Earlier today I discussed some of my problems with Alfred Mele’s 2014 book Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will. Like Dan Dennett, I agree that the book is somewhat tainted by being funded by and associated with a foundation (Templeton) that undoubtedly loves Mele’s ideas, but I’m not at all accusing Mele of writing the kind of stuff he knows that Templeton wants. Templeton skews academic discourse by selectively funding those scientists who find out stuff it wants, not by getting the scientists it funds to produce what the Foundation wants.
But onward and upward. There was one statement in Mele’s book that sounded weird to me, and it was about Drosophila, so I looked up the reference. On page 81 of Mele’s book we read this:
So is there hard evidence of deep openness? [JAC: Mele means that decisions are open regardless of what happened before them; in other words, true libertarian free will]. Some scientists say they’ve found something like it in fruit flies (Brembs 2011). If a fruit fly turned to the left a moment ago and time were wound backward a couple of moments, it might turn to the right in the rerun. There’s no evidence that fruit flies have free will. Instead, there’s evidence that something that people regard as necessary for free will—behavior-producing processes that aren’t deterministic—is present in fruit flies. And if such processes are present in them, they might be part of our evolutionary heritage; they might be present in us too.
What the hell? What evidence is there that at a given time a fly has behavior-producing processes that aren’t deterministic? (I assume Mele is not invoking quantum phenomena here, for, as he recognized earlier, such phenomena can’t really be part of “agency”.) So I looked up the Brembs paper in Proc. Roy. Soc. B, which you can see for free by clicking on the screenshot below (pdf here, reference at bottom of page).
Unfortunately for Mele, Brembs’s paper says nothing of the sort. The paper is largely about variability in animal behavior, and how varying your behavior can be adaptive, even in situations that are superficially similar to ones you’ve encountered before. And yes, animals do vary their behavior in seemingly unpredictable ways to avoid predators, find food, and so on, but that unpredictability says absolutely nothing about the absence of physical determinism. This is the kind of “evidence” that Brembs adduces (and yes, he adduces it in support of free will):
For instance, isolated leech nervous systems chose either a swimming motor programme or a crawling motor programme to an invariant electrical stimulus [78–80]. Every time the stimulus is applied, a set of neurons in the leech ganglia goes through a so far poorly understood process of decision-making to arrive either at a swimming or at a crawling behaviour. The stimulus situation could not be more perfectly controlled than in an isolated nervous system, excluding any possible spurious stimuli reaching sensory receptors unnoticed by the experimenter. In fact, even hypothetical ‘internal stimuli’, generated somehow by the animal must in this case be coming from the nervous system itself, rendering the concept of ‘stimulus’ in this respect rather useless. Yet, under these ‘carefully controlled experimental circumstances, the animal behaves as it damned well pleases’ (Harvard Law of Animal Behaviour).
. . . A great invertebrate example of the sort of Protean behaviour [31,32] selected for by these trade-offs is yet another escape behaviour, that of cockroaches. The cerci of these insects have evolved to detect minute air movements. Once perceived, these air movements trigger an escape response in the cockroach away from the side where the movement was detected. However, which angle with respect to the air movement is taken by the animal cannot be predicted precisely, because this component of the response is highly variable [33]. Therefore, in contrast to the three examples above, it is impossible for a predator to predict the trajectory of the escaping animal.
Note to Brembs (and Mele): “poorly understood” does not mean “determinism not at work”. Jebus, that’s an elementary mistake!
Does this unpredictability of behavior mean that it’s not controlled by physical processes—that it’s not determined by the laws of physics? Hardly. All it shows is that neither we nor other animals can predict exactly what a leech or a cockroach can do in circumstances that seem similar. But there could be plenty of determinism acting here. For instance, there could be an internal program that says, “If you swam recently, crawl now, or vice versa.” Or there could be all kinds of different things going on at the neuronal level that we don’t understand, yet are determinative in the animal’s behavior. This kind of stuff is simply the conflation of indeterminism with lack of predictability: a common error in discussing free will.
But on to the flies. Here Brembs is referring to studies of tethered fruit flies put in a chamber with a moving grate in front of them, to which they will respond as if they were flying and the grate was “moving” because they were flying by it. Their turning behavior, however, is variable:
For instance, in the study of the temporal dynamics of turning behaviours in tethered flies referenced above [63], one situation recorded fly behaviour in constant stimulus conditions, i.e. nothing in the exquisitely controlled environment of the animals changed while the turning movements were recorded. Yet, the flies kept producing turning movements throughout the experiment as if there had been stimuli in their environment. Indeed, the temporal structure in these movements was qualitatively the same compared with when there were stimuli to be perceived. This observation is only one of many demonstrating the endogenous character of behavioural variability. Even though there was nothing in the environment prompting the animals to change their behaviour, they kept initiating turning manoeuvres in all directions. Clearly, each of these manoeuvres was a self-initiated, spontaneous action and not a response to some triggering, external stimulus.
Yes, sometimes the flies’ turns were unpredictable, and they turned in various directions. Does this mean that their turns were not determined by physical processes, that, as Mele described the results, the turns “weren’t deterministic”? Not at all! All it says is that in a similar situation, “exquisitely controlled”, flies can do different things. Perhaps they have a program that, like Chuck Yeager in his crashing plane, says “Try X! Then try Y! Then try Z!”. They may have variable behavior, even in a constant environment, because they’re seeking some outcome that the experimenter doesn’t know, or simply because they have a neuronal program that evolved to produce variable results in nature and is also activated in this study. And it may not depend on any external stimuli, but so what?
In his paper Brembs talks a bit about chaos theory, which shows that in some processes tiny differences in initial conditions can be amplified into big differences in results. That might mean that, in such an experiment, there are imperceptible differences at different times in the “exquisitely controlled environment” that result in different directions of the turn. It’s another common error to think that chaos theory somehow negates determinism. Chaos theory is a deterministic theory.
You don’t have to be a genius to see that there are purely deterministic explanations for Brembs’ results. I believe, then, that in his book Mele has distorted Brembs’s results in such a way that they look like they favor his “ambitious free will” view. That’s why I argue that Mele’s book is tendentious.
Two last points. In an attempt to save libertarian free will, Brembs himself talks about the kind of unpredictability that would give humans moral responsibility—a system that has a way to generate nonrandom results. And so he highlights a two-stage model of free will. To wit (my emphasis):
. . . it is precisely the freedom from the chains of causality that most scholars see as a crucial prerequisite for free will. Importantly, this freedom is a necessary but not a sufficient component of free will. In order for this freedom to have any bearing on moral responsibility and culpability in humans, more than mere randomness is required. Surely, no one would hold a person responsible for any harm done by the random convulsions during an epileptic seizure. Probably because of such considerations, two-stage models of free will have been proposed already many decades ago, first by James [94], later also by Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, Karl Popper, Henry Margenau, Daniel Dennett, Robert Kane, John Martin Fisher, Alfred Mele, Stephen Kosslyn, Bob Doyle and Martin Heisenberg (cited, reviewed and discussed in [7]), as well as Koch [9]: one stage generates behavioural options and the other one decides which of those actions will be initiated. Put simply, the first stage is ‘free’ and the second stage is ‘willed’. This implies that not all chance events in the brain must manifest themselves immediately in behaviour. Some may be eliminated by deterministic ‘selection’ processes before they can exert any effects. Analogous to mutation and selection in evolution, the biological process underlying free will can be conceptualized as a creative, spontaneous, indeterministic process followed by an adequately determined process, selecting from the options generated by the first process.
But this doesn’t take the determinism out of free will—not unless the “options” generated in Stage 1 are generated by quantum-mechanical processes. Mutations might involve such processes, but brain functions? We have no idea. And even if the “options” (presumably the range of things you are capable of doing and know you’re capable of doing) are generated by quantum mechanics, that is still physical determinism.
Second, Brembs trots out the old canard that we should believe in free will because without it people would behave badly—a conclusion often drawn from the reference below:
Finally, there may be a societal value in retaining free will as a valid concept, since encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating [103]. I agree with the criticism that retention of the term may not be ideal, but in the absence of more suitable terms, free will; remains the best option.
The reference here is to the well known Vohs and Schooler 2008 paper (citation below), which has failed to be replicated at least twice since it was published (see here). Further, an extensive analysis last year showed no evidence that belief in free will correlated with either prosocial or antisocial behavior. It’s time to stop citing the Vohs and Schooler paper as evidence that we should believe in free will as a kind of social lubricant. (We shouldn’t, of course, accept what isn’t true just because it makes us behave better, but that’s another issue.)
There’s more in Mele’s book that is dubious, but I think I’m done for the time being. All I can say is that people will go to great lengths to take the determinism out of free will. Compatibilists do it by saying that you can have your determinism and free will at the same time, while mushy writers like Mele and Brembs do it by positing some kind of indeterministic process that affects one’s choices but doesn’t involve quantum mechanics. In the end, if you think that determinism simply means that your behaviors must obey the laws of physics on all levels, then you can’t have agent-determined you-could-have-done-otherwise free will.
________
Brembs, B. 2011. Towards a scientific concept of free will as a biological trait: spontaneous actions and decision-making in invertebrates. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 278:930-939.
Vohs K. D. and J. W. Schooler J. W.. 2008. The value of believing in free will: encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating. Psychol. Sci. 19: 49–54.doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x (doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x)
Just curious … Mele in his references mentions the Vohs and Schooler paper, did he mention the Zwaan replication attempt?
https://rolfzwaan.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-value-of-believing-in-free-will.html
No, nor the other replication attempts, but those weren’t around when the book was written. And there is more than one failure to replicate: https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/09/02/another-failure-to-replicate-a-much-cited-study-on-free-will-and-cheating/
And another study that contradicts the Vohs and Schooler paper: https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2018/11/01/new-study-belief-in-free-will-doesnt-make-you-act-better/
I really should mention these as Brembs cites the Vohs and Schooler paper in the last para of his own paper. I’ve added a paragraph or so to the end of my discussion above. Thanks for reminding me.
Forget it Jerry … probably not. Would not have been available to Mele.
Brembs and Mele are muddy thinkers. I agree with everything you say here except your final sentence. 😉
That depends on how one interprets “you could have done otherwise”.
I think there’s a lot in Dennett’s suggestion that it does not mean “you could have done otherwise even if every molecule had been identical”, it means “you could have done otherwise, given the sort of range of variation that commonly varies day to day”.
Thus it is true that I “could have chosen” chicken rather than salmon for lunch yesterday.
Yes!
Of course what we mean here is:
I can envisage having chosen chicken, but in reality I could only have chosen salmon. .
What it means is “I chose chicken but it could just as well have been salmon, if someone had talked to me about fish that morning.”
No its an envisaging of having made some other choice, eg being prompted by someone mentioning salmon.
(This will be my only comment in this thread, if allowed…)
rom,
As Coel et all are wishing to explain, the compatibilist is using “could have done otherwise” in the same way, to convey the same information, as pretty much every normal person does in daily life, without having to be a philosopher.
To say “I could have done otherwise” is simply a statement about one’s capabilities in relevantly similar situations. It conveys the same type of information as “I COULD do otherwise.”
So for instance, Fred is applying for a particular tourism job that requires fluency in Chinese, Japanese and English. If the job interviewer asks him “Can you communicate to someone fluently in English, Japanese OR Chinese?” What is being asked?
The job interviewer wants to simply know about your capabilities in the relevant situations: if you have a Chinese guest, can you talk Chinese? If you have a Japanese guest, can you speak Japanese?
It would make zero sense to think the Job interviewer was asking “can you do precisely the same thing if I rewound the universe” because of course he can’t rewind the universe to the same conditions. No one can, which is why our method of reasoning doesn’t ASSUME it. Our whole method of inductively understanding the world is inferring actions from previous circumstances in the past to *similar* circumstances we encounter in the future, to understand our capabilities in relevantly similar situations!
That’s why speaking both in future and past tense can convey the same information you’d want to know. You can say both that Fred COULD speak fluent Japanese to a Japanese person or note that Fred COULD HAVE spoken Japanese fluently to a Japanese person. Both convey the same pertinent information about Fred; his capabilities in similar circumstances.
For the same reasons, if someone is in court accused of a crime, it’s important that he “Could have done otherwise.”
Not: “if we rewound the universe back to precisely the same conditions?” But rather: “was he *capable* in such a circumstance of doing otherwise IF HE HAD WANTED TO.” Because if he was capable of doing X, but chose not to, that tells us what we want to know about the type of choice he made, and also alerts us to the type of choices he may make in relevantly similar situations.”
So take a pilot responsible for a harmful plane crash due to his extreme negligence in not checking his instruments. It doesn’t matter if you are a compatibilist, a libertarian, or a hard incompatibilist like Jerry, and we can assume a fully deterministic universe and even ignore whether the pilot is morally responsible in some deep “morally blameworthy” sense (as Jerry would reject). We will all still be asking the same question necessary to gain information: Could he have done otherwise IF HE HAD WANTED TO? E.g. was he of sound mind, and did he possess the requisite knowledge and capability for checking the plane’s instruments? If so, and he chose NOT to check the instruments, that tells us what we want to know: He’s culpable and going to jail.
Or at the very least we will want him removed from his job because knowing what he COULD HAVE DONE IF HE HAD WANTED TO…but chose not to do…gives us the important information about his likely attitude in future relevantly similar situations.
Before you ever read this post, and long after, you will go right on to using words like “choice” and “making decisions” and talking of “options” and “could do” “could have done” all to convey just the type of real information we compatibilists are talking about. It’s not dualistic. It’s not spooky. It doesn’t contradict a physical determined universe. It’s exactly how creatures who live traveling through time HAVE to think: given we are never, ever in precisely the same conditions we reason not about capabilities in *precisely the same circumstances* but rather we infer capabilities from previous circumstances to relevantly *similar* circumstances to talk about “what is/was possible” for us to do.
And with that I bow back out….
Cheers.
I think we are on the same wavelength. Even with determinism, decision-making and exercising everyday free will are simply part of how our lives play out. That it is all determined actually doesn’t matter to such processes. So what if everything is determined by the initial state of the universe and the rules of fundamental physics? Life goes on. Of course, our happy state would be upset by someone with a device that could read the state of the universe and predict our actions. Luckily, that’s never going to happen.
Life goes on, unless you’re on death row.
The fact that free will doesn’t exist has few practical implications. The illusion is just how our brains work. All our brains really do is computation, but perhaps we evolved this strong illusion of being “free agents” because it improves that computation. Nobody is suggesting that we should “fight the illusion” in everyday decision-making.
But the absence of could-have-done-otherwise spooky free will does have very strong implications for criminal justice. It shows that the whole notion of “mens rea” is flawed. And it shows that punishing people solely for retribution has no possible ethical justification.
And that’s why this kind of compatibilism will continue robust push-back, from me at least. Criminal justice is clearly based on the could-have-done-otherwise spooky notion of free will, contrary to compatibilist assertions that people don’t really think this way. Compatibilist claims about what the man on the street thinks about free will are no more based in reality than claims that most religious believers are “sophisticated”.
I see compatibilism as a major obstacle to criminal justice reform. It’s already extremely difficult to convince people that their sense of free will is an illusion, and compatibilists make that task even more difficult.
Why is criminal justice special, other than being an aspect of society in which you would like to see reform? Doesn’t the equivalent reduction in responsibility apply to other human behaviors? What about discovery? Should we hold Einstein responsible for discovering relativity if he could not have done otherwise? If we want to stay closer to the crime arena, what about bad deeds that are not actually crimes in our society? If I cheat on my wife and she finds out, should I claim that I have no free will and, therefore, I couldn’t have done otherwise? I guess incompatibilists should marry only other incompatibilists.
BTW, we might agree on criminal justice reforms but not in the reasons for them or, perhaps, in the details. There’s clearly a lot wrong with our system here in the US.
This is a classic example of compatibilist obfuscation of the debate.
You first muddy the waters by introducing skills like languages and piloting. But capabilities in the sense of skills are obviously not the type of “could have done” that we’re concerned with. We can only choose between two things that are logical possibilities. If I don’t know how to speak Chinese, then of course I can’t “choose” to speak Chinese under ANY model for what “choice” entails.
You also discuss the use of patterns of past behavior to predict future behavior in similar but non-identical situations. Of course that’s something we do all the time. And that’s more what our criminal justice system SHOULD be based on. But it’s not. So again this is irrelevant to the debate on free will.
You have said nothing at all here about PROCESS of decision making, which is what the debate is really about. It doesn’t matter whether future actions are predictable, what matters is HOW we make decisions, and the question of whether individual decisions are arrived at through “free will” or are simply deterministic computation. You evade this question altogether.
Your suggestion that we never think about the “could-have-done-otherwise in a precise rerun of the universe” scenario in everyday life is nonsense. We do it all the time, second-guessing our past decisions – and MORE so when the decisions were one-off opportunities that will never be repeated. The concept of “mens rea” in criminal justice is entirely focused on the PROCESS of decision-making. In our criminal justice system, people are punished for the explicitly stated reason that in a specific past instance they could have done otherwise under precisely identical conditions through spooky free will.
In today’s discussion of free will here, I have realized something. The argument that I and others have made that events can’t be repeated precisely applies to how most people think about “Could you have done otherwise?” questions. They are NOT thinking of reproducing the same decision with precisely the same input as that is only possible in a thought experiment. This applies to the discussion of whether I could have chosen salmon instead of chicken for yesterday’s lunch. People are not thinking in terms of a single event but two alternative universes, the one in which they chose chicken and in the other salmon. If we ask the question with a bit more detail, “Would you make the same decision if the universe in exactly the same state?”, their response should be either “yes” or that the question makes no sense as we can only be talking about a single event if everything in the two events are really identical.
On the other hand, discussions about a single event are a different beast entirely. If there is only one event, then it could not have evolved otherwise. Every event in the universe (a decision, or whatever) is unique. (I’m ignoring quantum indeterminacy which I don’t know how to include.) However, many discussions are not about a single event and this leads to confusion.
And yet it’s only the compatibilists who insist that what happens in slightly different circumstances is at all interesting. If you’re confused, blame them!
The fact that events cannot IN PRACTICE be re-run precisely the same misses the point. The question “could I have done otherwise in a re-run of this exact same decision” universe” is a THOUGHT EXPERIMENT that’s critical to understanding the PROCESS of decision making.
Our strong intuition deriving from the internal illusion of free will has historically led to the flawed concept of free will and guilt in major religions, and to a criminal justice system based on a fundamental fallacy. The point of the thought experiment is to drill down and analyze whether this intuition of free will accords with what we know about reality.
It begs the question against compatibilists to phrase the issue as:
Fair enough
I understand in the vernacular free will might mean I do similar things in similar circumstances.
So what?
There is a more interesting issue at hand here.
This is just a way to get around the determinism that is crucial for many people’s ideas of free will. It’s trivial that if circumstances differ you could have done something different. What’s important is “in a given situation” (like a robbery) could you have done otherwise (not pulled the trigger).
If you mean that organisms can do different things in different circumstances, then EVERYTHING has free will, including plants.
A small quibble(which doesn’t affect your argument)about this sentence:
“Chaos theory is a deterministic theory.”
A common definition of a chaotic system is one in which arbitrarily small changes in the initial conditions lead to large changes in a later state of that system. A chaotic system, then, would by definition be sensitive to quantum uncertainties. So in the real world, which is a quantum world, even a chaotic system with deterministic mechanics would have a quantum-mechanically-indeterminate behavior, because of the irreducible quantum uncertainty in its initial conditions.
I’ve mentioned before on this site that even a billiard ball model has macroscopic quantum uncertainty after enough bounces:
https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/1.1973895
Of course this does not give libertarian free will, only randomness. My point is only that there is no hard line between quantum-level uncertainty and macroscopic determinism, and that if you let the universe evolve long enough, even things like the existence and locations of particular planets and stars is probably macroscopically quantum-mechanically uncertain thanks to quantum uncertainty in the initial conditions.
Just when I thought I was going to have the answer to why my billiard balls all seem to go the wrong way, despite impeccable aim, they wanted money. A bit too much money.
Write me and I’ll send it to you. My address is my name, all as one word, at gmail.com
Brembs said
Well no. Most of the scholars who have paid the most attention to the issue – philosophers – are compatibilists. And some of the physicists who best understand time and causality, like Sean Carroll, are compatibilists too.
Which isn’t surprising, because compatibilism is right. 😀
+1
In eleven days it will be the 140th anniversary of the birthday of one of the most important theoretical physicists in the history of science: Albert Einstein.
( No offense to Carroll, but he is not an Einstein, nor would he ever claim that).
Einstein did not believe that there could be such a thing as free will.
“Our actions are supported by the always living awareness that humans are not free in their thinking, feeling and doing, but are just as causally bound as the stars are in their movements”.
Radio speech by Einstein in 1932
is “right”? Do you mean “correct”? All empirical evidence that we have demonstrates otherwise. Do you even read Jerry’s posts?
There is the -illusion- of having free will but, like creationism, there is zero evidence that it is so.
It’s right in the same sense that it’s right to say that free will is nutritious and rich in potassium, provided that free will means banana.
Compatiblism isn’t “right”; it’s a semantic construal of “free will”; a definition. And there are a LOT of different kinds of compatibilism. Are they ALL right?
It’s a construal that fits together with the everyday uses of the words, given our actual scientific knowledge (as opposed to the layman’s intuitive understanding of “causality” or “determinism”). And no, not all kinds of compatibilism are right, but Sean’s is. I recently stumbled across a philosophy paper that explains what Sean was trying to explain in his “Free Will is as Real as Baseball” blog post. You can use Unpaywall on https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/nous.12019
The fact that the environment was controlled “exquisitely” does not mean it was controlled perfectly. How do you control the neuronal state of the fly?
“That depends on how one interprets “you could have done otherwise”.” No.
There is ONLY one interpretation if you accept determinism: due to physical processes over which you have no conscious control. The “range of variation” of which you speak is also a physical process. So, if you chose “chicken”, all of the physical “range of variations” at that moment resulted in that choice, not your conscious agency.
Your “conscious control” or “conscious agency” is a physical process, unless you are a dualist.
So if I flip a coin to make a decision, that’s an exercise of free will? Might be stochastic, rather than strictly deterministic, but it strikes me as much different than an actual exercise of free will to choose to do other than what physics dictated.
Yes, Mele seems tiresomely naive.
QM – depending on interpretation – is either fully deterministic, or involves probability distributions that are truly random.
In a discussion of free will, it seems quite reasonable to use “determinism” as shorthand for “the laws of physics”, i.e. determinism with random probability distributions if applicable.
Yet somebody always pops up with “but QM is non-deterministic, maybe that’s where free will is”; you ask them if they think free will involves rolling a dice, they say no; so you ask what their point is, it turns out that they don’t have one; rinse and repeat.
Good question. Intuitively it seems to make the decision less predictable. I feel that predictability is a key to understanding determinism and free will. If a decision isn’t predictable, then it doesn’t matter that our behavior is determined. It is similar to the multiverse hypothesis. If we have no way of detecting or communicating with other universes, their existence is moot. Nothing wrong with talking about them though.
Of course it matters whether or behavior is determined if we can’t predict what we’ll do. The whole concept of moral responsibility rests not on predictability, but on the fact that you could have made a choice different (better/worse) than what you did.
If you can’t predict that someone who is mentally impaired will kill somebody, does it matter whether their disease led to their crime? Yes it does, because that makes them less responsible in the eyes of the law, which presumes free choice. (As I’ve pointed out, in some sense everybody who commits a crime is “diseased”, because they could not have done otherwise.)
The ability to predict the course of the universe, all or in part, is a test of whether determinism impacts everyday life. If the workings of fundamental physics proceeds simultaneously with everyday life but the former can’t inform the latter, the fact that everything runs on top of fundamental physics just doesn’t matter to everyday life.
The crime-is-a-disease point of view is somewhat independent of the free will debate. Obviously we already consider some disease as eliminating or mitigating responsibility. If we have no free will, then perhaps all crime is a result of disease as you suggest. But by the same token, all merit and responsibility goes by the wayside.
Why would such thinking only apply to crime and the justice system? Should we no longer laud Darwin as he and his work were just a product of his environment? it is true, of course, but we like to think he added something crucial. I think this gets to the heart of what I mean by life goes on as usual even if we acknowledge determinism. We still assign merit or responsibility to an individual even though it is all determined. It is the way our brains and our culture have evolved to operate.
If the universe is a result of cause and effect:
are the causes (and effects) deterministic, indeterministic or probabilistic? The answer to this question will throw some light on how accurately physics can generate predictions.
The fact that our models are inaccurate to some degree or incomplete and the data might we are throwing into those models not be sufficiently accurate is totally irrelevant.
If we accept that our wills are totally a product of cause and effect then our wills are not free in this sense. Of course we can (are caused to) change the sense and define the free will in some other way.
But that does not change the fact that our wills are a product cause and effect.
To me (I am caused to think) this is the truly interesting bit of the discussion.
While the effect on the justice system while important, the more immediate effect is on me. It affects how I see people, especially the ones I might see as annoying, stupid or some other negative connotation; that is if I do catch myself thinking in this way.
I think libertarians are wrong, too; but I don’t think they’re as dumb as you just painted them. Suppose for the sake of argument that each normal adult human being does often act in ways that reflect quantum randomness. And suppose that’s true randomness, and not, as I suspect, just Everett-style decoherence.
Then when we consider one of those acts and ask “could the person have done otherwise” the answer is clearly yes. Sure, an electron in their brain (say) is key to that fact, but that doesn’t erase the fact that the person could have done otherwise, because *that electron is part of the person*, part of their decision making process.
Now I happen to think that makes our decision happen for the *wrong reason*, so libertarianism still fails. (Unless Penrose were right, then quantum reasons could be right reasons.) But that’s a more subtle argument.
On doing otherwise—think of Buridan’s donkey, exactly halfway between two equally exactly attractive bales of hay. We don’t think it will starve to death because it can’t make a choice. Rather it will choose not to starve and go to one of the bales and eat. It could have done otherwise. Given identical circumstances, it might go to the other bale. Which bale doesn’t matter to it, it just chooses not to starve.
You are describing flipping a coin to choose one of two equally attractive possibilities. If it’s a truly random quantum coin flip, a re-run could produce a different result. But so what? Nobody thinks that flipping a coin to generate a random outcome is free will.
The unpredictable (dare we say “uncertain”?) turning behavior of tethered flies was first
documented by Martin Heisenberg, who is, yes, the son of that Heisenberg. I wonder whether their seemingly spontaneous “choices”
of direction could be the outcome of some kind of quantum-indeterminate mechanism?
I think free will is a hopeless debate in that, even if it existed, it would be impossible to observe. Even if you rewound time and found that someone wanted to make a difference choice the second time around, that could be entirely attributable to probability and randomness. If there is any such thing, it is a square circle that we have no way of talking about within our framework of human perception anyhow.
I do think it’s a useful exercise to consider our intuitions when confronted with the same act that is caused by a sentient being on the one hand, and by physics in the absence of conscious thought on the other. (I wonder if this explains a lot of the debate over free will – if those who insist it needs to be preserved are envisioning a world where the two are treated as the same, without a concept of ‘free will’.) Experiencing a sudden whack on the back of the head and turning to find it was a swinging tree branch in one case and a guffawing jerk in another. Finding your bank account empty and being told it was a computer glitch in one case and that your friend had stolen your debit card and gone shopping in another. I think this does give rise to useful intuitions about what it means for a volitional act to come from a conscious agent vs. an unconscious one, and that these scenarios are certainly different in a variety of ways. The way you would interact with the tree branch or the computer program, and even the opprobrium you might feel was justified, would differ, and I think that is the crux of the matter here. (That said, I continue to think that there’s no semantically coherent way to make any of that free, nor should we really want it to be free – a free agent untethered to the interdependent nature of things would exist outside the influence of causality and couldn’t truly interact with the world.)
bless me.This is just to see if the reworked connection to wordpress actually works.
I agree. I cannot put into a form I feel happy with what ‘free’ actually means. Who or what is free? Free of what? The mind free of the body and its circumstances? Is there an unchanging, unitary, permanent self/mind? That can somehow control a material body that is dependent upon a material world? People tend to think not whatever our habitual emotional tendencies or feelings.
I agree. I think some of the disagreement between compatibilists and those who don’t believe in free will at all comes down to the idea of agency – I suspect that to a compatibilist, saying an agent is not ‘free’ is like saying you are not actually talking to a sentient being at all. I think there’s a very subtle gradation there between acknowledging self-conscious, sentient minds – which do differ in meaningful ways from inanimate objects blowing in the wind – and insisting that in order to exist those minds must exist ‘freely’, in a sort of deistic way, outside the usual web of causal influences.
I guess an analogy would be a lake or resevoir. In some sense, it’s so different from a single raindrop that it does make sense to think of it as having an emergent property of ‘lake-ness’. You could never swim in a raindrop, after all, but you can swim in a lake. Raindrops move differently and cannot form the waves, currents, and so on that a lake can form. That said, our eyes can fool us into thinking that this must mean a lake is something ‘other’ than the rain that goes into it – yet in reality, while a lake may have some emergent properties, if the rain suddenly ceased forever, eventually, so would the lake. To my mind the emergent properties of the lake are synonymous with sentience; while its dependence on rain is a reminder that, emergent or not, it is not a ‘free phenomenon’, unconnected to causes and conditions.
Exactly… emergence should certainly be a central factor in this discussion and is ignored far to often. Isn’t it all too easy to reductively argue that because lower physical processes in a hierarchy of emergence are easily explained in deterministic terms, that the entire system and its properties are absolutely defined? This is not always the case. Emergent properties are often new phenomenon only referenceable in new terms pertinent to the emerged property alone, not to sub-properties. The issue of free will is exactly such an issue. Let me just highlight some of the emergent properties arising from the underlying chemical and physical properties of the brain. These emergent properties are computational in nature and more than this they are computational properties structured in an extremely complex hierarchical self-referential system. What are the capabilities of this system… 1) Memory 2) learning 3) Abstraction and language 4) Associative processing 5) pattern recognition 6) decisional processing 7) Multithreading and multiprocessing … just to name a few. The system creates something we see as selfhood….. a computational structure which to a significant degree becomes self-programmed over time. We (our SELF) exists as that entity, the computational effects of it we sense as our “agency”. The behaviour of this system and the additional degrees of freedom that the structure affords we see as “free will”. It is a real property of this complex structure. The system at lower levels is deterministic. But where does RESPONSIBILITY for outputs lie? – in this self. Indeed, the properties at a higher level requires different terminology for its self referential, self programmed, computational capacities. What it is, is compatibilist free will.
There are no known cases of where submergence (the dual to emergence) of conservation laws occur. We also have an upper bound to the degree to which this could conceivably occur, which is too small to do what is wanted. I cannot think of a situation where emergence rather than submergence would do the trick to override the underlying layers in this particular situation. (This is the correct part of Kim’s arguments about “overdetermination”.)
Do you have a reference for “submergence”? That’s a new one for me. When I google for emergence vs submergence, all I get is stuff about coastlines. Does it simply means “not emergent”? Are you saying that the emergent system are still subject to conservation laws that govern the system from which it emerges?
I am a fan of the emergentist argument you present here but I still have doubts about how emergence works. I think there is also no consensus in the scientific community on emergence either. I believe there’s something to it but we’re still looking for a precise definition. When a higher level emerges from a lower level, is it just that we lack the knowledge to tie them together? Calling something “emergent” does not really give it an independent existence. The workings of our brains is not really independent of quantum physics but we have trouble connecting the two.
Yes indeed.. Emergence is an emerging field of study (pun intended). I myself think of emergence in terms of a failure of Reduction or more precisely as “behaviours that cannot be identified through functional decomposition”. Science is a process of reduction… of explaining complex behaviours in terms of lower levels of interaction that together lead to explain that high level behaviour. The process usually works… but such reduction should also then allow us to construct a full description of the higher level behaviour (the emergent behaviour) JUST in terms of the reduced phenomenon (albeit a very difficult and complex explanation). But this doesn’t always work. We have weak emergence and strong emergence (Chalmers) – we seem to have failures in predictivity. My own example …if you happen to know Conway’s “Game of Life” – the most simplistic cellular automaton. The Game of Life is fully explainable in a trivial set of rules. Yet it is possible to have a Turing Machine structure implemented chancewise in the raw components of this cellular automation. A Turing Machine infers endless computational behaviours requiring some explanation. Is it possible to describe this capability just in terms of Conway’s cells? Impossible!
Emergence is a fundamental attribute arising in our mental capabilities. Incompatibilists must explain why it MUST be impossible for something we define as free will to emerge from these capabilities.
Actually, emergence as a subject of study has been around a while. I am reading “Emergence”, ed. Bedau and Humphries. It’s an interesting collection of articles. The very first chapter is on British Emergentism which was started by an 1843 work of John Stuart Mill. Of course they didn’t call it “emergence” until later.
I’m not sure I buy into your Life/Turing Machine case. I am very familiar with both but I don’t follow how you are tying that into a free will argument. Do you have any links?
“I am very familiar with both but I don’t follow how you are tying that into a free will argument”
In my example I’m just illustrating that Game of Life simplicity/Turing complexity is an example of emergence… where emergent effects cannot be reduced to discussions of activity at lower levels. My argument is that in a similar fashion we must address the free-will issue not in terms of physics and chemistry but in terms of the advanced computational and structural features of the human brain. If these facilities provide significant decisional responsibility to the human agency we can have an explanation that endorses the idea of compatibilist free will.
To expand….
Dennett talks of the great evolutionary advantage of “evitability”… the organisms ability, in its self, to avoid an unfolding causal path. Evitability is a computational capability present in the evading organism…. the fundamental level of agency. Think then of the unbelievably sophisticated computational capabilities of the human mind allied with its “self programming” capabilities. Evitability in the extreme. Yes, we are affected by external events but we have a degree of freedom which gives us things like moral and decisional responsibility.
These experiments with a so called “exquisitely controlled environment”, while interesting, are certainly not controlled at the molecular level, so they are useless for coming to any conclusions about free will.
Indeed, it has come to my attention way too late that Vohs and Schuler did not reproduce. I wish we had an infrastructure in place instead of parasitic publishers that would automatically pop up a warning every time we tried to cite a paper that has been flagged as problematic. But, alas, we don’t even have that for retracted papers. Either way, my bad, maybe I should start checking every single one of my references if it has been (non-)replicated since I last cited it, in this day and age.
WRT to our fly experiments, there was no grating or any other stimuli for our flies. In fact, the stimulus situation was entirely constant, such that any change in the recorded behavior must have originated from the nervous system. There are other experiments with other animals where sensory organs have been removed entirely, which work analogously, so whether this particular fly experiment is perfect is, while interesting, likely not very relevant here. Using our analysis of the temporal dynamics of this behavior, we find evidence that unstable nonlinear processes (formerly known as “chaos”) underlie these dynamics. Analogous nonlinear dynamics have no been found (in prep., I’ve seen the data on a poster) in a single neuron in Aplysia, due to two interacting calcium channels (i.e., a molecular double pendulum) in a neuron that can trigger a bout of a specific feeding behavior. While we do not yet know if the exact same molecular processes take place in flies and snails (two students are currently training to d experiments with flies with these channels knocked down), these dynamics appear sensitive enough to amplify channel-chatter (the quantum fluctuations in single channels) to the behavioral level. We understand the neuronal connectivity in the snails quite well, so while it remains to be shown if indeed such an amplification does occur and to what quantitative extent, the dynamics are in principle capable of providing the kind of amplification to provide quantum-level indeterminacy to the behavioral level in a ethologically relevant situation.
It goes without saying, that until such an amplification has been shown, everyone is free to predict a different outcome of our experiments 🙂 Either way, I’m not aware of any other preparation where such a process is similarly backed up by solid molecular, physiological and behavioral evidence.
Finally, in the 2011 paper, IIRC, I’m fairly certain I have mentioned that for any Dennett-like practical free will that provides us with sufficient options to be unpredictable even for a Laplacian demon (as Wittgenstein claimed to be important), I think we already have sufficient evidence, as the uncertainty principle provides enough wiggle room such that these nonlinear dynamics become unpredictable even for such a demon.
Chaos is basically a deterministic process, and surely doesn’t provide any basis for free will since it amplifies initial supposedly random differences. Whether or not there was a grate is irrelevant, however: you cannot create a situation in which every molecule in the system is replicated on a redo.
The fundamental flaw in Jerry’s incompatibilist position is assuming that neither the totally deterministic view that every effect has one and only one possible causal path, or the the alternative that determinism involving random (eg. quantum) effects can not allow for any true alternative non-random “choice” of action. But this is fundamentally not true.
The reality is that human causation is not unlike the mechanism of Evolution- where the random effects of mutation do not lead in effect to totally random results, but are directed by a “forming influence”. In Evolution that forming influence is natural selection. In the issue of free will that forming influence is the SELF.
If we consider how selfhood is formed we must first accept that random effects have an influence in mental activity – quantum effects, the effect of noise, indeterminacy in the hybrid nature of neural firing being examples. The causal chain is broken. In effect a new degree of freedom, albeit randomly instigated, is introduced. But the influence of this disconnection is influenced by the fact that one factor is ALWAYS involved in the causal path… that of the self itself. It is a recursive process with each iteration having the present state affecting the next state of the self. It is a process taking YEARS – we call it “growing up”. The omnipresence of the self in this process leads to a self-formed self, not disconnected from outside influence of course, but sufficiently independent a factor in its own right. Independent enough to categorise its decisions as sufficiently formed by involvement of a self-will, a “free will”.