Category: philosophy

Dan Dennett obituaries begin to appear

April 20, 2024 • 11:15 am

Dan Dennett died yesterday, and I still can’t believe he’s gone, though he’d used up a good portion of his nine lives in a series of cardiac events.  His NYT obituary can be read by clicking the screenshot below, or you can find it archived here.

The subheading seems to me a bit inaccurate. For one thing Dennett certainly did not think religion was an illusion, though he’s quoted saying that below. Perhaps he thought it was a delusion, but he certainly took it seriously as a human behavioral phenomenon, even though he was an atheist. What the subheading means is that he thought the idea of god and its concomitants were an illusion, but that is not all that religion comprises.

More important, Dan certainly did NOT believe that free will was a fantasy: Dan was a compatibilist who didn’t believe in libertarian free will, but wrote two books and several other papers and half of another book defending the idea that free will was not a fantasy, but that we did indeed have it: it was, he said, simply different from what most people thought.

Dan and I disagreed strongly on Dan’s compatibilism (Sam Harris disagreed as well), but free will being a fantasy? Nope.

Finally, yes, Dan concentrated on natural selection as the only process that could produce the appearance of adaptation, but didn’t deny, as I recall, the fact that genetic drift could cause some evolutionary change. (For a rather critical review of his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by my ex-student Allen Orr, go here.) But Dan concentrated on adaptations, including human behaviors, because the appearance of design, for centuries imputed to God, is what really demands explanation.

(*Note the misplacement of “only” in the subheading; it should appear after “explained,” not after “could”. Where are the proofreaders?)

At any rate, here’s an excerpt from the NYT that is more accurate than the subheading:

Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82.

His death, at Maine Medical Center, was caused by complications of interstitial lung disease, his wife, Susan Bell Dennett, said. He lived in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful writing style to reach a lay public, avoiding the impenetrable concepts and turgid prose of many other contemporary philosophers. Beyond his more than 20 books and scores of essays, his writings even made their way into the theater and onto the concert stage.

But Mr. Dennett, who never shirked controversy, often crossed swords with other famed scholars and thinkers.

An outspoken atheist, he at times seemed to denigrate religion. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.

According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.

For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.

And on free will:

His first book to attract widespread scholarly notice was “Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology,” published in 1978.

In it, Mr. Dennett asserted that multiple decisions resulted in a moral choice and that these prior, random deliberations contributed more to the way an individual acted than did the ultimate moral decision itself. Or, as he explained:

“I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: ‘That’s enough. I’ve considered this matter enough and now I’m going to act,’ in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.”

Some leading libertarians criticized Mr. Dennett’s model as undermining the concept of free will: If random decisions determine ultimate choice, they argued, then individuals aren’t liable for their actions.

Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.

“We couldn’t live the way we do without it,” he wrote in his 2017 book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” “If — because free will is an illusion — no one is ever responsible for what they do, should we abolish yellow and red cards in soccer, the penalty box in ice hockey and all the other penalty systems in sports?”

First of all, the notion of a separation between mind and body is not “outdated”: a huge number of people believe in libertarian free will: that your mind alone can, at any given moment, allow you to make any one of two or more choices. It’s outdated among scientists and philosophers, but not among the general public, as surveys have shown.

Further, “random decisions” aren’t really random to either libertarians or determinists. Even Libet-like experiments show that what you do is to some degree predictable using fMRI, and is probably entirely predictable if we had a complete understanding of the brain. No determinist argues that decisions are “random”, as they’re based on the pattern of your neurons produced by your genes and your environment. And libertarians would argue that decisions aren’t random, for if we were we’d have no ability to predict what anybody we know does. Finanly, determinists don’t claim that individuals aren’t liable for their actions. They are liable, but not in the way that most people think. If somebody murders someone else, we don’t just let him go and say, “well, he wasn’t responsible for the killing.”

Do note that Dennett is credited with believing something that I always maintained: he favored compatibilism, at least in part, because of “belief in belief”: without belief in some kind of free will, he said, society would fall apart (he said that at least twice):

Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.

But if religion is also thought necessary by some (not Dennett) as necessary to maintain a stable, society, then why is free will TRULY necessary to maintain a stable, functioning society? Perhaps our feeling of free will is necessary for that, but, like religion, that’s a delusion that we simply can’t avoid feeling. I function very well even though I’m a hard determinist, even though I feel like I have a choice. And, in the last sentence, I don’t think one can characterize Dan’s view of free will as an “illusion”. He argued strenuously for a form of free will that was not an illusion.

But I digress. Dan was an important figure in bringing philosophy and Darwinism to educated readers. How often do philosophers produce bestselling popular works?  Yes, he could be wrong, and the force of his personality led some to adopt what I thought were erroneous ideas (like “we have the kind of free will worth wanting”), but more often his arguments were cogent, important, and vividly expressed.

And Dan was a nice guy, one who befriended me when I was just a stripling. One thing missing from the NYT piece—and something I hope they’ll add—are quotations from Dennett’s friends and colleagues. Where, for instance, is an assessment by Richard Dawkins? I expect that will appear on Richard’s Substack site, but we needed some quotes for the NYT obit. Here’s Richard’s tweet about Dan’s death:

You can find other obituaries at the Torygraph, at Ars Technica, and at the Daily Nous, which is short but has a recent video interview, which I put below. And I’d recommend reading his recent autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking.

 

James Gleick favorably reviews a book arguing that humans have libertarian free will

January 14, 2024 • 10:00 am

The idea that we have libertarian free will, in the real sense of “being able to make any one of several decisions at a given time”, has made a comeback in the pages of The New York Review of Books, a magazine that never quite recovered from the death of editor Robert B. Silvers in 2017. It was once the magazine to read for thoughtful analyses of books, but it’s gone downhill.  I had a subscription on and off, but quit a while back.

But I digress. In the latest issue, the respected author and historian of science James Gleick reviews a recent book on free will, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell.  I haven’t read the book, so all I can do is reprise what Gleick says about the book, which is that Mitchell’s case for libertarian free will is convincing, and that determinism—or “naturalism” as I prefer to call it, since I take into account the inherent unpredictability of quantum mechanics—is not all there is to our actions and behaviors. Mitchell, says Gleick, maintains that natural selection has instilled humans with the ability to weigh alternatives and make decisions, not only apparent decisions but real ones, decision that involve us weighing alternatives, thinking about the future, and then making make one of several possible decisions even at the moment you decide. In other words, determinism doesn’t rule all of our behaviors and decisions. Apparently, this is libertarian free will: facing a restaurant menu, with everything else in the universe the same (a classic scenario), you could have ordered something other than what you did.

The problem is that Gleick never defines “free will” in this way; he only implies that Mitchell accepts libertarian free will, and then tries to show how evolution gives it to us.

But I’m getting ahead of myself: click on the screenshot below to read:

here

Gleick argues that life without libertarian free will is pointless. I maintain that this is incorrect—that the point of our life is the gratification we get from our actions, and we don’t need libertarian free will for that. All we need is a sense of satisfaction. You don’t even really need that if you define “point” post facto as “doing what you felt you had to do.”  But, say compatibilists like Dennett—and compatibilists are all physical determinists—we need to have some conception of free will, even if what we do is determined, for society would fall apart without it. And Gleick agrees:

Legal institutions, theories of government, and economic systems are built on the assumption that humans make choices and strive to influence the choices of others. Without some kind of free will, politics has no point. Nor does sports. Or anything, really.

. . . If the denial of free will has been an error, it has not been a harmless one. Its message is grim and etiolating. It drains purpose and dignity from our sense of ourselves and, for that matter, of our fellow living creatures. It releases us from responsibility and treats us as passive objects, like billiard balls or falling leaves.

One senses from these statements that the choices we make are not merely apparent choices, conditioned by the laws of physics, but real ones: choices that we didn’t have to make. In other words, we have libertarian, I-could-have-done-otherwise free will.

That construal of free will is buttressed by Gleick’s characterization of Mitchell’s argument as showing that we have purpose, and that purpose (again, not explicitly defined), is the proof that we have libertarian free will:

Agency distinguishes even bacteria from the otherwise lifeless universe. Living things are “imbued with purpose and able to act on their own terms,” Mitchell says. He makes a powerful case that the history of life, in all its complex grandeur, cannot be appreciated until we understand the evolution of agency—and then, in creatures of sufficient complexity, the evolution of conscious free will.

And this purpose is apparently an emergent property from natural selection, not only not predictable from physics, but somehow incompatible with physical law, which, are, says Gleick, are only descriptions of the universe and not really “laws” that the substance of our bodies and brains must obey:

This is why so many modern physicists continue to embrace philosophical determinism. But their theories are deterministic because they’ve written them that way. We say that the laws govern the universe, but that is a metaphor; it is better to say that the laws describe what is known. In a way the mistake begins with the word “laws.” The laws aren’t instructions for nature to follow. Saying that the world is “controlled” by physics—that everything is “dictated” by mathematics—is putting the cart before the horse. Nature comes first. The laws are a model, a simplified description of a complex reality. No matter how successful, they necessarily remain incomplete and provisional.

The incompleteness apparently creates the gap where you can find libertarian free will.

And the paragraphs below, describing the results of natural selection, seem to constitute the heart of the book’s thesis:

Biological entities develop across time, and as they do, they store and exchange information. “That extension through time generates a new kind of causation that is not seen in most physical processes,” Mitchell says, “one based on a record of history in which information about past events continues to play a causal role in the present.” Within even a single-celled organism, proteins in the cell wall respond chemically to changing conditions outside and thus act as sensors. Inside, proteins are activated and deactivated by biochemical reactions, and the organism effectively reconfigures its own metabolic pathways in order to survive. Those pathways can act as logic gates in a computer: if the conditions are X, then do A.

“They’re not thinking about it, of course,” Mitchell says, “but that is the effect, and it’s built right into the design of the molecule.” As organisms grow more complex, so do these logical pathways. They create feedback mechanisms, positive and negative. They make molecular clocks, responding to and then mimicking the solar cycle. Increasingly, they embody knowledge of the world in which they live.

The tiniest microorganisms also developed means of propulsion by changing their shape or deploying cilia and flagella, tiny vibrating hairs. The ability to move, combined with the ability to sense surroundings, created new possibilities—seeking food, escaping danger—continually amplified by natural selection. We begin to see organisms extracting information from their environment, acting on it in the present, and reproducing it for the future. “Information thus has causal power in the system,” Mitchell says, “and gives the agent causal power in the world.”

We can begin to talk about purpose. First of all, organisms struggle to maintain themselves. They strive to persist and then to reproduce. Natural selection ensures it. “The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does,” Mitchell says.

My response to this is basically “so what?” Natural selection is simply the differential reproduction of gene forms, which, when encased in an organism, can leave more copies when they give that organism the ability to survive and reproduce.  Organisms thus evolve to act as if they have purpose. But that “purpose” is simply anthropormorphizing the results of the mindless process of natural selection.  So, when we decide to go hunting for food, or get pleasure from being with a mate, we can say that those embody our “purpose”. But there’s nothing in all this that implies that, at a given moment, we can make any number of decisions independent of physics.

But, Gleick implies, there is a way we can do this: by leveraging the “random fluctiations” in our brains:

It’s still just chemistry and electricity, but the state of the brain at one instant does not lead inexorably to the next. Mitchell emphasizes the inherent noisiness of the system: more or less random fluctuations that occur in an assemblage of “wet, jiggly, incomprehensibly tiny components that jitter about constantly.” He believes that the noise is not just inevitable; it’s useful. It has adaptive value for organisms that live, after all, in an environment subject to change and surprise. “The challenges facing organisms vary from moment to moment,” he notes, “and the nervous system has to cope with that volatility: that is precisely what it is specialized to do.” But merely adding randomness to a deterministic machine still doesn’t produce anything we would call free will.

That’s correct, though what Mitchell or Gleick mean as “random fluctuations in the brain” is undefined. Robert Sapolsky argues, in his recent book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, that there are no “random” fluctuations in the brain: neurons interact with each other according to the principles of physics.  To have true free libertarian will, those neurons would have to fire in different ways under exactly the same conditions in the brain. Sapolsky spends a lot of time convincingly showing that this cannot be the case. Ergo, no brain fluctuations.

But, as Gleick says above, randomness alone doesn’t give us agency. Still, under Mitchell’s model it’s essential for free will. And this is the big problem, for how does one’s “will” harness that randomness to come up with decisions that are independent of physical processes? Gleick:

Indeed, some degree of randomness is essential to Mitchell’s neural model for agency and decision-making. He lays out a two-stage model: the gathering of options—possible actions for the organism to take—followed by a process of selection. For us, organisms capable of conscious free will, the options arise as patterns of activity in the cerebral cortex, always subject to fluctuations and noise. We may experience this as “ideas just ‘occurring to you.’” Then the brain evaluates these options, with “up-voting” and “down-voting,” by means of “interlocking circuit loops among the cortex, basal ganglia, thalamus, and midbrain.” In that way, selection employs goals and beliefs built from experience, stored in memory, and still more or less malleable.

Ergo we have to have the brain’s “randomness”, which is neither defined nor, at least according to Sapolsky, doesn’t exist. Then one harnesses that randomness to come up with your decisions:

Mitchell proposes what he calls a “more naturalized concept of the self.” We are not just our consciousness; we’re the organism, taken as a whole. We do things for reasons based on our histories, and “those reasons inhere at the level of the whole organism.” Much of the time, perhaps most of the time, our conscious self is not in control. Still, when the occasion requires, we can gather our wits, as the expression goes. We have so many expressions like that—get a grip; pull yourself together; focus your thoughts—metaphors for the indistinct things we see when we look inward. We don’t ask who is gathering whose wits.

Well, we can always confabulate “reasons” for what we do, but, in my view, the whole process of pondering is simply the adaptive machinery of your brain, installed by natural selection, taking in environmental information and spitting out a solution that’s usually “adaptive”.  And because different people’s brains are wired differently (there is, after all, genetic and developmental variation), people tend to have somewhat different neuronal programs, so they behave in somewhat different ways, often predictable. This is what we call our “personalities”: the programs that are identified with different bodies. “Pondering” is not something we do freely; it’s what’s instilled in our brains by natural selection to produce adaptive behavior. We ponder just as a chess-playing computer ponders: working through programs until one produces the best available solution (in the case of a computer, to make a move that best insures you’ll win; in the case of a human, to make a move that gives the most “adaptive” result).

In none of this, however, do I detect anything other than giving the name “free will” to neuronal processes that we get from natural selection, and spitting out decisions and behaviors that could not have been otherwise in a given situation. (That situation, of course, includes the environment, which influences our neurons.) In none of this do I see a way that a numinous “will” or “agency” can affect the physical workings of our neurons. And in none of this can i see a way to do something differently than what you did.

In the end, and of course I haven’t read Mitchell’s book, Gleick doesn’t make a convincing case for libertarian free will. Yes, he can make a case for “compatibilist” free will, depending on how you define that (“actions that comport with our personalities,” “decisions not made under compulsion,” etc.). But as I’ve emphaszied, all compatibilists are at bottom, determinists (again, I’d prefer “naturalists”). Remember, determinism or naturalism doesn’t mean that behaviors need be completely predictable—quantum indeterminacy may act, though we’re not sure it acts on a behavioral level—but quantum indeterminacy does not give us “agency”.  “Compatibilist” free will still maintains that, at any given moment, we cannot affect the behaviors that flow from physics, and we cannot do other that what we did. It’s just that compatibilists think of free will as something other than libertarian free will, and there are as many versions of compatibilism as there are compatibilist philosophers.

I can’t find in this review any basis for libertarian free will—not in natural selection, not in the “random” fluctuations of the brain, not in the fact that different people have different personalities and may act differently in the same general situation. You can talk all you want about randomness and purpose and “winnowing of brain fluctuations,” but until someone shows that there’s something about our “will” that can affect physical processes, I won’t buy libertarian free will. Physicist Sean Carroll doesn’t buy it, either. He’s a compatibilist, but argues this:

There are actually three points I try to hit here. The first is that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood. There is an enormous amount that we don’t know about how the world works, but we actually do know the basic rules underlying atoms and their interactions — enough to rule out telekinesis, life after death, and so on. The second point is that those laws are dysteleological — they describe a universe without intrinsic meaning or purpose, just one that moves from moment to moment.

The third point — the important one, and the most subtle — is that the absence of meaning “out there in the universe” does not mean that people can’t live meaningful lives.

(See also here.)

We are physical beings made of matter. To me that blows every notion of libertarian free will out of the water. I’ll be curious to see how Mitchell obviates this conclusion.

 

h/t: Barry

LA Times: Philosopher critiques Sapolsky’s book on determinism, touts free will

October 27, 2023 • 9:35 am

I’m reading Robert Sapolsky’s new book Determined now and like it a lot, but of course I’ve always agree with him about the hegemony of naturalism. Because Sapolsky is a hard determinist, and many people, even philosophers, won’t accept the form of unrelenting naturalism that both Sapolsky and I accept, we can expect a lot of uninformed criticism of the book But now we have uninformed criticism by somebody who’s informed, for the book has been negatively reviewed in the L. A. Times by John Martin Fischer, identified by the the paper as ” a professor of philosophy at UC Riverside [who] has written widely on free will and moral responsibility.” Fisher has also been characterized on Wikipedia as “a leading contributor to the philosophy of free will and moral responsibility.”

So I was pretty appalled to see Fischer, in a critical review of Determined, saying some things that seemed deeply uninformed, even to a philosophical tyro like me. It may be because he’s trying to summarize complex arguments for the public in a short review, but if that’s the case, Fischer’s concisions have led to mischaracterization of the book (I’ve read about 100 pages of Sapolsky’s 450-page book, but he’s advanced his thesis in other writings as well). Click on the screenshot to read:

Here are a few statements by Fischer (indented) and my comments about them (flush left).

Perhaps surprisingly, these views — which seem so unintuitive — have become more influential in contemporary philosophy and even legal theory. They are, nevertheless, a minority opinion. Although philosophy isn’t about majority rule (nor should it be!), many of us inside the field — and likely outside it, too — find this skepticism toward free will and moral responsibility deeply problematic.

Most philosophers aren’t libertarian “you-could-have-done-otherwise” believers in free will, but are determinists who accept, like Sapolsky, the idea that at any time, there is only one behavior possible (with the exception of behaviors that could be changed by the fundamental indeterminism of quantum mechanics; see below).  Yet they are determinists who say that their view of free will is not a libertarian view, so that free will is compatible with determinism. That’s why these philosophers (who hold the majority view on free will) are called “compatibilists”.

While Fischer may be right in that most philosophers accept moral responsibility, he misleads the reader, most of whom take free will to mean that you could change your mind at a single moment and do or choose more than one thing. (Without that ability, the “free” in “free will” is meaningless.)  Here Fischer plays into the popular libertarian conception of free will—the one that Sapolsky spends the whole book attacking—but may be referring to compatibilist free will (“yes, we’re determined, but we can semantically construct another form of “free will”). The problem is that Fischer never defines what he means by free will, while Sapolsky starts off his book with definitions to avoid this kind of muddle. The onus was on Fischer to define “free will”, but he dropped the ball.

Here’s more:

Some neurobiologists, including Sapolsky, hold that neurobiology supports determinism — that the brain activity science has uncovered reveals essentially mechanical procedures that cause human decisions. Other neuroscientists believe that at a fundamental level the brain works indeterministically, perhaps in accordance with quantum mechanics, which allows for randomness and unpredictability. In other words, whether the past and laws of nature dictate my choices and actions remains scientifically controversial.

There’s only one form of pure indeterminism in nature (I’m not talking here about “unpredictability”): quantum mechanics. And if our behaviors and choices are unpredictable because they are affected by quantum phenomena (note: WE DON’T KNOW THIS), that gives us randomness and unpredictability, but does not give us libertarian free will. (We can’t move electrons via our “will”.) And doesn’t Fischer realize that the laws of nature happen to include quantum mechanics?  Sapolsky and I are both naturalists: we accept that behaviors proceed only from the laws of nature: laws that can have acted eons ago to produce a behavior we evince today.  No, determinism is not scientifically controversial, at least among the majority of philosophers who accept that the laws of nature dictate our choices and actions.

Further, unpredictability can result from absolute, pure determinism, simply because, though determinism be true, we don’t know enough to be able to predict with great accuracy. It is a fundamental error to say that determinism is incompatible with unpredictability.  It’s just a matter of not knowing enough!  Let me put it in caps:  “UNPREDICTABILITY IS NOT THE OPPOSITE OF DETERMINISM”.

But wait; there’s more! You also get a free set of Ginsu knives!:

But let’s say determinism were true. Why exactly would it follow that we lack free will? Even if our choices and actions are shaped heavily by external factors, couldn’t they still be caused in a way that involves the human capacity for reasoning? Coughs, sneezes, seizures — these behaviors are easy to dismiss as beyond our control. Not all causal chains, however, are like those that trigger involuntary movements. Equating all human behavior to a cough is an egregiously hasty generalization.

Consider, as a simple example, my decision to sit down at my computer to write these sentences. Yes, my past and the laws of nature may have crucially led me here. But I did so also because of deliberation. I weighed the pros for writing against the cons and chose to do it. It wasn’t like a sneeze; it was a process that involved reasoning. Determinism helps explain why I started typing, but it does not in itself rule out my free will.

Well, that depends on what Fischer defines as “free will”, doesn’t it? The problem with the two paragraphs above is that Sapolsky’s entire book is devoted to showing exactly why a decision to sit down and write is precisely like a cough or sneeze: both depend on a concatenation of causal events that extend way back to the past, well before you’re born.  Reasoning is just a brain process, and is itself conditioned by the past history of the neurons in one’s brain and of the body that carries them. That history includes genetics, environment, and experience, things that extend way back into the past since there are long chains of causation. Fischer is showing here that he either hasn’t read Sapolsky’s book or doesn’t understand it.

More:

The “why” might additionally involve exercises of free will that confer responsibility — and thus we cannot dismiss moral responsibility because we are machines. We are biological machines, but the biology does not get in the way of free will. It enables it, just as our neurobiology enables our thoughts and feelings.

Yes, Sapolsky (and I) do dismiss “moral responsibility” (but not “responsibility”) because it violates determinism (I call it “naturalism”, which equals determinism plus fundamental indeterminism caused by quantum mechanics.) And what does Fischer mean by “the biology does not get in the way of free will”?  Since he hasn’t defined “free will”, we don’t know what he means, nor what he means by saying free will is “enabled by biology”.  Here Fischer is misleading the reader. Even if he’s a compatibilist, Fischer is responsible for not only defining free will, but explaining his critique.  By the way, Sapolsky’s book is largely about neurobiology, and Fischer shows no evidence of having read Sapolsky’s neurobiological argument for determinism.

And even if Fischer is accepting a compatibilist form of free will, he then goes way off the rails by implying that determinism, by absolving us of “moral responsibility,” completely lets us off the hook when we do something bad. Like most ignorant critics of determinism (but Fischer shouldn’t be that ignorant!), he argues that without a notion of free will, we can rape, pillage, plunder, and murder at will, without fear of punishment. To wit:

We live in a world with horrors almost too terrible to imagine. That no one could fairly be blamed or punished for anything is a view as disturbing as it is radical. It would entail that Vladimir Putin could not be morally blamed or punished for documented war crimes; he would not deserve such treatment. Moral responsibility skepticism implies that Hitler did not deserve to be morally blamed or punished, nor did Stalin or any mass murderer.

The skeptical view asks us to do what is almost humanly impossible: to let even our worst actors off the hook. Of course, the same point applies to good behavior: Heroes such as Sully Sullenberger would not deserve our gratitude, and your friend who sacrifices her plans so she can pick you up at LAX wouldn’t merit it either. (Sometimes, though, even this requires heroism!)

Yes, Sapolsky says that determinism means that people don’t deserve what happens to them, whether it be good or bad, but he doesn’t argue that people don’t need to be blamed or punished! No rational determinist thinks that.  Blame and punishment are social tools for encouraging good behavior and discouraging bad ones, and we can confer praise or opprobrium without having to think that a person had a choice of showing good or bad behavior. As a determinist, one can praise someone to elicit further good behaviors (another mistake of critics is to think that behavior is unchangeable), or discourage bad ones. That’s why Sapolsky thinks that judicial punishment is still needed.  Again, Fischer shows no sign of having read Sapolsky’s book, for he’s constantly misrepresenting Sapolsky’s views.

Fischer does that one last time at the end, when he levels what seems like a gratuitous swipe at Sapolsky, managing to argue that his views justify—wait for it—the cheating scheme of Sam Bankman-Fried!

In a beautiful vision of the no-responsibility world, people are liberated from forces over which they have no control. But there is an ugly side too. Consider that Barbara Fried, a professor emerita at Stanford Law School, has argued against free will and moral responsibility. Right now her son, Sam Bankman-Fried, is on trial for allegations that he looted billions from customers of his collapsed crypto exchange FTX. Under the skeptics’ view, Bankman-Fried deserves no blame or responsibility. How convenient, but deeply wrong.

Here Fischer is not only wrong, but stupid as well. Sapolsky does not think that criminals should get off. The sentence argues that those who criticize free will, like Barbara Fried, whose views he mischaracterizes—read the link, which goes to an essay written, of course, by Fischer himself—also think that nobody should be punished. (Fried says we should “move past blame,”, which is a reasonable view and does not say we should not punish.)

In the end, here we have a philosopher who doesn’t define his terms (isn’t that de rigueur in philosophy?), doesn’t explain himself, and appears not to have read the book he’s reviewing. It’s a horrible review of a very good book, and I continue to highly recommend Determined. 

Oh, and Fischer should be kept away from popular writing until he can understand what he’s writing about and be honest in his criticism.

h/t:Barry

Scientific American on a philosophical grift: panpsychism

October 1, 2023 • 9:30 am

Well, Scientific American has published an article that, while on a subject of questionable interest, is at least neither woke nor wrong. The topic is panpsychism, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines this way:

Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. The view has a long and venerable history in philosophical traditions of both East and West, and has recently enjoyed a revival in analytic philosophy.

The old and new forms of panpsychism were advanced because of our present failure to completely understand where consciousness comes from. Thus panpsychism offers an easy way out: we’re conscious because everything is conscious.  That, of course, doesn’t solve the “hard problem” of how a brain-carrying organism can be conscious. Our failure to completely understand where consciousness comes from, say the panpsychics, is because we’re working on the wrong level: we just need to show that all bits of the universe are inherently conscious. Problem solved!

No, not solved!

First, a failure to understand something doesn’t mean that we’re taking the wrong approach; it could just mean that the problem is a difficult one. We don’t know where and how the first self-replicating organism evolved, but we don’t say that every bit of the universe has a form of replication, and thus the problem is solved.

In the “revival” forms of panpsychism (about which I’ve written many posts), promulgated most vociferously by Philip Goff, the claim is that every bit of the universe has some form of consciousness, however rudimentary.  This includes particles like electrons.  (They never specify the form of consciousness enjoyed by, say, electrons.) When the particles, though evolution, are assembled into a creature like a human, this assembly somehow makes the entire creature “conscious” in the way we think of (go here for a discussion of what consciousness is; I’m just referring to the common construal: self-awareness and the ability to perceive sensations).

But there has been no progress in understanding whether panpsychism could be true since it was proposed a long time ago, and that’s for several reasons:

  1.  We know no way of demonstrating that inanimate objects, like rocks and neutrons, have some form of consciousness.
  2. We know no way of showing that the combination of rudimentary consciousnesses, as in the constituent particle of our brain, will somehow, when assembled in an organism, make it conscious. This is called the “combination problem.”
  3. As far as we know, consciousness requires a complex nervous system in a living organism, which isn’t present in inanimate constituents of the universe or in dead individuals.
  4. We are making progress in the conventional view of consciousness, e.g, it’s either a byproduct of having a sufficiently complex nervous system or an evolved condition in which the brain was selected to create the phenomenon. (In both cases it’s a material phenomenon connected with how neurons are arranged.) We can change consciousness with brain stimulation, use psychological tricks to fool people into thinking they’re doing something consciously when they’re not, or vice versa, and we can take away or restore consciousness with drugs (e.g., anesthesia).

It’s because of these issues that panpsychism has made no scientific progress while the “materialistic” view of consciousness, the one that doesn’t assume that particles themselves are conscious, has made progress. Panpsychism, in my view, is promulgated by philosophical grifters, who crave the attention they get from propounding novel and counterintuitive theories. And surely on some level they must realize that there’s no way to go any further with their scientific program. They keep singing the same old tune without adding any words, i.e., evidence.

At any rate, the Sci Am piece below, by science journalist Dan Falk, gives an account of the arguments in favor of and against panpsychism made at a recent meeting at Marist College, a college founded as a Catholic school (but now denying any religious affiliation) in Poughkeepsie, New York. The meeting was organized by panpsychist proselytizer Philip Goff, who found it all too easy to get funding from the John Templeton Foundation, which loves stuff like panpsychism because it’s anti-materialistic and conjures up the numinous (“an electron is conscious?. Weird!”)

Goff, of the University of Durham in England, organized the recent event along with Marist philosopher Andrei Buckareff, [JAC: he seems to be a philosopher of religion as well as religious] and it was funded through a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In a small lecture hall with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson River, roughly two dozen scholars probed the possibility that perhaps it’s consciousness all the way down.

You can read the article for free, though if you know about panpsychism, you don’t need to. But if you don’t know about it, it gives a good summary of the arguments against it (there are no arguments for it except its claim that everything is conscious).  As usual, physicist Sean Carroll injects some sense into the discussion; he also had a big debate with Goff, as he has several times before (see below):

The crazy part of this all is that a lot of philosophers accept panpsychism, despite its numerous problems and scientific intractability. From the article (my emphasis):

Yet panpsychism runs counter to the majority view in both the physical sciences and in philosophy that treats consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, something that arises in certain complex systems, such as human brains. In this view, individual neurons are not conscious, but thanks to the collective properties of some 86 billion neurons and their interactions—which, admittedly, are still only poorly understood—brains (along with bodies, perhaps) are conscious. Surveys suggest that slightly more than half of academic philosophers hold this view, known as “physicalism” or “emergentism,” whereas about one third reject physicalism and lean toward some alternative, of which panpsychism is one of several possibilities.

How can philosophers fall for a panpsychic grift? I suppose it’s because they don’t really understand science, want to do down science (yes, some philosophers have that motivation), or apprehend the value of evidence in supporting or weakening a theory.  Here’s more (my bolding):

Many philosophers at the meeting appeared to share Goff’s concern that physicalism falters when it comes to consciousness. “If you know every last detail about my brain processes, you still wouldn’t know what it’s like to be me,” says Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosopher at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. “There is a clear explanatory gap between the physical and the mental.” Consider, for example, the difficulty of trying to describe color to someone who has only seen the world in black and white. Yanssel Garcia, a philosopher at the University of Nebraska Omaha, believes that physical facts alone are inadequate for such a task. “There is nothing of a physical sort that you could provide [a person who sees only in shades of gray] in order to have them understand what color experience is like; [they] would need to experience it themselves,” he says. “Physical science is, in principle, incapable of telling us the complete story.” Of the various alternatives that have been put forward, he says that “panpsychism is our best bet.”

First of all, those philosophers seem to be ignorant about how real scientists (as opposed to philosophers) are attacking the problem of consciousness and understanding its physical basis. More important, I think Goff would (and believe has) said that panpsychism is a physicalist theory. We just don’t know, physically, how the consciousness of electrons works. If it’s not physicalist, then it’s supernatural. But if you claim it’s an inherent property of matter, that’s a physicalist assertion, for one then needs to show how it’s an inherent property of matter. If you can’t, find another line of work.

Here’s some critique of the theory from the article (there’s no evidence offered in support of the theory except that it sounds good):

But panpsychism attracts many critics as well. Some point out that it doesn’t explain how small bits of consciousness come together to form more substantive conscious entities. Detractors say that this puzzle, known as the “combination problem,” amounts to panpsychism’s own version of the hard problem. The combination problem “is the serious challenge for the panpsychist position,” Goff admits. “And it’s where most of our energies are going.”

Others question panpsychism’s explanatory power. In his 2021 book Being You, neuroscientist Anil Seth wrote that the main problems with panpsychism are that “it doesn’t really explain anything and that it doesn’t lead to testable hypotheses. It’s an easy get-out to the apparent mystery posed by the hard problem.”

. . . During a well-attended public debate between Goff and Carroll, the divergence of their worldviews quickly became apparent. Goff said that physicalism has led “precisely nowhere,” and suggested that the very idea of trying to explain consciousness in physical terms was incoherent. Carroll argued that physicalism is actually doing quite well and that although consciousness is one of many phenomena that can’t be inferred from the goings-on at the microscopic level, it is nonetheless a real, emergent feature of the macroscopic world. He offered the physics of gases as a parallel example. At the micro level, one talks of atoms, molecules and forces; at the macro level, one speaks of pressure, volume and temperature. These are two kinds of explanations, depending on the “level” being studied—but present no great mystery and are not a failure on the part of physics.

Bringing up the gas laws was a smart thing to do, showing emergent physical properties that do not demonstrate a failure of physicalism. The gas laws may not be predictable from the laws of physics, but are consistent with the laws of physics. One more critique:

Seth, the neuroscientist, was not at the workshop—but I asked him where he stands in the debate over physicalism and its various alternatives. Physicalism, he says, still offers more “empirical grip” than its competitors—and he laments what he sees as excessive hand-wringing over its alleged failures, including the supposed hardness of the hard problem. “Critiquing physicalism on the basis that it has ‘failed’ is willful mischaracterization,” he says. “It’s doing just fine, as progress in consciousness science readily attests.” In a recently published article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Seth adds: “Asserting that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous does nothing to shed light on the way an experience of blueness is the way it is, and not some other way. Nor does it explain anything about the possible functions of consciousness, nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma.”

It’s clear that I think panpsychism is a big philosophical grift, and although I could be more charitable, I get angry when a philosophical equivalent of creationism, which is what panpsychism is, gets popular. Perhaps Goff and his colleagues really believe it, but unless they’re thick-headed they surely realize that there is no evidence in its favor and they haven’t offered a solution to the most crucial part of their theory: the combination problem. I predict with some confidence that panpsychism will go nowhere. As the Encyclopedia notes, the theory has a “long and venerable history”.  I’d disagree with the “venerable” part, but the fact that its history is long, but yet no progress has been made in documenting or understanding it, shows that it’s an intellectual dead end.

Here’s a three-year old video, which I believe I put up before, giving an audio debate between Carroll and Goff.  There’s no doubt that the physicist is the winner; Goff comes out licking his wounds.

For another video dismantling of panpsychism by Carroll, go here, and you can also see a paper by Carroll on the phenomenon here.

When I first read the Sci Am piece, I had the following email conversation with Matthew, also a critic of panpsychism:

Me: Why not a symposium on flat-earthism?
Matthew: I bet Templeton funded it.  Good guess. I mean, it’s right up their street. Imagine the real good they could do with all their dosh if they funded sensible things!

I hadn’t read the article when I had this exchange, but, sure enough, Matthew was right: the sticky fingers of Templeton are all over this symposium. To wit:

But I’ve had some second thoughts about Sci Am publishing this article, and don’t oppose it now. Panpsychism is not precisely equivalent to “flat earthism”, but only because a lot of people still believe in panpsychism, and if you pay attention to intellectual currents you’ll have heard about it. In my view, though panpsychism is nearly as scientifically worthless as flat earth theory or the “Loch Ness Monster” hypothesis, the public needs a place to understand what panpsychism is. Author Falk fills that bill, also showing (necessarily) panpsychism’s profound weaknesses. In that sense, Falk has done a good job, and I can’t fault Scientific American for publishing his piece.

Dan Dennett: a new book and an interview in the NYT

August 27, 2023 • 12:00 pm

I recently finished Dan Dennett‘s new autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking (cover below; click to get an Amazon link), and I was deeply impressed by what a full life the man has had (he’s 81).  I thought he spent most of his time philosophizing, writing, and teaching philosophy at Tufts; but it turns out that he had a whole other life that I knew little about: owning a farm in Maine, sailing all over the place in his boat, making tons of apple cider, hanging out with his pals (many of them famous), and traveling the world to lecture or study. Truly, I’d also be happy if I had a life that full. And, as Dan says in his interview with the NYT today, he’s left out hundreds of pages of anecdotes and other stuff.

Although I’ve taken issue with Dan’s ideas at times (I disagree with him on free will and on the importance of memes, for example), you can’t help but like the guy. He’s sometimes passionate in his arguments, but he’s never mean, and of course he looks like Santa Claus. Once at a meeting in Mexico, I was accosted by Robert Wright, who was incensed that I’d given his book on the history of religion a bad review in The New Republic.  Wright plopped himself down beside me at lunch, so I was a captive audience, and proceeded to berate and harangue me throughout the meal. It was one of the worst lunch experiences I’ve ever had.

Because of Wright’s tirade, I was so upset that, after the meal was done, I went over to Dan, jumped in his lap, and hugged him (telling him why). I was greatly relieved, for it was like sitting on Santa’s lap. Now Santa, who’s getting on, has decided to sum up his career. The book is well worth reading, especially if you want to see how a philosopher has enacted a life well lived.

In today’s paper there’s a short interview with Dan by David Marchese, who has been touted as an expert interviewer. I didn’t think that Marchese’s questions were that great, but read for yourself (click below):

I’ll give a few quotes, mostly about atheism and “other ways of knowing,” First, the OWOK. Marchese’s questions are in bold; Dennett’s responses in plain text. And there are those annoying sidenotes that the NYT has started using, which I’ve omitted.

Right now it seems as if truth is in shambles, politics has become religion and the planet is screwed. What’s the most valuable contribution philosophers could be making given the state of the world? 

Well, let’s look at epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Eric Horvitz, the chief scientist at Microsoft, has talked about a “post-epistemic” world.

How? 

By highlighting the conditions under which knowledge is possible. This will look off track for a moment, but we’ll come around: Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s last theorem. 1990s, the British mathematician Andrew Wiles proved a theorem that had stumped mathematicians since it was proposed by Pierre de Fermat in 1637.

It was one of the great triumphs of mathematics in my lifetime. Why do we know that he did it? Don’t ask me to explain complex mathematics. It’s beyond me. What convinces me that he proved it is that the community of mathematicians of which he’s a part put it under scrutiny and said, “Yep, he’s got it.” That model of constructive and competitive interaction is the key to knowledge. I think we know that the most reliable path to truth is through communication of like-minded and disparate thinkers who devote serious time to trying to get the truth — and there’s no algorithm for that.

Note this bit: “the most reliable path to truth is through communication of like-minded and disparate thinkers who devote serious time to trying to get the truth.” This means that all knowledge, including the “other ways of knowing” of indigenous people, has to be vetted by like-minded and disparate thinkers. If it hasn’t been, it’s not another way of knowing, but only a way of claiming to know.

But wait! There’s more!

There’s a section in your book “Breaking the Spell” where you lament the postmodern idea that truth is relative. How do we decide which truths we should treat as objective and which we treat as subjective? I’m thinking of an area like personal identity, for example, where we hear phrases like, “This is my truth.” 

The idea of “my truth” is second-rate. The people who think that because this is their opinion, somehow it’s aggressive for others to criticize or reject them — that’s a self-defeating and pernicious attitude. The recommended response is: “We’d like to bring you into the conversation, but if you’re unable to consider arguments for and against your position, then we’ll consider you on the sidelines. You’re a spectator, not a participant.” You don’t get to play the faith card. That’s not how rational inquiry goes.

Marchese asks too many questions about AI and ChatGPT, topics which, while they may be important, bore me to tears. He also gets a bit too personal. He should have stopped inquiring after the first answer below.

There was something in your memoir that was conspicuous to me: You wrote about the late 1960s, when your pregnant wife had a bowel obstruction. 

Yeah, we lost the baby.

You describe it as “the saddest, loneliest, most terrifying” time of your life. 

Yes.

That occupies one paragraph of your memoir. 

Yes.

What is it indicative of about you — or your book — that a situation you described that way takes up such a small space in the recounting of your life? 

Look at the title of the book: “I’ve Been Thinking.” There are hundreds of pages of stories that I cut at various points from drafts because they were about my emotional life, my trials and so forth. This isn’t a tell-all book. I don’t talk about unrequited love, failed teenage crushes. There are mistakes I made or almost made that I don’t tell about. That’s just not what the book’s about.

Finally, the good stuff about atheism and religion. Although regarded as one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism” along with Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris, Dan has been the least demonized of them, probably because he’s not a vociferous anti-theist and regards religion as a phenomenon deserving more philosophical study than opprobrium. Nevertheless, he makes no bones about his unbelief:

We have a soul, but it’s made of tiny robots. There is no God. These are ideas of yours that I think a lot of people can rationally understand, but the gap between that rational understanding and their feelings involves too much ambivalence or ambiguity for them to accept. What is it about you that you can arrive at those conclusions and not feel adrift, while other people find those ideas too destabilizing to seriously entertain? 

Some people don’t want magic tricks explained to them. I’m not that person. When I see a magic trick, I want to see how it’s done. People want free will or consciousness, life itself, to be real magic. What I want to show people is, look, the magic of life as evolved, the magic of brains as evolving in between our own ears, that’s thrilling! It’s affirming. You don’t need miracles. You just need to understand the world the way it really is, and it’s unbelievably wonderful. We’re so lucky to be alive! The anxiety that people feel about giving up the traditional magical options, I take that very seriously. I can feel that anxiety. But the more I understood about the things I didn’t understand, the more the anxiety ebbed. The more the joy, the wondrousness came back. At the end of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” I have my little hymn to life and the universe.  That’s my God — more wonderful than anything I could imagine in detail, but not magical.

So how do you understand religious belief? 

No problem at all. More people believe in belief in God than believe in God. [Marchese takes issue with this in a sidenote.] We should recognize it and recognize that people who believe in belief in God are sometimes very reluctant to consider that they might be wrong. What if I’m wrong? That’s a question I ask myself a lot. These people do not want to ask that question, and I understand why. They’re afraid of what they might discover. I want to give them an example of somebody who asks the question and is not struck down by lightning. I’m often quoted as saying, “There’s no polite way of telling people they’ve devoted their life to an illusion.” Actually, what I said was, “There’s no polite way of asking people to consider whether they’ve devoted their life to an illusion, but sometimes you have to ask it.”

There are better questions that could have been asked. For example, I would have asked Dan, “What do you think has been your greatest contribution to philosophy?” and “What has been your biggest error in your work on philosophy?”  Readers might suggest other questions below, though I’m not going to convey them to Dan!

A photo of Dan en famille, with caption, from the interview. I knew him only after his beard turned white, so I wouldn’t have recognized him:

Two of my photos of Dan. The first is in Cambridge, MA, on the way to the “Moving Naturalism Forward” meeting in 2016. We drove the three hours from Boston to Stockbridge, and Richard had to fly back early because of a hurricane warning. Ergo Dan argued with me about free will for three hours’ return drive on the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston (it was not covered with snow). That was something to remember, but I gave no ground:

And Dan at a symposium on religion at the University of Chicago in 2019.  It was tedious at times, and I think Dan is showing some impatience here with the annoying lucubrations of Reza Aslan.

Are insects sentient?

June 25, 2023 • 9:45 am

The Oxford English Dictionary gives three relevant definitions of the adjective “sentient”:

a.) That feels or is capable of feeling; having the power or function of sensation or of perception by the senses.

b.) Conscious or percipient of something.

c.) Physiology. Of organs or tissues: Responsive to sensory stimuli.

(“Sentience” itself is defined only as “The condition or quality of being sentient, consciousness, susceptibility to sensation.”)

The question that the Scientific American article below asks (and for once it’s written by a scientist in this field) is whether insects fit the definition of the first two definitions: do they have feelings and sensations experiencing qualia like pain, joy, pleasure, or the sensation of “redness”?  Or are insects merely chitinous robots that are programmed by evolution to act (to us) as if they have feelings—programmed reactions that we anthropormophize as similar to our own sensations? After all, you can be “responsive to sensory stimuli” (the third sense above) without actually feeling the sensory stimuli the way humans do.

Answering the question of whether a bee or a fly is sentient in the first two senses, or has consciousness (the ability to be sentient and perceive stimuli), is difficult. Some would say it’s impossible. After all, we all know that we ourselves have consciousness  and feel pain and joy, because we experience those things personally. But can I prove that, say, another person is conscious? Not directly, because we can’t get inside their brains. We infer that they’re conscious because they tell us they are; they are physically constructed with the same neurons that give us consciousness; and they act as if they experience qualia.  It’s inference, but of a Bayesian sort, and the question has high priors.

But can we extend this to other species?  Chittka uses the example of dogs:

Although there is still no universally accepted, single experimental proof for pain experiences in any animal, common sense dictates that as we accumulate ever more pieces of evidence that insects can feel, the probability that they are indeed sentient increases. For example, if a dog with an injured paw whimpers, licks the wound, limps, lowers pressure on the paw while walking, learns to avoid the place where the injury happened and seeks out analgesics when offered, we have reasonable grounds to assume that the dog is indeed experiencing something unpleasant.

This is a Bayesian approach to the question, and it’s really the only way to go. Yes, I think it’s highly probable that dogs, and most mammals, feel pain. But what about insects, reptiles and amphibians? They certainly avoid unpleasant stimuli and gravitate towards pleasant ones, which you could interpret as feeling joy, pleasure, or pain, but do they feel these sensations? If you say that the behavior denotes sentience, well remember that protozoans do these things, too (see below).

I’m fully aware that philosophers of mind have probably discussed this issue at length, and I haven’t followed that literature, so my musings here may seem childish to these philosophers.  But this Sci. Am. article (click below to read, or find it archived here) is not written for philosophers of mind but for people like me: folks interested in science and wanting to see what’s happening in other fields.  I found the article quite interesting, and for me it slightly raised the probability that insects can feel pain. But the answer remains far from settled—or even of having a high probability. And the author admits that. But he cites a number of cool studies.

Here are the lines of evidence that, to Chittka, raise the Bayesian probability that insects have sentience: experiencing pain, pleasure, and even joy.

a.) They learn and can do really smart things. (All quotes from Chittka are indented):

The conventional wisdom about insects has been that they are automatons—unthinking, unfeeling creatures whose behavior is entirely hardwired. But in the 1990s researchers began making startling discoveries about insect minds. It’s not just the bees. Some species of wasps recognize their nest mates’ faces and acquire impressive social skills. For example, they can infer the fighting strengths of other wasps relative to their own just by watching other wasps fight among themselves. Ants rescue nest mates buried under rubble, digging away only over trapped (and thus invisible) body parts, inferring the body dimension from those parts that are visible above the surface. Flies immersed in virtual reality display attention and awareness of the passing of time. Locusts can visually estimate rung distances when walking on a ladder and then plan their step width accordingly (even when the target is hidden from sight after the movement is initiated).

All of these responses, of course, could come from computers programmed to learn from experience, which is exactly what we and other animals are. Natural selection has endowed us with a neuronal network that will make us behave in ways to further our reproduction (or, sometimes, that of our group—like an ant colony). We can program computers to do this, too: robots that avoid aversive stimuli and gravitate towards good ones. And clearly we behave in such a way that furthers our reproduction, of which survival is one component. But do insects experience the world, with its pleasures and pains, by having qualia similar to ours?

A related question is this: is consciousness like we have (feeling pain and joy) something that’s merely an epiphenomenon of having evolved a sufficiently complex nervous system, or is consciousness itself a product of natural selection to further our reproduction? We don’t know the answer, but it’s pretty clear that some of our conscious experiences, like pain, have evolved by selection. People who can’t feel pain as a result of neurological conditions or disease (like Hansen’s disease) quickly start getting infections, hurting their bodies without being aware, losing fingers, and the like. If you didn’t experience pain when putting your hand in boiling water, you’d damage your body. But if consciousness is just an epiphenomenon of a complex evolved nervous system, then we can’t automatically say that bees that act as if they’re conscious really are conscious.

I’m prepared to believe, based on what I said above, that mammals feel pain.  Maybe even reptiles or amphibians, though there are suggestions that fish don’t feel pain, at least in the way we do. All these creatures gravitate towards adaptive things and avoid nonadaptive ones, but again, they could be programmed to do so without the ancillary conscious experience that we have.

More evidence from Chittka:

b.) Insects act as if they can alter their consciousness:

Many plants contain bitter substances such as nicotine and caffeine to deter herbivores, but these substances are also found in low concentrations in some floral nectars. Researchers wondered whether pollinators might be deterred by such nectars, but they discovered the opposite. Bees actively seek out drugs such as nicotine and caffeine when given the choice and even self-medicate with nicotine when sick. Male fruit flies stressed by being deprived of mating opportunities prefer food containing alcohol (naturally present in fermenting fruit), and bees even show withdrawal symptoms when weaned off an alcohol-rich diet.

Again, seeking out things that are good for you, like curing you of illness or infection, could be programmed, either directly or as part of programs involved in “learning what gets rid of harmful conditions”. Now if bees are partial to coffee and cigarettes because it gets them high, then yes, it seems to show that they want to alter their consciousness, which implies that they have consciousness. But these facts aren’t that convincing to me, because nicotine and caffeine may have other beneficial physiological effects.

c.) Bees appear to be “optimistic”. Here’s the experiment Chittka adduces to support  that:

We trained one group of bees to associate the color blue with a sugary reward and green with no reward, and another group of bees to make the opposite association. We then presented the bees with a turquoise color, a shade intermediate between blue and green. A lucky subset of bees received a surprise sugar treat right before seeing the turquoise color; the other bees did not. The bees’ response to the ambiguous stimulus depended on whether they received a treat before the test: those that got the pretest sugar approached the intermediate color faster than those that didn’t.

The results indicate that when the bees were surprised with a reward, they experienced an optimistic state of mind. This state, which was found to be related to the neurotransmitter dopamine, made the bees more upbeat, if you will, about ambiguous stimuli—they approached it as they would the blue or green colors they were trained to associate with a reward.

This is not a meaningless experiment, but to me shows only that bees conditioned to approach a color after a sugar reward are more likely to approach something like that color than those who weren’t conditioned.  To call this “optimism” seems to me hyperbolically anthropomorphic.

d). Bees appear to experience “joy”.  This experiment is more suggestive to me:

Other work suggests that bees can experience not only optimism but also joy. Some years ago we trained bumblebees to roll tiny balls to a goal area to obtain a nectar reward—a form of object manipulation equivalent to human usage of a coin in a vending machine. In the course of these experiments, we noticed that some bees rolled the balls around even when no sugar reward was being offered. We suspected that this might be a form of play behavior.

Recently we confirmed this hunch experimentally. We connected a bumblebee colony to an arena equipped with mobile balls on one side, immobile balls on the other, and an unobstructed path through the middle that led to a feeding station containing freely available sugar solution and pollen. Bees went out of their way to return again and again to a “play area” where they rolled the mobile balls in all directions and often for extended periods without a sugar reward, even though plenty of food was provided nearby. There seemed to be something inherently enjoyable in the activity itself. In line with what other researchers have observed in vertebrate creatures at play, young bees engaged more often with the balls than older ones. And males played more than females (male bumblebees don’t work for the colony and therefore have a lot more time on their hands). These experiments are not merely cute—they provide further evidence of positive emotionlike states in bees.

It’s hard to understand these results without thinking that bees, like panda cubs, are playful, messing around with balls that give them pleasure. And since bees don’t experience balls in their natural state, they could be enjoying the novelty. On the other hand, they could simply be encountering something they haven’t experienced, and are following neuronal instructions to manipulate it to see how it operates, which could be useful knowledge in the future. This second interpretation means that no “pleasure” need be involved. Remember, play behavior in animals is often there to prepare them for what happens when they become adults, and isn’t just there for pleasure.

Again, it’s hard to judge from such studies whether bees are feeling pleasure in the way we do. But to me this makes it marginally more likely.

Finally,

e). Bees appear to weigh pain against pleasure, and change their behaviors when the balance is altered.  Here’s another experiment:

We decided to do an experiment with only moderately unpleasant stimuli, not injurious ones—and one in which bees could freely choose whether to experience these stimuli.

We gave bees a choice between two types of artificial flowers. Some were heated to 55 degrees Celsius (lower than your cup of coffee but still hot), and others were not. We varied the rewards given for visiting the flowers. Bees clearly avoided the heat when rewards for both flower types were equal. On its own, such a reaction could be interpreted as resulting from a simple reflex, without an “ouch-like” experience. But a hallmark of pain in humans is that it is not just an automatic, reflexlike response. Instead one may opt to grit one’s teeth and bear the discomfort—for example, if a reward is at stake. It turns out that bees have just this kind of flexibility. When the rewards at the heated flowers were high, the bees chose to land on them. Apparently it was worth their while to endure the discomfort. They did not have to rely on concurrent stimuli to make this trade-off. Even when heat and reward were removed from the flowers, bees judged the advantages and disadvantages of each flower type from memory and were thus able to make comparisons of the options in their minds.

To me, this really shows nothing more than that animals are attracted to adaptive stimuli and repelled by harmful ones, with the addition of being able to balance harms versus advantages. (This is like the “flight distance” of animals, with some individuals able to give more weight to attractive stimuli. That’s probably how cats got domesticated!) But it doesn’t tell us whether animals are feeling the pain or attraction the way we do.

And we should remember that even protozoans show avoidance of some external stimuli and can be induced by electrical shocks to avoid light. So these animals can be trained. Do they feel pain or pleasure? I doubt it—not protozoa!  They may not show “play” behavior, but perhaps they can be trained to weigh aversive versus adaptive stimuli, as in section “d” above.  I doubt anybody would conclude with confidence that protozoa feel pain the way we do (they don’t have a nervous system) or are even conscious.

Against the doubts that I’ve raised, Chittka offers a counterargument:

Critics could argue that each of the behaviors described earlier could also be programmed into a nonconscious robot. But nature cannot afford to generate beings that just pretend to be sentient. Although there is still no universally accepted, single experimental proof for pain experiences in any animal, common sense dictates that as we accumulate ever more pieces of evidence that insects can feel, the probability that they are indeed sentient increases.

The first sentence is what I have said already. And I’m willing to go along with the third sentence, too: as we learn more, the Bayesian probability that other species experience pain or pleasure can increase or decrease.

But I’m not willing to go along with the idea that “nature cannot afford to generate beings that just pretend to be sentient.”  What does he mean by “afford”? My interpretation is this: he’s saying that natural selection cannot produce organisms that act as if they’re sentient unless they really are sentient. And I cannot see any support for that, for we already know that protozoans act as if they experience qualia, but almost certainly don’t. And saying “pretend to be sentient” is pretty anthropormorphic! It implies, for example, that programmed robots that do what bees do are “pretending to be sentient” when in fact we know they are NOT sentient.

Finally, that leads to the Big AI Question: if we generate robots sufficiently complex that they respond exactly as humans do in complex situations requiring consciousness, does that mean that they have become conscious?  I say “no”, but others disagree.  After all, there are those panpsychists who say that even electrons and rocks have a rudimentary form of consciousness.

I’m writing this on the fly, so forgive me if my thoughts are half-baked.  I do think that Chtittka’s experiments are clever, and, over time, may give us a sense of sentience in other species. But I’m not yet ready to throw in with him on the claim that insects are conscious.  It’s enough for me now to realize that they do experience some aspects of the environment as things to be avoided. And that is why I have always anesthetized my fruit flies before killing them. (When I was an undergrad I used to take them to the biology department roof and let them go, but my advisor Bruce Grant nixed that on the grounds that I was polluting the natural gene pool of Drosophila.)

The last bit of Chittka’s paper is a thoughtful analysis of how these kinds of studies should condition our behavior towards insects. But even if they don’t feel pain, aversion or attraction itself should help us confect a philosophy of “insect ethics.”

h/t: Howard, who brought this paper to my attention and wanted my take on it. I’m sending him this link as my take.

More on free will from Sabine Hossenfelder

June 4, 2023 • 9:35 am

Several readers, knowing of my interest in free will, sent me the link to the video at the bottom by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. Thanks to all, and to Adrian, who sent the link first. My summary and analysis precede the video.

In October of 2020, Hossenfelder declared that libertarian free will—i.e., the “I-could-have-done-otherwise-using-my-volition” form—didn’t exist. I agree with her, of course, for we’re both “naturalists” and “hard determinists.” If you think matter obeys the laws of physics, which is universally accepted in science,  then there’s no room for mental lucubrations that could somehow tweak the laws of physics (Mental lucubrations are instantiations of physical law!) That’s why she (and I) think that, as far as libertarian free will is concerned, “it’s obvious that we don’t have it.”

Hossenfelder notes that some find the “freedom” in “free will” via occasional quantum jumps of particles on top of deterministic physical determinism. It’s possible that these jumps could, at any given moment, produce different outcomes in the next moment, but that of course depends on whether our behavior or thoughts are affected by quantum phenomena. (We have no idea.) But even were that true, those quantum jumps can’t come from “will”, so there is no “freedom” from physical determination of behavior. Volition is an illusion.

However, Hossenfelder is dubious about whether quantum jumps are really random phenomena: she appears to be a full-on determinist who thinks that the wave function, which includes quantum behavior, itself behaves deterministically. (This bit is way above my pay grade, but still leaves no room for some numinous “will”. I’ll let physicists argue about the “randomness” of quantum mechanics.)

Hossenfelder goes on to describe “emergent properties” like conductivity, which makes no sense unless you talk about a collection of electrons. This, however, doesn’t do away with determinism, for it is the laws of physics that produces emergent properties as the consequence of underlying laws. Emergent properties may not yet be predictable from the laws of physics, but they are all absolutely consistent with the laws of physics.

Finally, she goes on to discuss compatibilism: the view that free will and determinist can coexist happily and without contradiction. Like me, she regards this view as simply an exercise in philosophical semantics that does noting to dispel the fact that we lack libertarian free will in the classical sense. (Remember, that brand of free will is the one most accepted by people in several countries, and is of course a mainstay of Abrahamic religion as well as other forms of religion.)  Compatibilism, to me, is like religion: a “little people’s” view confected with the idea that unless people believe certain creeds, society will fall apart.

Here are the forms of compatibilism Hossenfelder presents (I note with some amusement that different philosophers find many different ways to make free will compatible with the laws of physics, and some of the forms of compatibilism are incompatible with each other).

a. ) Some philosophers say that “Human decisions are to a large extent independent from external factors and are dominantly determined by internal deliberation.” This seems confusing to me because “internal deliberations” are simply examples of “external factors,” i.e. the laws of physics acting on our bodies and brains. If you say that they aren’t, then you are a dualist who accepts libertarian free will.

b.) Hossenfelder’s chracterization of Dan Dennett’s compatibilism:  “Our ability to see probable futures–futures that seem like they’re going to happen, and then to take steps to make something else happens instead.” Those steps, of course, are also determined by the laws of physics.

c.) Another brand of free will is due to “The large degree of autonomy that our brain has from environmental factors.” This has the same problems as (a) above.

d.) Free will occurs because “our decisions follow from what we want”. And yes, we do make decisions according to what we want, because what we want is simply the result of our genes and environment and is and thus coded in our brain.  People generally act consistently with their character, because their character is consistent with their evolved and structured brains.

Hossenfelder presents the results of a 2020 survey about philosophers’ acceptance of libertarian free will vs. compatibilism vs. determinism (what I call “naturalism”). The results of the survey are given in the screenshot below, which I lifted from her video.

Most philosophers are compatibilists, which is a view that, I think, people hold because although these philosophers really do accept Hossenfelder’s claim that there is no libertarian free will, they think that some notion of free will is essential for people to be able to function without drowning in nihilism. (That’s not true.) But at least more philosophers are compatibilists than are “regular people”.  What is disturbs me is that nearly 1 in 5 philosophers (probably the religious ones) are free-will libertarians: more than are “hard determinists” like Hossenfelder and me.

She does take up the question (one I’m often asked when I lecture on why we lack free will), “Why don’t you just kill yourself since everything is more or less determined?” Her answer is a good one: those people should see a psychologist. I manage to hang onto being a hard determinist, though of course I act as if I can make free decisions. We can’t live without feeling that way because that’s just the way our brains are constructed. Perhaps the illusion of libertarian free will is an evolved trait. I can think of several reasons why natural selection, for instance, would drive us to think we make free choices, or perhaps it’s just an epiphenomenon. But I won’t wade into those waters here.

In the end Hossenfelder adds two points:

1.) The free-will problem arises because “the way we think our brain works is not compatible with the facts of science”. But the way we think our brain works is an illusion.

2.) Why does this issue matter? Because, says Hossenfelder, “free will is an inaccurate description of reality” and “makes people believe that they have more control over what goes on in their head than is really the case.”  Example: “Our brains will process input whether we want to our not; once it’s in and we can’t get it out. That’s why trauma is so hard to cope with and misinformation so hard to combat”. This, she says, is a result of our physically-mandated and evolved neuronal processing of inputs. I would add that perhaps it’s possible, through therapy, to mitigate trauma. That, of course, would be the deterministic result of a traumatized person going to a therapist skilled in this art. But no determinist claims that such external influences cannot have an effect.

Sabine closes by declaring that she’s a hard determinist and that we have no free will in the commonly-accepted sense of “libertarian” free will. It’s good to hear from a kindred spirit, though this video is fairly similar to the one she put up several years ago. Still, determinism is like atheism: you have to keep emphasizing it to get the truth before new generations of people.

A short Forbes magazine interview with Peter Singer

May 24, 2023 • 1:00 pm

I’m posting this clip for two reasons. First, it’s a Forbes Magazine interview with a philosopher I much admire: Peter Singer. He’s admirable because he deals with philosophy’s original purpose: to figure out how to live a good life; because he deals with tough questions (one of them here: the euthanasia of terminally suffering newborns, which he discusses at 6:45); because, even when attacked he defends his ideas with tenacity; because he walks the walk, giving a lot of his income to others; and because does a lot of charitable work. Despite calls to get him fired because of his views on infant euthanasia, he maintains his equanimity and simply proffers a defense of his stand that I, for one, find convincing. And, of course, he spends a lot of time dealing with animal welfare, which a biologist has to admire (sadly, I’m too hypocritical to give up eating meat, but Singer abjures it).

Second, because he’s one of the founders of The Journal of Controversial Ideas, I was chuffed to hear that he talks about our paper recently published there, “In defense of merit in science” (between 9:30 and 13:00). I’m not sure who the interviewer is, but she seems to push on our merit thesis because in some ways it opposes racial diversity. Singer, in response, seems dubious about the idea of equity trumping merit.

They begin by discussing Singer’s new book (an update, actually): Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed, which came out on Tuesday. I read the original book  (Animal Liberation), which was when he first came to my consciousness. I also admire his book The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress., which suggests how our evolved ethical system has been extended to all humanity.

p.s. Singer has compiled a list of charities where, he thinks, you can get the most relief of suffering for your dollar. I’ve used that list, which you can find here, to decide who will get my money when I die.