Although I’m suffering from jet lag, I’ll treat you today to a post on free will and “compatibilism”. Yes, I can hear the groans of distress as I write this, but my advice to you is the same as my advice to those who complain about Milo Yiannopoulos lecturing at Berkeley: if you don’t want to hear this, just skip the post. But of course philosophical rumination is far less offensive than are the lucubrations of Milo.

The post at issue was written on the Naturalism website by Tom Clark, who reads this site and will undoubtedly reply below, taking me to task. Such is my fate, but I must say what I think. Tom is a good writer and a clear thinker, but we have disagreements about his views on compatibilism, the idea that while determinism reigns in human behavior—absent truly stochastic quantum phenomena, we can behave in only one way at one time, and that behavior is the deterministic result of our genes and our environments)—nevertheless we can define a form of free will that can harmonize determinism and some concept of “freedom”. That also allows people to believe—a belief that they’re said to need—that they are in some sense autonomous beings who can make choices. Without that belief, some philosophers (Dan Dennett is one) think that society would fall apart, for our feeling that we have free will is essential to keep us up and at it. (He doesn’t add that most people think of free will in the “libertarian, ghost-in-the-machine” sense that virtually all secular philosophers have rejected.

I agree that we are autonomous beings (by that I mean we can distinguish different people), and that we appear to make choices that look as if we could have chosen otherwise. But that’s an illusion. And I’m not a big fan of philosophers spending their time trying to tell us what kind of “free will” we really have—especially because in global surveys, most people think of free will in the libertarian sense that Clark, Dennett, and other compatibilists reject: the “you-could-have-done-otherwise” form of behavior.

Further, as I’ve said before, I fail to understand why philosophers spend their time trying to harmonize free will and determinism when the really useful thing they could be doing—the kind of philosophy that really makes a difference in society—is to work out the consequences of determinism, especially with respect to the judicial system. If you think people are wholly products of their genes and environments, and had no choice about doing crimes (or doing good stuff), then that mandates a big rethink in our judicial system: one geared not toward retribution, but toward rehabilitation, deterrence, and keeping people out of society until we deem them no longer harmful. In other words, a judicial system like the one Norway has.

Now I know some readers say that compatibilism implies identica changes in the judicial system, and they may be right. It’s just that compatibilists tend to spend reams of paper and gazillions of electrons telling us what “free will” really is, and never seem to get around to talking about judicial reform. Frankly, I don’t care whether you redefine the libertarian form of “free will” accepted by most people; what’s important to me are the social consequences of determinism.

But let’s look at Tom’s 2015 piece, “What should we tell people about free will?” First, he mentions a video by Dan Dennett that explicitly claims that it’s “mischievous” for neuroscientists to tell people they don’t have free will, because such information could have inimical social effects. This is, in other words, the “little people’s argument” (TLPA)—the same kind of argument used to justify promoting religion even if it isn’t true.  I reject TLPA, just as I reject the claim that we should tell people there’s an imaginary God even if we reject that, for atheism supposedly makes people behave badly. The “experiment” that Dennett mentions about students’ disbelief in free will making them behave badly has not been replicated, so you can ignore his “evidence.”

I find it ironic that Dennett, who would never urge us to redefine “God” so philosophers could tell people there is a god—because society needs a concept of “god” to function well—nevertheless does the same thing with “free will.”

To his credit, Clark accepts determinism, but offers a new concept of free will (my emphasis):

We can thus see that the free will wars – disputes about whether or not we should go around denying free will, and what free will really is – are a function of differing definitions. If you’re referring to our capacity for voluntary choice-making that gives us rational control over our behavior, and that makes us responsible, then it would be wrong to deny that. If, on the other hand, you’re referring to a contra-causal capacity that supposedly makes us more responsible than what deterministic voluntary action affords, then it would be wrong not to deny that, at least on the assumption that we want a well-informed public. So the first order of business when discussing free will is to make clear what you’re talking about, then make your point.

He expands on this in the quote below:

If you tell people they couldn’t have done otherwise in an actual situation, this might strike them as saying they don’t have control, that we are victims of determinism. If we can have done only what we did, given the circumstances as they were, how can we be free? The answer is that, should determinism be the case, we are still free in the sense that what we do, most of the time, is a function of our beliefs, desires, and intentions, so is up to us, not someone else. Even though things couldn’t have turned out otherwise, most of the time we are in control of our behavior, free from coercion or manipulation by others.

But what does it mean to say “most of the time we are in control of our behavior, free from coercion or manipulation by others”? First, we certainly reflect, in our behavior, the “coercion and manipulation by others” that has, over the history of our life, rewired our brains. Our backgrounds, moral instruction from parents and peers, and so on, have imposed a coercion on our behavior that is just as “coercive” as somebody making you give up your wallet by holding a gun to your head. After all, you didn’t have to give up that wallet! And if you start talking about people being coerced into doing things they wouldn’t do were the coercive agent not present, you get mired in the philosophical hinterlands of issues like “well, Fred sacrificed for his kids when he really would rather have been traveling on his own”.  Is that coercion? Who knows? Who cares? The important thing is that determinism has wired our brains in a way that, given one or a series of inputs, only one output—the “choice”—can be made.

Our brains are like immensely complex computers, wired up by our heredity and experiences, but they still behave like complex computers—the kind of computers that play chess. Such computers have been programmed by humans to achieve certain ends, like beating a grand maters, and they react to the chess moves of humans based on their wiring. They’re been programmed to respond to environmental inputs (their opponents’ moves) and they have an “adaptive” goal: to beat their human opponents.

In that sense, computers, like us, also have “beliefs,  desires and intentions”: they “believe” that their opponent wants to win and will make moves toward that end, their “desire” is for the computer to win, and their “intention” is to beat the opponent. Do computers, then, wired adaptively as humans were wired by evolution and experience, have free will? If not, why not? How do they differ in a substantive way from the definition given above?

I don’t see why, according to Clark’s definition, we have free will but computers don’t. Just because humans may have subjective feelings—”qualia”—and computers don’t is no reason to bestow us with a free will that machines don’t have. After all, you can program computers to have “beliefs, desire, and intentions,” and they’ll behave in a consistent way, just like humans behave in a consistent way based on their heredity and environment. And the juman consistency is called our “personality”

None of our personality is “up to us”. Yes, it is true that a being called “Jerry Coyne” can be identified as a behaving segment of humanity that can be singled out and subject to incarceration and rehabilitation if he does something bad.  But that bad stuff is programmed in me just as it could be programmed into a robot. In the end, while it sounds profound to say “our ‘choices’ are up to us”, it’s trivial. Of course they are, for each of us is an organism that has its own wiring that determines our outputs.  Only in that trivial sense can one say “we are in control of our behavior.” Admitting that is to admit only that a Macintosh computer is in control of its own output, and not the output of another Mac that was programmed separately and differently.

Now we normally don’t impute beliefs, desires, and intentions to computers, but insofar as they’re programmed to respond in different ways to different circumstances, there is no substantive difference between saying that humans are “free” because of our neuronal evolutionary/behavioral programming and saying that different computers are “free” because they may be programmed differently and give diverse outputs according to how they’ve been programmed. How does our “freedom” differ from that of a computer? And where is the “freedom” in this form of free will. What, exactly, is free?

It’s time for philosophers to stop wasting time on compatibilism, to start emphasizing determinism more, and then work out the consequences of that determinism. That’s what Peter Singer tried to do in his engagingly thoughtful book Practical Ethics. One of the great boons of philosophy is to use rational thought, combined with an assessment of human preference, to work out how we should live. That, after all, is how philosophy began, but somehow it got sidetracked by arcane academic arguments.

h/t: Julian