I can’t resist calling your attention to a 2016 article on free will, mainly because it appeared in The Atlantic—a magazine many here (including me) admire. And as I’m reading Matthew Cobb’s terrific new biography of Francis Crick, I see that Crick was a determinist like me, though he realized that different phenomena require different levels of analysis. Crick didn’t think that free will was even worth considering, and avoided it like the plague though he was deeply concerned with consciousness. His research program for understanding the brain is deeply deterministic and pretty reductionist. But read Matthew’s book for yourself.
In view of Crick’s ideas that I’ve just learned about, and a reader calling my attention to this article, which I haven’t seen, it’s worth seeing how author Stephen Cave deals with determinism. You can read the article by clicking below, but since it’s likely to be paywalled you can find it archived here.
The article’s main points are these, two of which are summarized in the title and subtitle (my take):
1.) We have no such thing as free will in the libertarian sense of “you could have done other than what you did”
2.) But studies show that if you reject free will, you are likely to cheat, be lazy and fatalistic, and reject the idea of moral responsibility
3.) To avoid these injurious social effects, we must confect a new take on free will, encouraging others to behave better. This can enhance “autonomy” (not “agency” or “autonomy in the sense of ‘ability to govern oneself'”, neither of which we have) but “autonomy” in the sense of “adhering to behaviors that help our selves and society”.
Now #3 may look like a bogus solution, and author Steven Cave sort of admits that, but we can clearly improve our behaviors with the right carrots and sticks. It’s a misconception about determinism that people’s behavior can’t be changed. Clearly, the influence of others, blaming and praising people for actions they consider respectively injurious and admirable, can, over time, change your neurons in such a way that you begin behaving in ways better for you and for society. The fly in this ointment is the infinite regression of determinism: whether and how we even try to change people’s minds is itself determined by people’s genes and environments. But I won’t go down that rabbit hole here.
Cave’s solution is at least better than that of compatibilists like Dan Dennett, who simply redefined free will so that we could tell people they had it. Since Dan adhered to point #2, thinking that belief in strict determinism was bad for everyone, he wrote two books designed to convince people that they had free will in a meaningful way. I found his arguments unconvincing. Dan later stressed that he was not making this “little people’s” argument, one similar to making the “belief in belief” claim that even though there’s no God, it’s good for society to be religious. But in Dan’s own writings I did find him making the Little People’s argument, which I quoted in a post here in 2022:
Here, for example, are two statements by the doyen of compatibilism, my pal Dan Dennett (sorry, Dan!):
There is—and has always been—an arms race between persuaders and their targets or intended victims, and folklore is full of tales of innocents being taken in by the blandishments of sharp talkers. This folklore is part of the defense we pass on to our children, so they will become adept at guarding against it. We don’t want our children to become puppets! If neuroscientists are saying that it is no use—we are already puppets, controlled by the environment, they are making a big, and potentially harmful mistake. . . . we [Dennett and Erasmus] both share the doctrine that free will is an illusion is likely to have profoundly unfortunate consequences if not rebutted forcefully.
—Dan Dennett, “Erasmus: Sometimes a Spin Doctor is Right” (Erasmus Prize Essay).
and
If nobody is responsible, not really, then not only should the prisons be emptied, but no contract is valid, mortgages should be abolished, and we can never hold anybody to account for anything they do. Preserving “law and order” without a concept of real responsibility is a daunting task.
—Dan Dennett, “Reflections on Free Will” (naturalism.org)
But you can be a “hard determinist” and still believe in responsibility!
Dan is no longer with us, but I did post these when he was alive, so I’m not beating a dead philosopher.
I will try to be brief, discussing the three points above. Quotes from the Atlantic article are indented, while my own take is flush left:
1.) We have no such thing as free will in the libertarian sense of “you could have done other than what you did.” To his credit, Cave admits this straight off, noting that science supports determinism.
In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.
. . . . The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. But it left some room, at least in the popular imagination, for the possibility that we could overcome our circumstances or our genes to become the author of our own destiny. The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.
This is what I believe, and also what Crick believed. Now we’ll never know enough to be able to predict people’s behavior, but if quantum effects don’t manifest themselves in behavior (making you choose a salad rather than french fries, for example), then yes, determinism could lead to absolute predictability. But that will never happen, because we’d have to know enough to predict environmental factors like the weather. Besides, scientists have not decided that quantum phenomena affect behavior. Crick himself rejected that as “woo”, and I’m awaiting evidence for such influences. (We have none.) Finally, even if quantum effects do scupper determinism for some behaviors, they are not effects that we can control by “will.”
I won’t add here the many experiments showing that you can largely predict people’s (simple) decisions before they’re made, beginning with the study of Libet. As these studies continue, we can, by monitoring brain activity, predict what people will do in simple binary tasks farther and farther ahead of the time they’re aware of making such decisions (up to ten seconds, I believe). Free willies, however, always find ways to reject these studies, since that work suggests that our feeling of agency is a post facto phenomenon occurring only after the brain’s neurons have made a “decision”.
2.) But studies show that if you reject free will, you are likely to cheat, be lazy and fatalistic, and reject the idea of moral responsibility. Much of this is based on an early study of Vohs and Schooler showing that college students who are “primed” by reading passages on determinism are more likely to act badly and to cheat than students primed by reading about free will. But that was just over a very short time, was a highly artificial study on college students, and a later meta-analysis showed no deleterious effect of rejecting free will on “prosocial” behaviors. (Note that most of the studies tested behaviors lasting at most a week or so after “priming”. Cave does, however, mention one study suggesting inimical effects of belief in determinism, though:
In another study, for instance, Vohs and colleagues measured the extent to which a group of day laborers believed in free will, then examined their performance on the job by looking at their supervisor’s ratings. Those who believed more strongly that they were in control of their own actions showed up on time for work more frequently and were rated by supervisors as more capable. In fact, belief in free will turned out to be a better predictor of job performance than established measures such as self-professed work ethic.
But even if the evidence did show small deleterious effects on behavior stemming from determinism, are we supposed to pretend to believe we have agency so we can behave better? How can you pretend to believe something you don’t? It would be like asking atheists to believe in God because that belief has salubrious effects. It can’t be done—at least not for rational people. It’s like asking a lion to stop chasing gazelles and start eating salads. It’s not in us!
Two other points. We always feel like we have free will, so I doubt that the scientific truth will make people fatalistic. Whether this belief evolved by natural selection or is merely an epiphenomenon of our evolved brain structure is not clear, and I doubt we’ll ever know. So I don’t take point #2 seriously in most circumstances. Where it IS important to recognize the truth of determinism is in our system or rewards and punishment, most notably in the legal system. If people who act badly are simply people with “broken brains,” then how we treat them depends crucially on recognizing this. A society in which we realize, for instance, that a thief had no choice about whether or not he stole, or a killer about whether or not he pulled the trigger, we would have a very different system of punishment than a society in which we think people had a choice of how they behaved. (Yes, I know that some people say that belief in libertarian free will wouldn’t change how we dispense justice, but I reject that view.)
This does not mean that we should do away with the idea of responsibility and punishment. Far from it. While I don’t consider people morally responsible in the sense that they could have done something “moral” rather than “immoral”, that doesn’t mean that every criminal obtains a get-out-of-jail-free card. People are responsible for their acts in the sense that they are the people who do the acts, and that leads to the idea that those people need, for their own sake and society’s, to be punished or rewarded. Punishment is still justified under determinism to keep criminals out of society, to give them a chance to be rehabilitated, and (to most) as a form of deterrence. What is not justified is retributive punishment like the death penalty, as that implicitly assumes the criminal made a choice (the death penalty isn’t a deterrent, anyway, and can’t be revoked if someone is later found to be innocent).
Finally, praise is as justified as punishment, for praising people for some actions, even if they had no choice, will almost always lead them to perform more good actions, because we’re evolved to appreciate praise, which raises our status. In the end, though none of us have choices about how we behave, we go about our lives feeling as if we did, and that’s enough for me. When the rubber hits the road, as when determinism really matters (as in punishment), we can still revert to what science tells us.
3.) To avoid this injurious social effects, we must confect a new take on free will, encouraging others to behave better, which can enhance “autonomy” (not “agency” or “autonomy” in the sense of “ability to govern oneself”, neither of which we have, but “autonomy” in the sense of adhering to behaviors that help our selves and society. Author Cave is wise enough to accept the science and the determinism it suggests, but he still thinks we need a solution to the problem that belief in determinism leads to bad behavior. I am not convinced that this is true, as different studies show different things. And I don’t think we need to do what Dennett did, writing big books confecting new definitions of a “free will worth wanting.” It is this last part of the article that most disappointed me, for Cave suggest a tepid solution: we all need to behave better. (He cites Bruce Waller, a philosophy professor at Youngstown State University):
Yet Waller’s account of free will still leads to a very different view of justice and responsibility than most people hold today. No one has caused himself: No one chose his genes or the environment into which he was born. Therefore no one bears ultimate responsibility for who he is and what he does. Waller told me he supported the sentiment of Barack Obama’s 2012 “You didn’t build that” speech, in which the president called attention to the external factors that help bring about success. He was also not surprised that it drew such a sharp reaction from those who want to believe that they were the sole architects of their achievements. But he argues that we must accept that life outcomes are determined by disparities in nature and nurture, “so we can take practical measures to remedy misfortune and help everyone to fulfill their potential.”
Of course Obama was determined to say this via the laws of physics, but his words may still have had a good effect on society. Poor people don’t choose to be poor, nor homeless people to be homeless. We need to realize this, for that form of determinism is good for everyone (except perhaps for some Republicans). Cave admits that accepting determinism but trying to be good is somewhat bogus, but at least it’s nor harmful—not in the way I think Dennett’s views were.
Cave:
Understanding how will be the work of decades, as we slowly unravel the nature of our own minds. In many areas, that work will likely yield more compassion: offering more (and more precise) help to those who find themselves in a bad place. And when the threat of punishment is necessary as a deterrent, it will in many cases be balanced with efforts to strengthen, rather than undermine, the capacities for autonomy that are essential for anyone to lead a decent life. The kind of will that leads to success—seeing positive options for oneself, making good decisions and sticking to them—can be cultivated, and those at the bottom of society are most in need of that cultivation.
To some people, this may sound like a gratuitous attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too. And in a way it is. It is an attempt to retain the best parts of the free-will belief system while ditching the worst. President Obama—who has both defended “a faith in free will” and argued that we are not the sole architects of our fortune—has had to learn what a fine line this is to tread. Yet it might be what we need to rescue the American dream—and indeed, many of our ideas about civilization, the world over—in the scientific age.
Well, that’s a bit dramatic, but we do need to reform our notions of praise and—especially—blame. I’ve outlined some of the changes in the justice system we should make in light of determinism, and Gregg Caruso (e.g., here) has done so far more extensively. But I don’t think we should go around telling people that the classical notion of free will is true. Although I’ve been kicked out of a friend’s house and also threatened by a jazz musician for defending determinism (in the latter case by telling him that his saxophone solos were determined rather than improvised under free will, so that he could not have played a different solo), I’m still a diehard determinist.
Yes, the Atlantic article is nine years old, but the field hasn’t moved very far since it was written. Do people even need to think and write about free will, then? Certainly Francis Crick didn’t think so: he completely ignored the problem in his late-life work on the brain, dismissing free will as a nonstarter. But because notions of free will still permeate our justice system in a bad way, yes, I think everyone needs to think about determinism and accept the science buttressing it. Then we can go about our everyday lives acting as though we have choices.
h/t: Reese
wondering about extending Crane’s argument to “free” speech! Not just to the celebration that we can utter any words that our oversized brains can generate, but to put free speech in the moral and ethical contexts of the types of effects and outcomes they lead to. E.G. fact checkers make people in power uncomfortable, but the consequences are to give the public (if they are paying attention) a chance to evaluate speech and the conclusions and actions predicated on it.
I have still not gotten around to reading about the gut – stomach, intestine – as it factors in consciousness. There were a couple blurbs I saw a while ago that made a point that it is significant.
Seems in practical terms to matter. If you’re hungry, compared to the opposite, things seem different.
Then, consciousness would be riding on billions of bacteria.
🧠🧫<-the only bacteria emoji I could find ☹️
My wife hates it when I say this: I do not think we have free will, but we have to behave as if we had free will because we have no choice.
I’m a long-term subscriber and I read that article at the time. (But I didn’t re-read it for purposes of this comment.) I thought the author to be right on the most important part: there is no free will (in the sense of being able to stop time, suspend physics, contemplate the possibilities with time and physics suspended, and then restart it all with the “decision” in place). But I disagreed at the time with the rest of his thesis, namely that “we must confect a new take on free will, encouraging others to behave better.”
Now I’m not so convinced that his solution can’t help. Imagine that people read the solution that Stephen Cave offers, and that their brain structures are altered by the stimulus (of reading his thesis), such that they (the brains) now do think about behaviors that improve others and society. Now, having had their brains altered by reading the article, people behave better. (I’m obviously simplifying for brevity.)
Under the scenario just described, there is still no free will—it’s all molecules shuttling around under the laws of physics. But brain structures have been altered by input from their surroundings (by reading the author’s article in the Atlantic). And those brains, so altered, cause thoughts and behaviors that better society. See. There’s still no free will, but Stephen Cave’s “solution” does have its desired effect.
Put another way, if carrots and sticks can influence human behavior by their physical effects on the brain, so can the carrot “confect[ing] a new take on free will, encouraging others to behave better.”
No. We shouldn’t “go around telling people that the classical notion of free will is true.” Why? Because it is not.
Who gets to decide what is “better”, and how so?
“And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good—Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
-Phaedrus in Dialogues by Plato
But I know it from
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 😁
Good reply, Norman Gilinsky.
I took a quick look in The Bible for a few verses that suggest something about free will – ostensibly a tenet of Christianity – Galatians has some relevant tracts for this post IMHO – this is a suggestion to take a look – this is from a free copy of King James, YMMV :
“5:14 For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
5:15 But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another.
5:16 This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.
5:17 For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.
5:18 But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law.
5:19 Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,”
(See The Bible for a list of more “works of the flesh” )
[ end excerpt ]
ISTM Paul’s most direct teaching relevant to this discussion of free will is in his letter to the believers in Ephesus: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.”
That is, not only were they unable to act (“works”) by themselves to get saved, but they were equally unable to believe (“faith”) by themselves: those beliefs were instead given to them, gratis, by Dad.
That’s where Calvin (no, not Hobbes’ one) got his deterministic “predestination of the elect”. The immediate antisocial consequences of this included the “Free Grace Controversy,” which is still a problem for today’s churches — why shouldn’t the believers do whatever they want, without needing repentance or anything else, and still get to live with Dad?.
So Cave and Dennett are by no means the first to seriously try to square this circle.
I seriously doubt that people will start behaving better because this article told them to.
Quantum effects don’t support the claim that we have free will. They do, however, make it impossible to determine future “decisions” made by complex biological systems over time. Infetisimal changes could lead to surprising results, like me choosing a salad over French fries. Then again,, it’s unlikely because butterflies don’t flap that hard.
Did you really upset that musician for saying that there is no such thing as improvisation in a deterministic universe, or did you upset the musician for invalidatimg their experience?
You are correct to say, “We always_feel_ like we have free will.”. We experience the sensation of making choices. Those sensations are located in the same neural networks that provide us with the glorious sensations of eating a nice hot French fry. Why privilege some sensations over others? (Other than the fact that fries objectively taste better and salad is better for our health.) Crick could describe experiences in terms of brain processes but how is that different than an electronic expert describing the football game I’m watching on television in terms of the valence theory of electrons? Am I watching flip-flop circuits creating “1’s” and “0’s”, or am I watching Aaron Rodgers getting angry at the refs for making bad decisions?
He was mad for me invalidating his experience by implying (and then saying outright) that at the time he played the solo, he could not have played a completely different solo. I told him I was not impugning his skill or acquired knowledge of what kind of solo would please himself or the audicnec, that did not satisfy him. Richard Dawkins, ever polite, was standing nearby and defused the impending death of PCC(E).
But you would say that. 🙂
My view is that humans (and intelligent animals, etc.) do not have libertarian free will, but “for all practical purposes” they do. So I don’t think the fact that we (strictly speaking) lack free will is a big deal. My analogy is algorithmic random number generators, which are not really random – they are completely deterministic – but for all practical purposes they are random. You can run simulations, do numerical analysis (e.g., Monte Carlo integration) and so on without worrying that they are not really random. In extreme situations (national security) you can’t trust RNGs since they can in principle be hacked, and likewise, there may be extreme situations where the lack of free will is important, but these situations are very rare. I don’t think criminals that “couldn’t have acted otherwise” is an important example. There’s no need to torture them even if they did have choice!
I would say that we do not have free will, but we do have “private” will. In other words nobody can know what I will decide to do. I suspect there is something like a Heisenberg uncertainty principle, where if somebody sticks enough electrodes in my brain to determine what I will do, it is likely to change what I would have done to something else.
I’ve read Dennett, and I don’t think I am saying the same thing he said, but perhaps I am.
Generally, #2 is based on dodgy studies. Particularly, the Vohs and Schooler one.
On a more personal level, most of the time, I just go about doing stuff. There is very little active decision activity, if you see what I mean. When I do ponder decisions, I am acutely aware of the antecedents that go into forming my decision. Libertarian free will is an incoherent concept.
As for “good and bad”, that too is a dodgy concept in a world where determinism, indeterminism, or some combination is true.
I often wonder about the anger that one’s political opposites can elicit. Not a shrug, not an eye roll, not a resigned “Well, they can’t help doing what they do.” Anger—which only makes sense if, deep down, we believe the person could have done otherwise. Anger—from people who insist, at least at an intellectual level, that people can’t choose what they do. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” is not routine human behavior—unless, perhaps, when the insult or injury is directed at others.
Perhaps tribalism elicits the politically-oriented anger; we do seem more patient with those we consider our own. But such anger is often directed even at those we love—spouses, children, parents—when they act in ways we dislike. Might this suggest that the underlying assumption that people can choose differently is an evolved trait? If it is so ingrained, what would that say about most people’s ability to override it in everyday life?
Being a compatibilist, I’ll stick up for Dennett a bit. As I see it, he’s not making a “little people” argument, he’s making a big people argument. That is, an argument that applies to everyone. He’s saying that we do need notions of responsibility, agency, morality and accountability (let’s leave “free will” aside since that phrase is too multi-meaninged to be helpful), and thus that we need to understand what those concepts entail given that the world is indeed deterministic. That’s it, that’s compatiblism.
Of course Jerry says much the same above (we do need notions of responsibility and accountability). I’m sticking to the suggestion (as I’ve made here before) that the difference between Dennett and Jerry is largely semantics (particularly over that unhelpful, multi-meaninged phrase). That is, it terms of concrete and specific actions (over, say, what to do with a convicted violent mugger) there’s not much actual difference in practice (though there may be some difference in the commentary about the situation).
PS to add: “We always feel like we have free will …”. I actually don’t feel that I have contra-causal free-will, I feel that my brain is computing decisions that are determined by the prior state of the system. Yes, I really do feel that!
Do you know of any mental exercises that might help those of us who don’t have that feeling get some small experience of it?
In order to function and achieve, all humans evolved to use a variety of illusions, distortions, biases, and myths. A key is for humans to be aware of this, so they are more humble about the extent of their knowledge and the objectivity and wholeness of their worldviews.
A (hopefully) relevant repost:
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Without addressing the deep question of whether we have free will (and how exactly to clarify what that means anyway), I notice a big difference in our perception (or illusion) of our free will to choose what to do as opposed to choosing what to think and believe. Some people claim they can choose what to believe and think. That seems bonkers to me. I have had people tell me that I should believe in Jesus because it improves your life and happiness to do so. When I explain that even if I granted the premise, which I don’t, it is meaningless to choose what to believe, some people disagree and insist that we can choose what to believe.
I don’t get it. The act of “choosing” what to believe negates the possibility that one is objectively evaluating the truth or falseness of the proposition. It seems to me that “choosing to believe X” is not just different from, but incompatible with actually believing X in the sense of thinking that X is true.
It could be argued that we have subconscious psychological processes going on in our minds that we are not aware of and that bias our thinking and perception. It may be that in that sense we unconsciously choose what to believe more than we realize and more than we would like to admit. Could be. But I can’t for the life of me understand how anyone can CONSCIOUSLY choose what to believe. I’m not even sure what that means, though some people say that they can consciously choose what they believe.
Illusory or not, it FEELS to me that I can choose whether to have Chinese food or Italian food for dinner tonight. I feel no such choice about what to believe about the principles of quantum mechanics, whether Trump really won the 2024 election or not, whether astronauts walked on the moon, and etc.
Suppose that I could give you proof beyond reasonable doubt that you would be happier if you believed that two and two is five or three rather than four. How could that possibly induce you to think it’s true? Yet some people seem to do that with religion and astrology and other things. Worse, some people choose to believe whatever they would prefer to believe in ways that have real world consequences. I.e. election conspiracies, boys are girls if they feel like girls, American blacks don’t have cultural defects that contribute to their rates of crime and family dysfunction and lack of economic achievement because that would be a mean, racist, unpleasant thing to think, deporting illegals will cure all our economic ills, and I could extend this list ad infinitum.
This isn’t exactly what I think you mean by “choosing to believe” something, but based solely on my experience (no data to back it up) it seems clear to me that people can and do train themselves to believe things. Sort of like “fake it till you make it.” Pretend to believe a thing hard enough and for long enough and eventually you may come to believe it.
Libet himself did not regard his experiments (revealing the brain’s “readiness potential” occurring a few milliseconds prior to a felt conscious decision) as proving there is no free will; a subsequent experiment showed that people could decide to cancel a movement they’d decided to make even after the readiness potential had been generated. The readiness potential may just indicate a general preparation of the motor areas for some sort of response, rather than a specific decision being made by the brain.
There is however a neurological condition in which a person’s freedom to make independent decisions is lost, called environmental dependency syndrome. This can result from severe prefrontal cortical damage. The patient’s behavior becomes a function of whatever stimulus is present in their immediate environment. The French neuroscientist Lhermitte was the first to study this syndrome and described it as a complete loss of human autonomy. The patient becomes like a robot showing only conditioned, stereotyped responses to immediate stimuli.
So how does all this pertain to the concept of free will? I am a bit of a free willy here, as in for example supporting free speech. Sure the interactions of electrons and neurons etc. appear deterministic as far as we can tell, but the chain goes all the way back to the Big Bang and thus can never be known or understood, so when it comes to ultra-complex organs such as brains and entire universes going back almost to infinity we might as well conclude we have free will, at least in ideal conditions. Or perhaps the universe itself has free will! Besides, determinism has been used by totalitarians to justify clamping down on free speech and controlling everyone’s lives based on a twisted belief in the perfectibility of human behavior and society, so I am not on board with that and take a more libertarian view. On the other hand, it is absurd to say that someone “could have” acted otherwise once their action has occurred, just as it is absurd to say that a tree that fell down “could have” remained standing after it already fell. “Could have” is a mere abstraction, a fantasy; obviously we cannot go back in time to change actions already made, however we can use feedback from our actions to perhaps make different decisions in the future. And that’s where the complexity of the genes-brains-environment-universe interactions are such that we might as well regard those with normally functioning brains – and who are not being actively restrained by other people – to have free will in the sense of being free to make their own independent decisions, unlike the poor patients studied by Lhermitte.
I think there’s a natural experiment: Donald Trump. He strongly believes in free will and moral responsibility—that’s why he, for example, ordered the killing of every drug smuggler in the ocean. But Trump cheats at everything, even at golf—which is, according to Sam Harris, “like cheating at prayer.” So, believing in free will doesn’t make people behave better, but believing that you’re going to be punished does.
I’m an applied mathematician without any expertise on this topic, but I do know about Econometric Choice Models and a random component in making choices is quite clear. I’m not sure how Drs. Dennet and Coyne would see this, but I see it as meaning even with determinism, the choice someone makes can only be predicted within statistical limits.
What do you mean by saying a random component in making choices. Do you mean that behaviors are not dictated by the laws of physics? What makes you so sure that the supposedly random component in making choice does not reflect that actions of brains subject to different environments. I have no idea what you are talking about. As I said, even under pure determinism we do not have perfect predictability.
People do not like thinking that they and others do not deserve what they get. Especially when they are better off than others.
The jazz musician would probably have an easier time accepting a deterministic argument if he felt he did not play well or made a mistake.
I find it bizarre that given the complexity of the brain and how much we still do not understand, that free will deniers , or hard core determinists, can be so critical of those who question the science supporting this. Most scientific journals finish off with a line something like…“More work needs to be done in this area.” I feel a lot comes down to semantics when it comes to free will discussions. I’m sure almost everyone who follows this blog would agree with determinism in so much as agreeing that everything happens according to the laws of physics. But the notion that me deciding to post this was pre-determined by reactions during the Big Bang is as ridiculous to me as the idea that I was directed by God. There are far too many variables over a long period of time to specifically determine much with that amount of specificity. When we clearly still lack information and understanding of how the brain and mind works, should we not keep an open mind, and perhaps not criticize those who still question. I, for one, do believe that we have at least some conscious choice, in some circumstances…when we are not pissed off, stressed, tired, hungry, rushed, or doing something on autopilot, etc. If, in these circumstances we choose consciously to feed our subconscious with certain ideas, I believe that in time this will alter what our subconscious does on “autopilot”. If one chooses to follow this blog versus immerse themselves in “intelligent” design blogs, it can lead to different downstream consequences on what one finds acceptable and possibly believable…well maybe for some. Bad example. How about following exclusively Fox News vs. CNN, or hanging out with people who choose to do drugs regularly. What we hear or see becomes more normal the more we hear/see it. Through simply the phenomenon of normalization of the familiar, conscious decisions (even a little free will) can have a huge influence on downstream thoughts and actions (non-free will). Is it not possible that with the laws of physics, the complexity of the mind/brain is such that we can not rule out that we may, when the circumstances allow, have the ability to make at least some conscious choices.
Agreed. The combination of quantum indeterminacy and deterministic chaos means that futures are not set over the long term. However, the brain’s decisions are (almost certainly) deterministic (set by the recent prior state), since brains would average over any quantum indeterminacy (there’s no point in evolution building our decision-making brains if that is then subverted by a quantum dice throw).
But surely our consciousness and our conscious choices are products of our material brain. What else would they be? And why would evolution go to the huge expense of building a resource-hungry material brain if it wasn’t the organ doing exactly that job of making (computing) decisions?
Surely evolution produced the decision-making brain. We are our brains, so we are the ones making decisions. Thus to say that your brain, not you, is what makes decisions, seems nonsensical.
2 points:
Determinism =/= Predictability: These terms are often confused, but they’re not the same. As Steven Wolfram emphasizes, a system can be fully deterministic—following simple, fixed rules—yet still be fundamentally unpredictable in practice. “Computational irreducibility” means that for many systems, there’s no shortcut to knowing what will happen: the only way to find out is to let the system run. Determinism governs the rules; predictability depends on whether those rules can be compressed or shortcut.
No Self => No Choosing (Free Will): Arguing about free will as if a solid “self” is making choices misses a deeper point: the self itself isn’t a fundamental entity. Like free will, it’s an emergent narrative produced by underlying physical and neural processes. Debating whether the self has free will is like asking whether a wave decides where to go, the wave is real, but it’s just a pattern arising from deeper dynamics, not an independent decision-maker.
This is a post by my nonexistent self deterministically flexing about how unpredictable it is.
The argument that unbelief in free will causes laziness and uncaring behaviour does not convince me, because personally I don’t, and yet this never prevented me from doing things. The thought that my actions are effects of causes just never occurs to me in practice when I make decisions, because it doesn’t matter in the moment.
I’m a determinist… but I accept that it is difficult or impossible to work out why I might make a particular decision, or why a bunch of other people might make a decision.
Because of the difficulties in understanding all the prior circumstances free will might offer a simplified explanation without too much thought. So free will might be a ‘useful fiction’ – a simplified story that enables economical thought processes. I don’t have to labour at working out why strawberry is my favourite flavour of ice cream from first principles. Or for why I accept that killing random people is unacceptable in society.
Now there may be ‘harmful fictions’ too. They simplify the justification process even though their consequences may be less than optimum. I suspect that many lawbreakers have their own ‘useful fictions’ to justify their behaviour – even while societies might judge their fictions to be ‘harmful’.
Whether ‘useful’ or ‘harmful’ the fictions are still fictions.
It surprises me that anyone is shocked that the articles conclusions #1 and #2 are both true. Not for the reason that believing in determinism increases cheating, lying etc but because people see that as an argument against determinism.
Not having free will does not mean we are helpless! It means we have to “change our priors” in the sense that we inculcate in our children those factors that will influence their decisions in the right direction. Essentially, that means the Golden Rule.
Dan Dennett is not guilty of making the Little People’s argument. He insists that we should recognize a difference between manipulated actions and non-manipulated actions because there is a difference – not just because it would be harmful not to recognize it. As for responsibility,
That seems debatable. At the very least, if the incompatibilist determinist is not sneaking compatibilism in by the back door, the “responsibility” in question has to be a different sort: see the Dennett-Caruso debate. As they both agree, there is an empirical question about whether Caruso’s version of responsibility would make us better off.