Plain talk about free will from a physicist: Stop saying you have it!

January 11, 2016 • 10:30 am

We’ve taken a break from the many discussions on this site about free will, but, cognizant of the risks, I want to bring it up again. I think nearly all of us agree that there’s no dualism involved in our decisions: they’re determined completely by the laws of physics. Even the pure indeterminism of quantum mechanics can’t give us free will, because that’s simple randomness, and not a result of our own “will.”

So although most of us are pure determinists about our behaviors, and reject the libertarian we-could-have-done-otherwise brand of free will embraced by most people and nearly all religionists, many of us are still compatibilists. By and large, compatibilists reject dualism and embrace determinism (and the randomness of quantum phenomena), but still say that humans have “free will”. (What is deemed “compatible” is determinism and some notion of free will.) To do that, they simply redefine the classical notion of dualistic free will so that it means something else: the lack of constraint by others, the evolved complexity of our brain that processes a variety of inputs before spitting out a “decision,” and so on.

Given that most people’s notion of free will is a dualistic ghost-in-the machine one, and that we know that’s false, it’s not clear why the classical definition of free will has been replaced by compatibilism rather than determinism. To those compatibilists who gladly embrace a new definition of “free will”, I ask these questions:

What is the point of redefining free will so that it’s compatible with determinism? And given that compatibilistic definitions are diverse and often conflicting, which one is right? Or does it even matter?

All too often, the point of compatibilism is not to create some philosophical advance, but merely an attempt to stave off the damage that rejecting dualistic free will is said to pose to society. Although compatibilists often cover that up, I think that many of their efforts are directed at keeping the Little People from seeing that determinism reigns. The motive is that people’s false belief that they really can make different decisions in exactly the same circumstances is essential to keep society running smoothly. In precisely the same way, religion-friendly atheists say that the Little People need their gods, because without them the fabric of society would unravel. (There are a lot of similarities between belief in free will and belief in God.)

Explicit statements that we need to retain some concept of free will for the good of society have been made by several people, including Dan Dennett, the most sophisticated purveyor of compatibilism (he has two books on it), philosopher Eddy Nahmias, and, in 2014, Azim Shariff and Kathleen Vohs, who warned of the dangers of rejecting free will in a Scientific American article (reference below, sadly not free). Vohs was co-author of a famous 2008 paper (reference below, pdf free) showing that reading a passage about determinism caused a short-term increase in students’ tendency to cheat in psychological tests. Their results, however, have not been replicated in two subsequent tests.

Nevertheless, in the Scientific American article Shariff and Vohs make an extended argument about the dangers of science telling us that we don’t have free will. Two snippets:

The less we believe in free will, it seems, the less strength we have to restrain ourselves from the urge to lie, cheat, steal and feed hot sauce to rude people.

Yes, in one of their studies people who read passages denying the existence of free will tended to put twice as much hot salsa on tortilla chips intended for someone else who’d acted like an ass. Can you imagine a society in which everyone tries to burn the palate of others? That would truly be a disaster!

After considering the potential effects that rejecting free will could have on society, Shariff and Vohs conclude this way:

In the 18th century Voltaire famously asserted that if God did not exist, we would need to invent him because the idea of God is so vital to keeping law and order in society. Given that a belief in free will restrains people from engaging in the kind of wrongdoing that could unravel an ordered society, the parallel is obvious. What will our society do if it finds itself without the concept of free will? It may well reinvent it.

And that’s precisely what they’ve done by inventing compatibilistic notions of free will!

Given the dubious claim that rejecting free will damages society, and the undoubted benefits to our judicial system of embracing determinism, I’m still baffled by why compatibilists continue to argue that we NEED some notion of free will. If you’re going to argue that in the comments, I’d appreciate your telling me why we have to have such a notion rather than just rejecting the idea and embracing determinism. And why is the notion you embrace better than the alternative forms of compatibilism? (As I said, compatibilism is a lot like religion.)

And if rejecting free will has bad effects on society, so what? Doesn’t the truth matter—the truth that neuroscience is telling us about the determinism of our actions? Those who are compatibilists for the good of society are no better than atheists who argue that while there’s probably no god, it’s crucial that the Little People still believe in one. My view is that we should simply find out what’s true, and then deal with it.

Finally, free will is important because it’s one of those issues where philosophy and science can really make a difference in peoples’ lives. Science tells us that our behavior is not under our conscious control, and philosophy can tell us how to apply that to issues like reward and punishment. There are not that many areas of academic philosophy that can actually affect the lives of the average person, but this is one. Why on Earth do we waste our time arguing about compatibilist definitions of free will, definitions that are too arcane to affect society or the average person?

I’ve gone on too long, but I wanted to call your attention to a good new critique of free will—both the dualistic and compatibilist verisons—by Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics. It’s on the BackReAction website, and is called “Free will is dead, let’s bury it“. Hossenfelder doesn’t pull any punches, and she writes very well. I’ll give a couple of excerpts:

There are only two types of fundamental laws that appear in contemporary theories. One type is deterministic, which means that the past entirely predicts the future. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no freedom. The other type of law we know appears in quantum mechanics and has an indeterministic component which is random. This randomness cannot be influenced by anything, and in particular it cannot be influenced by you, whatever you think “you” are. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no “will” – there is just some randomness sprinkled over the determinism.

In neither case do you have free will in any meaningful way.

These are the only two options, and all other elaborations on the matter are just verbose distractions. It doesn’t matter if you start talking about chaos (which is deterministic), top-down causation (which doesn’t exist), or insist that we don’t know how consciousness really works (true but irrelevant). It doesn’t change a thing about this very basic observation: there isn’t any known law of nature that lets you meaningfully speak of “free will”.

I consider compatibilism one of those “verbose distractions.” She then goes after the Chicken Little Compatibilists and cites the Shariff and Vohs article (that’s how I found it):

This conclusion that free will doesn’t exist is so obvious that I can’t help but wonder why it isn’t widely accepted. The reason, I am afraid, is not scientific but political. Denying free will is considered politically incorrect because of a wide-spread myth that free will skepticism erodes the foundation of human civilization.

For example, a 2014 article in Scientific American addressed the question “What Happens To A Society That Does not Believe in Free Will?” The piece is written by Azim F. Shariff, a Professor for Psychology, and Kathleen D. Vohs, a Professor of Excellence in Marketing (whatever that might mean).

In their essay, the authors argue that free will skepticism is dangerous: “[W]e see signs that a lack of belief in free will may end up tearing social organization apart,” they write. “[S]kepticism about free will erodes ethical behavior,” and “diminished belief in free will also seems to release urges to harm others.” And if that wasn’t scary enough already, they conclude that only the “belief in free will restrains people from engaging in the kind of wrongdoing that could unravel an ordered society.”

To begin with I find it highly problematic to suggest that the answers to some scientific questions should be taboo because they might be upsetting. They don’t explicitly say this, but the message the article send is pretty clear: If you do as much as suggest that free will doesn’t exist you are encouraging people to harm others. So please read on before you grab the axe.

Hossenfelder then goes on to criticize the Vohs and Schooler study for not showing what it claims to, and then dispels the canard that rejecting free will also denies people responsibility for what they do.

At the end she draws a connection between quantum mechanics and free will—a connection that eludes me. I know of the so-called “observer effect,” but didn’t realize that it, or Bell’s Theorem rejecting the existence of local hidden variables, had any connection to dualistic free will. So I invite readers to read what’s below and then enlighten me. And of course you are still welcome to defend compatibilism if you want, but do tell me why you think we have to retain a notion of free will. (All of us, of course, feel that we have free will, but that’s irrelevant.) At any rate, tell me what this means, especially the part I’ve bolded.

The reason I am hitting on the free will issue is not that I want to collapse civilization, but that I am afraid the politically correct belief in free will hinders progress on the foundations of physics. Free will of the experimentalist is a relevant ingredient in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Without free will, Bell’s theorem doesn’t hold, and all we have learned from it goes out the window.

This option of giving up free will in quantum mechanics goes under the name “superdeterminism” and is exceedingly unpopular. There seem to be but three people on the planet who work on this, ‘t Hooft, me, and a third person of whom I only learned from George Musser’s recent book (and whose name I’ve since forgotten).

h/t: Hector

______________

Vohs, K. D. and J. W. Schooler. 2008. The value of believing in free will: encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating. Psychol. Sci. 19:49-54.

Shariff, A. F. and K. D. Vohs. 2014. The world without free will. Scientific American. Scientific American 310:76-79.

Readers’ wildlife photos (and video)

January 11, 2016 • 7:45 am

My old friend Andrew Berry, who teaches and advises biology undergraduates at Harvard, recently went on a trip en famille to the Galápagos—as a lecturer on a university alumni cruise. He’s a good photographer, using the same Panasonic Lumix camera as I do, and he sent me a selection of what he calls his “holiday snaps.” There’s a video at the end, too. Captions are Andrew’s.

Galapagos flycatcher, Myiarchus magnirostris, (endemic), Floreana:

Female sea turtle somewhat grumpily emerging from the water to lay her eggs. Presumably Pacific Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas. Floreana, with Isla Campeon in the background.

Yellow crowned night heron Nyctanassa violacea posing patiently, Floreana.

The cause of the heron’s patience: a worm hole directly in front.

Charles Darwin wearing a curious purple finch head dress. San Cristobal.

In the Galapagos, prickly pear bushes have become trees. Opuntia echios. Floreana.

Male lava lizards, Microlophus sp, San Cristobal. Endemic.

Female lava lizard, Microlophus sp, San Cristobal. Endemic.

Sea lion, Zalophus californianus, obligingly providing some foreground.

Brown pelican, Pelicanus occidentalis, and blue-footed booby, Sula nebouxii. San Cristobal.

Lava gull goofing around, San Cristobal. Larus fuligionosus, endemic.

A sea lion unmoved by considerations of comfort when it comes to finding a spot of a bit of a lie-down. Zalophus californianus.

Marine iguana, icon of the Galapagos. Amblyrhynchus cristatus, endemic. San Cristobal. Darwin’s encounter was crudely experimental: “I threw one several times as far as I could, into a deep pool left by the retiring tide; but it invariably returned in a direct line to the spot where I stood. It swam near the bottom, with a very graceful and rapid movement, and occasionally aided itself over the uneven ground with its feet. As soon as it arrived near the edge, but still being under water, it tried to conceal itself in the tufts of sea-weed, or it entered some crevice. As soon as it thought the danger was past, it crawled out on the dry rocks, and shuffled away as quickly as it could. I several times caught this same lizard, by driving it down to a point, and though possessed of such perfect powers of diving and swimming, nothing would induce it to enter the water; and as often as I threw it in, it returned in the manner above described. Perhaps this singular piece of apparent stupidity may be accounted for by the circumstance, that this reptile has no enemy whatever on shore, whereas at sea it must often fall a prey to the numerous sharks. Hence, probably, urged by a fixed and hereditary instinct that the shore is its place of safety, whatever the emergency may be, it there takes refuge.”

Marine iguana, Española.

Galapagos dove, Zinaida galapagoenis, Española. Endemic.

Proud parent, Nazca booby. Sula granti. Española.

Swallow-tailed gull, Creagrus furcates. Endemic. Española.

Marine iguanas, Española.

Sally Lightfoot crab, Grapsus grapsus. Española.

Española mockingbird, Nesomimus macdonaldi. One of four species of Galápagos mockingbirds, each one on a different island. Darwin recognized differences among islands, but it wasn’t until he talked in London to the ornithologist John Gould that he came to appreciate that the differences were sufficient to qualify the mockingbirds as separate species. This Española species is particularly tame; here one is investigating the contents of my backpack.

Española mockingbird, Nesomimus macdonaldi, on the beach at Gardner Bay. This is a mockingbird territorial face-off. Galapagos mockingbirds are co-operative breeders, meaning that a few individuals breed, and others help out. They form cooperative groups of as many as 25 individuals, which defend their group territories using the remarkable “dance” seen in the video at bottom (shot at the same time as the photo above was taken).

Land iguana, Conolophus subcristatus, Baltra Island. Endemic. Darwin was a little unkind about this species: “Ugly animals, of a yellowish orange beneath and of a brownish red colour above: from their low facial angle they have a singularly stupid appearance”

Giant tortoise, Geochelone elephantopus, Santa Cruz. Endemic. Darwin famously missed the boat on this species. He was told upon arrival in the Galapagos that it was possible to tell from the structure of a tortoise’s carapace the island from which it was derived. However, he failed to follow up on this and his discovery of the role of geographic isolation in the genetic divergence of populations had to wait. He preferred instead, it seems, to ride the beasts: “I was always amused when overtaking one of these great monsters as it was quietly pacing along, to see how suddenly, the instant I passed it, it would draw in its head and legs, and uttering a deep hiss fall to the ground with a heavy sound, as if struck dead. I frequently go on their backs, and then, giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away — but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.”

Andrew also sent a video with these notes:

Española mockingbird, Nesomimus macdonaldi, on the beach at Gardner Bay. This is a mockingbird territorial face-off, with two groups noisily contesting a territory boundary. Galapagos mockingbirds are co-operative breeders, meaning that a few individuals breed, and others help out. They form cooperative groups of as many as 25 individuals, who defend their group territories using the remarkable “dance” seen here. Video by Megan Berry.

David Bowie died

January 11, 2016 • 6:30 am

I had no idea that David Bowie, the Chameleon of Music, had cancer, but he’d apparently been ill for 18 months. Sadly, he died from the disease yesterday at the young age of 69. I just read a good piece in the New Yorker on his new album, but it didn’t mention he was sick.

The BBC has a nice obituary with pictures and videos; and the longer New York Times obit, with a slideshow, is here. The NYT also published a collection of tributes, ranging from Madonna to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I wasn’t a huge fan of his (I simply wasn’t aware of what he was doing), but he did record two songs that, to me, are classics: “Young Americans” and, especially, “Changes”. I’ll put them below. The best obituary, however, appeared today at the East Finchley tube station in London, tw**ted by Charlie Elliott:

https://twitter.com/charlienin/status/686471057801371648?s=03

“Changes”:

“Young Americans”:

If you liked Bowie, or have any favorite tunes, please weigh in below (try not to post YouTube videos, though!)

It’s cold!

January 11, 2016 • 6:19 am

When I was a wee kid, my father used to tell me one of his patented jokes, always at bedtime. Here’s how it went:

Floyd: Jerry, did you ever hear about the kee-kee bird? It lives at the North Pole!

Little Jerry: No, dad. Why do they call it the kee-kee bird?

Floyd: Because it sits up there at the Pole and calls, “Kee kee kee kee KEE-RIST, it’s cold!

And so it is in Chicago today; I damn near froze my face off on the 11-minute walk to work:

Fahrenheit:

Celsius (note the minus sign):

Photo on 1-11-16 at 6.12 AM

At that’s not even near as cold as it gets!

But of course, that’s nothing. When I was a lad in Yorkshire, the temperature used to be close to absolute zero when we walked to school (uphill both ways).

Monday: Hili dialogue (and squirrel lagniappe)

January 11, 2016 • 5:30 am

I woke up to the sad and surprising news that David Bowie died yesterday. The next post, in an hour, will be a brief obituary. Given that, I don’t have the heart to go over things that happened this day in history. In Dobrzyn, though, life goes on, and Hili is again being duplicitous—though I suppose it’s redundant to use the phrase “duplicitous cat”.)

A: Hili, get down from this table.

I just wanted to say bon appétit.

In Polish:

Ja: Hili, zejdź z tego stołu!

Hili: Chciałam wam tylko powiedzieć bon appétit.

Here’s a bonus photo of Hili and Cyrus essaying a companionable walk in the snow:

Finally, Anne-Marie Cournoyer sends a daily squirrel from snowbound Montreal, along with some notes:

We’ve been visited by the rare Abominable Snow Squirrel, a.k.a. as the Nutsquatch. He’s a relative of the famous Yeti. Fits the description: large, hairy, muscular, bipedal when needed, squirrel-like creature, roughly 1 foot tall, covered in hair described as grey, white and brownish. Likes to say: “Go ahead, make my day!”

Spot the find

January 10, 2016 • 2:15 pm

by Matthew Cobb

One of the people I have ended up following on Tw*tter is Nicola White, who is a mudlark and posts as @TideLineArt. That is, she goes down onto the banks of the Thames, which is tidal, and rummages about for what she can find from past times. Sometimes she tw**ts strange badges, or fragments of pottery, which she asks readers to identify or translate. She reunites messages in a bottle with their senders. You can see her website here and you can buy some of her mudlarked creations on Etsy.

Nicola also regularly posts photos like this one, inviting readers to identify what on earth she has found. As you can see – this is almost as difficult as the spot-the-nightjar pictures we have posted here. She says ‘You’ll have to be sharp to find this one’, which could be a clue. NB It’s not a nightjar. Click twice to embiggen. Post your spots below.

The Curious Case of Cologne

January 10, 2016 • 12:15 pm

by Grania

By now everyone has heard of the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne, although the events of that night are still being investigated and the facts aren’t yet known in great detail. On New Year’s Eve, groups of men appearing to be of mostly Middle Eastern and African origin attacked and harassed women in an apparently coordinated action. There are now, as the Irish Times reports, 379 official criminal complaints, including two rapes. About 40% the cases include sexual offences.

The German newspaper The Local reports that women were even hindered in attempting to reach police:

“We were already informed of the conditions in and around the station as we were arriving at our positions by emotional members of the public with crying and shocked children,” a high-ranking police officer wrote in a document seen by Spiegel Online and tabloid Bild.

“On the square outside were several thousand mostly male people of a migrant background who were firing all kinds of fireworks and throwing bottles into the crowd at random.”

The police vans were themselves the targets of thrown fireworks as they pulled into their parking spaces, and people immediately rushed to the officers to report thefts, violence and sexual assaults against women.

“Even the appearance of police officers on the scene. . . didn’t hold the masses back from their actions,” the report notes.

Women – with or without male companions – were forced to “run a gauntlet. . . beyond description” of drunken men to reach or leave the station.”

In some cases, reaction in the media has been bizarre. Predictably, right-wing outlets have used the event to fuel absurd anti-immigrant screeds, seeing this as all the ammunition they need to attack Germany’s recent welcoming of a million refugees.

Perhaps even more bizarre has been the reaction from certain left-wing outlets and people who have apparently been so confused by cultural relativism that they end up sounding exactly like the rape apologists they normally decry. These comments range from well-intended but inept “advice” from authorities in Germany, such as Cologne’s mayor, Henriette Reker, telling women to keep themselves at a certain distance from men; to various talking heads in both written and video media arguing that this is nothing unusual—rape happens all the time. Click on the image below to watch The Young Turks for an interesting if eyebrow-raising 3 minutes (I couldn’t make it any further in the clip).

Untitled — Rape-splaining by The Young Turks: “I’m sure there’s been plenty of assaults in Germany before this”.

It’s perfectly true that this crime spree cannot be seen as a characteristic of immigrants, let alone Muslim immigrants; and right-wingers trying to hijack this for their own goals need to be confronted and combatted. But this pushback will be futile if right-wingers alone discuss the issue, and if the best that the left-wing, pro-feminist side can come up with is an appalling unwillingness to even admit that there is something worth discussing here.

Yes, this is not entirely about immigrants: it’s not yet clear how many immigrants were actually involved in the group in Cologne. But even if they were all immigrants, it would still not invalidate Germany or Europe’s immigration policies. Nor would it show that the overwhelming majority of immigrants are anything other than ordinary people looking to start a new life in a new country. However, this sort of thing cannot be ignored, nor can it be written off as just another example of the sort of thing that happens all the time to women in Europe. That attitude is clearly imbecilic and betrays the women who were targets of the abuse and violence on New Year’s Eve.

I have read two hearteningly intelligent articles on the subject. The first is from Musa Okwonga, journalist (and himself an immigrant to Europe) in the New Statesman: “How to deal with the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne and Hamburg“:

“So, what to do …? Well, it is actually simple. Let’s just keep sticking up for the women. As far as being a black man of African descent goes, the racists in Germany and elsewhere hate us anyway. They thought we were rapists and perverts and other assorted forms of sex attacker the second they set eyes on us. They don’t care about the women who were attacked in Cologne and Hamburg, except to prove the point that we are the animals that they always thought – or hoped – we were.

In return, I don’t care about them. Nor am I too bothered by the people who don’t want to sit next to me on the train. Fear of the unknown is a hard thing to unlearn. I am most concerned, by far, with the safety of the women who may now be more frightened than ever to enter public spaces. I don’t think that women have ever felt particularly comfortable walking through crowds of drunk and aggressive men at night, regardless of the race of those men. But groups of young men of North African and Arab origin, whatever their intentions, will most likely endure more trepidation from women than before.

So here’s what I propose we do. Why don’t we just start with the premise that it is a woman’s fundamental right, wherever she is in the world, to walk the streets and not be groped? And why don’t we see this as a perfect moment for men, regardless of our ethnic backgrounds, to get genuinely angry about the treatment of women in public spaces: to reject with fury the suggestion that we are somehow conditioned by society forever to treat women as objects, condemned by our uncontrollable sexual desires to lunge at them as they walk past?”

The second is a very detailed analysis by Maajid Nawaz who, with his usual refreshing candor and clarity, tackles the underlying problems head-on in The Daily Beast, “Why We Can’t Stay Silent on Germany’s Mass Sex Assaults“:

The fetishization of the female body has not led to a decrease in cases of sexual violence in societies where women cover their entire bodies. If Taliban- and ISIS-held areas are anything to go by, violence against women only increases the more women are asked to conceal and segregate themselves. This would make sense, because accompanying such attitudes is the notion that women are sexual objects to be owned and controlled, and not human beings to be respected and loved. What is infuriating is that for centuries progressives have made these very arguments against white Christian fundamentalists in the West, yet—displaying an incredible cognitive dissonance—those progressives easily abandon that position when confronted with the problem in a minority community. [JAC: here we see, again, the characteristic ambivalence of the Authoritarian Left: a dissonance between sympathy for the oppressed on the one hand and the Enlightenment values apparently violated by the oppressed on the other.]

The case of Cologne tells us that we can no longer afford this Regressive-Left double standard. The only person to blame for rape is the rapist. Employment and education among migrant males will be a more conducive and far more consistent approach than asking European women to change how they dress or when they go out.

Whatever the investigation eventually uncovers about the attacks in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, three things will remain true: it is not the fault of Europe’s trying to help as many refugees as they can; the overwhelming majority of Muslim immigrants to Europe arrived there only to seek a new and better life for themselves and their families; and the mass attacks on women in Cologne that night were not an example of “everyday sexism”.

	Susan on Saturday: Hili dialogue
	Leslie MacMillan on Saturday: Hili dialogue
	whyevolutionistrue on Saturday: Hili dialogue
	whyevolutionistrue on Saturday: Hili dialogue
	grasshopper on Saturday: Hili dialogue