thank you.
I don’t possess the free will to be persuaded to change my mind about the existence of free will.
Next please.
@Gregory Kusnick
I didn’t overlook that. For example I wrote this:
I’m not denying the social dimension of behavior. That can’t be denied, and is real and obvious all around us.
Also I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. I wrote in this post:
Really I agree with pretty much everything compatibilists say. But I don’t understand why many object to Jerry’s formulation of the tape replay of history always leading to the same choice, which is fully consistent with determinism. If you acknowledge that ‘free will’ is “not what you think it is”, which I take to mean not what most people think it is, i.e. contra-causal, then why all the trouble to argue with Jerry’s point about determinism and choice? Jerry argues that people do not have the free will they think they have; you seem to agree with this, and I think all compatibilists should agree with it if they are serious about materialism and determinism.
I have to acknowledge that people hearing the idea that we don’t have free will for the first time often misunderstand it, and incredulously make sarcastic jokes, like “I’m just a puppet who can’t make any choices, so I may as well shoot myself, but I’m not even free to decide that”. So we need better ways to talk about this. I think both compatibilists and incompatibilists should agree with this: the way people behave is compatible with what people are, and people are biological organisms with a very complex and flexible intelligence based on a wholly deterministic computing engine known as the brain. From there the whole conflict is about how we use language, and I agree we should use language as we always have, except that we need some way to construct an explicit message so that the idea that, as you say, free will is not what people think it is, can be absorbed into common knowledge among the public at large. I have felt that ‘free will’, not actually being a word but being a constructed term to signify something special in humans, often with a theological dimension as being a special human dispensation from divine will, thus divine determinism, is a good fulcrum with which to rock an entire system of thinking predicated on that special human freedom: the idea of the soul, of the afterlife, and of humans as elevated above the animal kingdom in some fundamental metaphysical way. I like the comparison to ‘élan vital’, also a compound term, hypothesizing a force distinguishing life from mere matter. When we understood there was no élan vital, we made the term historical, and we didn’t think that because of it we weren’t really alive. So we can say we have kinds of freedom, and we make choices, we resist coercion, we have control and agency which manifests as a will, we just don’t possess the classical notion of ‘free will’. But the standard definition of what compatibilism means obscures and confuses these facts.
So the big question is, what is the best way to construct this message to the general public about what humans are, that compatibilists, concerned with language and social constructs, and incompatibilists, concerned with physics, chemistry, biology, and scientific accuracy, can both agree on?
No elan vital and no divine intent, Strato and Thaels ever are right.
I use the term determined volition. Free will is out of the question then, How does our determined volition work? How works out the interplay of genes and environment?
Jerr,yes.
WEIT, thanks.
I meant thnaks,Jeff.