Templeton uses its wealth to debase philosophy

September 5, 2012 • 5:55 am

For a while I thought the Templeton Foundation was changing its stripes and going more mainstream science, quietly shelving its penchant for woo and religion/science compatibility on the grounds of embarrassment.  Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case.  They are changing the names of their programs and awards (the Templeton Prize, for example, was called the “Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion from 1972-1981,  the “Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities” from 1981-2008, and is now apparently called simply “The Templeton Prize. And it’s 1.1 million pounds, by the way, deliberately designed to exceed a Nobel Prize).  The discussions about religion have now become, as the article below notes, “Big Questions.”

I know I bang on about Templeton and its prizes and huge grants, but I see the Templeton Foundation as the #1 force in America devoted to watering down science with religion, thereby confusing the two and eroding habits of rational thinking. Now, a new piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Templeton Effect” by Nathan Schneider, shows how this corruption is extending into philosophy.

This is all happening because academic philosophers aren’t very well funded—not nearly as well as we scientists—and so have to scrabble for a few measly dollars to fund their research. But Templeton has millions to give to projects in philosophy (their endowment is over 2.3 billion dollars), and so many philosophers line up at the trough, ready to swill. The thing is, Templeton directs its money to projects that involve philosophy and religion (theologians are often involved in these big grants), and so they slant the field toward the kind of research Templeton wants, rather than what philosophers want to work on.  This isn’t true of science. Although some granting agencies do have “problem-oriented” special notices (usually for only a short time), the major funding organizations in the U.S., the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, aim at funding good science of all types, and don’t have an agenda. (The NIH does look for health-related research, but also funds basic research that may deal with human health or evolution.  I was funded by the NIH for my entire career.)

To see how bad this is, and to dispel the myth that Templeton simply wants to fund good research, read the Chronicle piece. I’ll put down some excerpts, but there’s no substitute for reading the piece in its entirety (it’s free online):

One of the areas of Templeton’s interest is free will, and Templeton just gave out a 4.4 million dollar grant for that work to Alfred R. Mele at Florida State University (and some collaborators) for free-will studies.  Eddy Nahmias, the subject of my post yesterday, and a strong advocate of compatibilism, is funded by that grant. (All indented quotes are from the Chronicle.)

But in the past few years, Templeton has been stepping up the number of its six- and seven-figure awards for people in the discipline to study what the foundation calls the “Big Questions.” These “Big Questions” are the kinds of out-there topics that make philosophy seem bold and exciting to a college freshman but can feel thoroughly desiccated after a few years in graduate school: free will, the universe, evil, hope, consciousness.

What about the religion part? (My emphasis in the following):

Controversy, though, always follows money, especially when it’s Templeton money. Partisans of Richard Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists have long despised the foundation, interpreting its interest in dialogue between science and religion as an attempt to buy undeserved credibility for the latter at the cost of the former. Adds Brian Leiter, “It’s clearly more of a windfall for philosophers who have some sort of vague religious angle to what they’re doing.” Yet he also points out that Mele is an exception. His foregoing work on free will expressed scant interest in the religious implications—which makes it all the more noticeable that his Templeton project has a component devoted to theology.

You can see the theology component of Mele’s grant at Templeton’s “Big Questions in Free Will” webpage: there are at least five projects devoted to theology:

Jesse Couenhoven, “Praiseworthy Lack of Control”

W. Matthews Grant, “Divine Agency and Human Freedom: A Thomistic Approach”

David Hunt, “Freedom and Foreknowledge: Divine and Human Agency without Alternative Possibilities.”

Brian Leftow, “Divine Freedom.”

Hugh McCann, “Free Will for Theists: The Theology of Freedom.”

This is religious philosophy, the worst sort of philosophy, and why is it in there? Given Mele’s lack of interest, I suspect that Templeton insisted on it.  It’s all part of the legacy of investor John Templeton, who envisioned his foundation as a way to marry science and religion:

As Templeton’s net worth grew into the billions, [John Templeton] turned his attention to a new kind of investment. He had always lived by an eclectic and homemade brand of spirituality, blending Presbyterian respectability with the New Thought-influenced mysticism of his mother, and those with the pie-chart evidentialism of the boardroom. He was also enamored of science. “What might we learn,” he wondered, “if we applied the same intensity of research energy to the pursuit of spiritual information that has been devoted to scientific inquiry?” The terms of his eclectic vocabulary—”spiritual information,” “humility theology”—framed the charter for the John Templeton Foundation, formally established in 1987. The materialism of modern society cast its “maximum pessimism” on the possibilities of spirit.

And of course free will is part of that program:

Follow these contours, and Templeton’s recent projects—even those led by people outside the Christian-philosophy fold—seem to follow a certain apologetic logic. Free will, for instance, is a critical feature of Plantinga’s celebrated defense against the problem of evil; although Al Mele does not partake in religious speculation himself, he is a respected opponent of the brazen neuroscientists, like Michael S. Gazzaniga, who announce free will’s nonexistence. Cosmology, too, is considered one of the most promising avenues lately in arguments for God’s existence, particularly thanks to evidence that basic features of the universe may be “fine-tuned” to provide for the possibility of life. Barry Loewer isn’t particularly interested in arguing for a divine fine-tuner, but his efforts might indirectly lend aid to someone who is. The recent $5-million grant to study immortality went to a philosopher who doesn’t believe in the afterlife, but the very fact that so much money is going to study it might give more credence to those who do.

Templeton cannot, of course, mandate the research findings of its scholars (one of the studies it funded, for example, showed no effect of intercessory prayer in curing heart disease), but it clearly steers money towards projects it likes, and rewards those who produce the desired results with additional grant money. And everyone knows that: to stay on the Templeton gravy train, you have to get the results that it likes.

A prime example of this is Elaine Ecklund, who, after getting a Templeton grant to study the religious beliefs of American scientists, repeatedly interpreted her data—in a way I consider disingenuous and unscholarly—to show that those scientists are more religion-friendly than everyone thinks. She thereby won another Templeton grant.  I suspect that will happen with the free-will stuff, too. Eddy Nahmias, for example, who wrote a compatibilist piece in the New York Times that I mentioned yesterday, won a $3000 Templeton essay prize for those views.

Here are a few more egregious examples of what Templeton funds:

It’s true that one tends to hear more Templeton-branded talk of “Big Questions”—spoken as if capitalized, and without irony—on the lips of philosophers with religious commitments, at religious institutions. When I met Christian Miller two years ago at a Society of Christian Philosophers conference at Wake Forest, the historically Baptist university where he teaches, he was still glowing from news of the three-year, $3.7-million Templeton grant he’d just received. Its purpose is “to promote significant progress in the scholarly investigation of character,” and $2-million of it will go to empirical psychological research, alongside accompanying investigations in philosophy and theology.

Miller wasn’t the only Templeton beneficiary in the room. Also at the Wake Forest conference was Samuel Newlands, a University of Notre Dame philosopher who had just begun spending the $1.8-million he’d received to investigate the problem of evil—that is, the problem of whether worldly pain and suffering can coexist with a perfectly good God. The project includes both textual considerations centered on Gottfried Leibniz and a biological subgrant for research on animal pain. “Historically, the best philosophers that we all think of as the greats were all deeply immersed in the ongoing scientific inquiries of their time,” Newlands explains, “and we think that’s a noble endeavor to continue.”

With the project on evil slated to end next year, Newlands is starting to develop another big project, oppositely enough, about hope and optimism. Receiving funds from Templeton is part of his plan; for undertakings like this, there’s really no other choice.

And for those of you who admire the Templeton Foundation for funding the World Science Festival, think about this:

Much as Notre Dame served as the headquarters of the Christian-philosophy renaissance ushered in by Alvin Plantinga, a 104-year-old evangelical institution on the outskirts of Los Angeles called Biola University has cleared the way for one of the ren­aissance’s most spirited and ambitious outgrowths. Biola supports the Evangelical Philosophical Society, a more doctrinally austere cousin of the Society of Christian Philosophers, and it houses the country’s largest philosophy graduate program, which is devoted to sending Christian students with its master’s degrees to leading Ph.D. programs. For a few weeks each year, Biola is graced by an intensive course by William Lane Craig, the master of public “God debates,” who famously trounced Christopher Hitchens in 2009.

This summer Biola received the largest foundation grant in its history—a $3-million Templeton award to support a new Center for Christian Thought, an interdisciplinary forum led by three philosophy professors. One of them, Thomas Crisp, was a star student of Plantinga’s at Notre Dame, and he first met Michael Murray during a 2010 Society of Christian Philosophers good-will expedition to a symposium in Iran. A year later, Crisp and the others in the center’s “leadership triumvirate” were hard at work on a proposal for the foundation, and he sees Templeton and Biola as an ideal match.

“The Christian community needs to think well about the Big Questions,” says Crisp. “Especially in the evangelical world, we haven’t done a great job of providing resources for our scholars to work collaboratively on these questions.” He hopes that the center will elevate the level of discussion throughout Biola’s curriculum, as well as in the churches they plan to reach through public events. The fellows that the center brings to the campus will vary from year to year, according to a sequence of themes like neuroscience, spiritual formation, and civil discourse. But Crisp expects that philosophers are there to stay.

Biola University, of course, was formerly the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, and is now a college that is profoundly anti-evolution; according to Wikipedia:

Biola holds to the key doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, the idea that the original writings of the Bible were without error with regard to both theological and non-theological matters. The institution officially holds to the teaching of premillennialdispensationalism,and requires its faculty members to be in accord with this theological and cultural perspective. As a final guarantee of strict adherence to its theological worldview, the university requires every faculty member, when first hired and again upon application for tenure, to submit their understanding of and complete agreement with each item of the doctrinal and teaching statements to the Talbot School of Theology for evaluation.

You can see Biola’s doctrinal statement here; it’s scary.  Really, Templeton recipients, do you want to be associated with this kind of stuff? Because even if you think you’re doing unsullied pure science, you’re still installed in Templeton’s stable of horses right beside the theological thoroughbreds.  Those scientists who take Templeton money will protest, as one did yesterday, that their research is not being used to support an agenda, but, given Templeton’s history they’re being disingenuous. For the notion that Templeton doesn’t direct its money in certain spiritual-friendly ways is belied by this bit from the Chronicle article (my emphasis):

Barry Loewer, a philosopher at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, isn’t likely to turn up at a Society of Christian Philosophers meeting with Newlands and Miller. “I myself have no interest in philosophy of religion and am not a religious person,” he says. For years, Loewer has been working with a group of philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists in the New York area, meeting and collaborating on papers—nothing very expensive. But about five years ago a colleague at Rutgers, Dean W. Zimmerman, told the group about the Templeton Foundation and suggested that they apply for a grant. Zimmerman, a top Christian philosopher, had already served on Templeton’s advisory board and participated in many foundation-sponsored activities. [JAC: Templeton has an incestuous relationship between its directors and its grantees; they’re often the same people!]

The idea at first was to do a project about quantum mechanics and the foundations of physics, which was an interest of Loewer’s group. Templeton had other ideas. The foundation pointed the group in the direction of cosmology, with the prospect of a much bigger grant, and the researchers jumped at the idea. They realized that cosmology encompassed the questions of time and physical laws that had concerned them all along.

What a realization! Thanks, Templeton! And, sure enough:

The nearly $1-million grant his team received from Templeton last year coincided with another, slightly larger one called “Establishing the Philosophy of Cosmology,” which was awarded to scholars at the University of Oxford. Despite the change of plans at Templeton’s behest, Loewer stresses, “They’ve been really helpful, and totally noncoercive in terms of any agenda that they might have. I had my eyes open for it.”

What? The “change of plans at Templeton’s behest,” with the plum of a larger grant dangled before them if they did change their plans—this was “noncoercive”?

It’s through the offer of money to conflate science and religion that Templeton corrupts science.  There’s nothing either I or you can do about this, for they are rich and independent and we are just small voices in a wilderness of grant-hungry philosophers.  In academia, money talks.

Nevertheless, I decry any scientist, sociologist, or philosopher who takes money from the Templeton Foundation. Theologians, of course, are already beyond the pale.

Hump day footwear

September 5, 2012 • 4:07 am

The name is appropriate given the animal (no, it’s not camel). These are again made by Tres Outlaws of El Paso and sold through Falconhead, a superb purveyor of custom boots (for a pair worth $25,000, which took hundreds of hours to design and build, and is inlaid with gold coins, have a look at “The Mexican” on their website).

These are more mundane, but built like a rock.  They’ll be in good shape when I leave this blessed vale.

Now guess the animal:

Ken Ham responds to Bill Nye’s anti-creationism video

September 4, 2012 • 12:04 pm

The scary creationist Ken Ham, head of Answers in Genesis and of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, responds to Bill Nye’s (the Science Guy’s) video that extolled evolution and warned against the teaching of creationism.

Ham’s response consists of mainly of accusing Nye of having “an agenda to teach children not to believe in God.” Now I never watched Nye’s show, but I doubt that he ever said anything that was pro-atheism.

Ham also make the bogus creationist difference between “observational science” and “historical science” (since evolution falls in the latter class, to Ham it’s not really science). He also mischaracterizes evolution as “chance, random processes.”

The last two minutes comprise an incoherent rant in which Ham argues that Nye doesn’t understand science, and is brainwashing kids by not teaching them to think critically (i.e., not teaching them creationism or how to distinguish historical from observational science).  It’s always funny to see creationists take the high ground: “See? Unlike you guys, we teach our kids the other side!”

As always with these videos, comments are disabled, so you can rant below.

h/t: Chris

A gynandromorph cardinal: one half male, the other half female

September 4, 2012 • 9:58 am

Reader Brian Peer sends us a photo of a “gynandromorph” cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis).  A gynandromorph, as the name implies, is an animal that is part male and part female, with the sex-specific parts usually demarcated cleanly.  Here’s Brian’s description of how he saw the bird:

Your post this morning on Venus the Cat reminded me of a bilateral gynandromorph Northern Cardinal we found a couple years back in nearby Rock Island, IL. I’ve attached several photos of the bird. As you can see, the left side is male and the right female. For two winters the bird appeared at the feeder of a retired high school biology teacher. I was able to observe it on several occasions, and noticed that it didn’t associate with other cardinals, nor did I hear it produce any vocalizations. We attempted to capture it with mist nets so that Rob Fleischer and I could get blood samples for further study, but we caught every bird in the neighborhood except this one! Alas, it never returned the third winter.

And some photos:


This, by the way, is a very graphic demonstration of the differences between males and females, with the brighter color of the male almost certainly reflecting sexual selection (with bright colors presumably advantageous in males because they attract females, but disadvantageous in females because they attract predators).

Now how does this happen? I used to see this sometimes in my Drosophila flies, and we’ve long known how a half-male, half-female fly forms. In flies the sex is determined by the ratio of X chromosome to autosomes.  Flies, like all diploid species, have two copies of every autosome. If you also have two X chromosomes, you’re a female because the ratio of autosomes to Xs is 1:1. If you have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome, your ratio is 2:1 and you’re male.  The Y doesn’t matter here: if you lose a Y chromosome, and hence are XO, you still look like a male, although you’re sterile (the Y carries genes for making sperm).

So to get gynandromorphs in flies, all that has to happen is that one X chromosome gets lost in one cell when the initial cell in a female (XX) zygotes divides in two.  One half of the fly then becomes XX, the other XO, and the fly is split neatly down the middle, looking like the one below.  But gynandromorphs don’t have to be “half and halfs”.  X chromosomes can get lost at almost any stage at development, so flies can be a quarter male, have irregular patches of maleness, have just a few male cells, or even a male patch as small as a single bristle.

Note smaller wings (males are smaller), and presence of sex comb and dark abdominal pigmentation on the right side. The genitals on the ventral side are also part male, part female.

But in birds, unlike flies (or humans), the females are heterogametic: i.e., their sex chromosomes are different (the females are called ZW; and the males are ZZ). I’m not sure whether chromosome loss is involved in the production of this cardinal, or how that loss affects sex determination in birds (in humans, for example, unlike flies, the Y chromosome is important, so XO individuals are not phenotypic males but largely phenotypic females). An article at Live Science on a similar gynandromorph cardinal in Texas offers the following theory, based on the observation that in gynandromorph chickens the female side is the normal ZW and the male side the normal ZZ:

It’s not known exactly how gynandromorphy happens in birds, Arnold said. The predominant theory is that an error occurs in the formation of an egg, which normally carries one chromosome to unite with the single chromosome carried by the sperm. But if an egg accidentally ends up with two chromosomes — a Z and a W — and if this aberrant egg is fertilized by two Z-carrying sperm, the bird that results will have some ZZ cells and some ZW cells, he explained.

That seems unlikely to me because it requires the concatenation of two rare events: an egg carrying two sex chromosomes instead of one (but the normal half complement of autosomes), uniting not with one sperm but with two.

I get email: an insane response to my views on free will

September 4, 2012 • 5:33 am

See how I am made to suffer for my belief that free will is an illusion? I am accused of being a pedophile! LOL.

Note that I have pasted this directly from the email I got; the misspellings and other errors, which are ubiquitous, are the responsibility of “Lee Hudson”

From: Lee Hudson [email address redacted]
To: [my email address]

what do you gain from this? do you get a sick turn on from telling peope there not responsible? does it arouse you saying paedophiles are blameless? your a sick fuck jerry, a dirty paedophile prommoter. do you have kids jerry? I doubt someone like you would ever become a father but if you are,  its even sicker and more disgusting, I bet they are really proud of a daddy who writes brain stuff about how nobody is free or responsible. Some get a firefighter or cop daddy or a lawyer, but no they will have you. At highschool it will be like yeah my dad writes articles but how none of us are responsible and being paedophile is ok. your sick, if you have kids I hope they disown you and Im sure your parents are really proud of you also…not! a career in writing about how moral responsibility is impossible and we are all blameless, well done you disturbed indivudual!!!

your filth!

p.s. There’s a new post on free will just below for those of you who are following this debate.

Eddy Nahmias: apostle for free will

September 4, 2012 • 5:27 am

Eddy Nahmias is an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department and the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University, in Atlanta.  Lately he’s been writing and speaking a lot about free will. Nahmias is a compatibilist, someone who thinks that free will is indeed compatible with physical determinism (i.e., there is no “will” outside of our material brains that makes decisions). In November he had a piece in the New York Times Opinionator section, “Is neuroscience the death of free will?” (answer: NO), which I criticized in a post two days after Nahmias’s piece appeared.

Nahmias recently wrote on this topic again (a very similar post) at Big Questions Online, a site run by the John Templeton Foundation, which reportedly pays substantial dosh for contributions.  His piece has a similar title, “Does contemporary neuroscience support or challenge the reality of free will?”  His compatibilism is on full display, as it was in the NYT piece. He begins with a ringing affirmation of the thesis that we are authors of our lives:

Humans love stories.  We tell each other the stories of our lives, in which we are not merely players reading a script but also the authors.  As authors we make choices that influence the plot and the other players on the stage.  Free will can be understood as our capacities both to make choices—to write our own stories—and to carry them out on the world’s stage—to control our actions in light of our choices.

This isn’t just a fanciful introduction; this is what Nahmias really thinks.  It implies that we can indeed make choices that influences the course of our lives, and that implies that we could have made other choices that could have affected our lives differently.  To the average person, I think, “making a choice” means that you could have made different choices. Now Namiah really doesn’t believe that, but uses language suggesting otherwise.  In that sense, at least, the idea of “free will”—that we can actually make choices different from those we did—is an illusion, an illusion in the sense that our notion of such freedom isn’t what it seems.  Nahmias calls those of us who agree with this idea of an illusion “willusionists”:

How might neuroscience fit into the story I am telling?  Most scientists who discuss free will say the story has an unhappy ending—that neuroscience shows free will to be an illusion.  I call these scientists “willusionists.” (Willusionists include Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne, Jonathan Bargh, Daniel Wegner, John Dylan Haynes, and as suggested briefly in some of their work, Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins.) Willusionists say that neuroscience demonstrates that we are not the authors of our own stories but more like puppets whose actions are determined by brain events beyond our control.  In his new book Free Will, Sam Harris says, “This [neuroscientific] understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet.” Jerry Coyne asserts in a USA Today column: “The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we’re characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we’re puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics.”

Yes, our actions are determined by brain events beyond our control. Does anybody doubt that? But Nahmias objects to our definition of free will, which is the dualist one that, I think, most people hold (more about that tomorrow). He says that we can define it in another way so that we have it:

But there is no reason to define free will as requiring this dualist picture.  Among philosophers, very few develop theories of free will that conflict with a naturalistic understanding of the mind—free will requires choice and control, and for some philosophers, indeterminism, but it does not require dualism.

Yes, but in none of these theories is our will really “free.”  Of course you can always define free will in a way that comports with determinism: you can say, for example, that a computer that is programmed to give different outputs when faced with different inputs has “free ill” because it appears to make choices, and in that sense the computer has free will. This, in fact, isn’t very far from the way that many philosophers define free will, except that the computer is made of neurons, sits in our head (yes, I know our brain doesn’t act like a digital computer), has consciousness, and has a very complex way of producing outputs given different inputs.  But are we really freer than that computer? I don’t think so, and most philosophers don’t, either.

Nahmias notes that many people actually do not have a dualistic picture of free will— they’re compatibilists at heart:

Furthermore, studies on ordinary people’s understanding of free will show that, while many people believe we have souls, most do not believe that free will requires a non-physical soul.  And when presented scenarios about persons whose decisions are fully caused by earlier events, or even fully predictable by brain events, most people respond that they still have free will and are morally responsible.   These studies strongly suggest that what people primarily associate with free will and moral responsibility is the capacity to make conscious decisions and to control one’s actions in light of such decisions.

I hope to talk about these studies—in particular Nahmias’s work—this week, but let it be said that the results of different people’s work are, well, incompatible.  The way people answer questions about free will depends largely on how those questions are asked: whether or not the scenario is abstract or concrete, and whether or not one imputes moral responsibility to an actor (moral responsibility and free will aren’t identical to many people).  There’s also the additional point that many of these studies are conducted on American undergraduates—Nahmias’s study that he cites in the NYT article is based on 249 undergrads at Georgia State University—and one might wonder if this is a representative sample of Americans, much less inhabitants of our planet.

Finally, I think it’s indisputable that many Christians, or other believers, think that they do have a completely free choice about whether to accept God or Jesus as their personal savior, that it is not a matter of being predetermined by your genes and environment. I wonder what a survey of Christians would show. At any rate, these surveys are tricky things, and reduce complex questions to simple choices on a form.  There’s no doubt, at any rate, that many people (and some scientists I’ve talked to) are dualists, whether that’s based on religion or not.  And I’m wondering why all those philosophers who are busy redefining free will don’t have the time to tell people that their actions and choices are completely determined by their genes and their environments. (Well, I have a theory about that—see below.)

Nahmias discounts the Libet and Soon et. al experiments (which have been challenged recently on other grounds, not successfully, I think), showing that brain scan can predict the results of a “choice” before that choice is consciously made:

If such early brain activity always completely determines what we do before our conscious thinking ever comes into the picture, then this would suggest we lack free will, because our conscious thinking would happen too late to influence what we did—an audience rather than author.  But the data does not show that brain activity occurring prior to awareness completely causes all of our decisions.  In the study just described, the early brain activity correlates with behavior at only 10% above chance.  It is not surprising that our brains prepare for action ahead of time and that this provides some information about what people will do.

But later studies show a higher predictability and an unconscious signal that arises much sooner—up to ten seconds before one thinks the decision was made.  It’s not surprising that the predictability is not perfect (left versus right choices for pushing a button) given that the brain scans are crude.  What would Nahmias say if we could make predictions that were 95% accurate before the subject said she made a conscious decision? Would that mean that there is no free will in Nahmias’s scheme? For, make no mistake, predictability is going to get better as we understand more about the brain.  And it is not that our brains merely “prepare for action”—it is that our brains give information about which decision we will make ahead of time.

In the end, Nahmias says we have free will because, as humans, we can reflect and deliberate about what we do before we make a choice, and that those reflections and deliberations can affect our choice:

A more complete scientific theory of the mind will have to explain how consciousness and rationality work, rather than explaining them away.  As it does, we will come to understand how and when we have the capacities for conscious and rational choice, and for self-control, that people ordinarily associate with free will.  These are the capacities to reflect on our desires and reasons, to consider which of them we want to motivate us, and to make efforts to act accordingly—or as Roy Baumeister explained in his recent post, to habituate ourselves to make choices that accord with our reflectively endorsed goals.

But none of us incompatibilists think that our “deliberation process” has nothing to do with our choices, for our deliberations reflect our genes and our environments, and nobody denies that our experience conditions what “choices” we make. If you see from experience that an employee who makes mistakes is more responsive to correction when you’re empathic rather than judgmental about it, you’ll tend to be more empathic when dealing with him. Our “deliberations” may reflect that experience, even if there is no “will” that chooses to be empathic.  Our “deliberations and reflections” mirror our experience, and may be the conscious signs of the processing that is going on in our neurons. So when Namiah says this,

But our stories are not always fiction.  Other research suggests that our deliberations and decisions can have significant causal influences on what we decide and do, especially when we have difficult decisions to make and when we make complex plans for future action.

he is saying nothing that’s incompatible with incompatibilism.  That “other research” shows that affecting one’s deliberations by outside interventions affects one’s decisions.  But those interventions also affect one’s neurons and the physical processes in our brain. “Deliberations and decisions” can have causal influences only if those deliberations are part of a deterministic physical process conditioned by genes and environments.

Here’s a 5-minute video of Nahmias speaking at my university (I didn’t hear the talk) under the “Defining Wisdom” program, which was sponsored by a $3 million grant from—guess who?—The Templeton Foundation. Templeton, of course, is wholly in favor of compatibilism; the idea we have free will comports completely with their religion-loves-science agenda.

Note that what seems to bother Nahmias in this video is the idea that the public will misunderstand what “willusionists” like Harris and I say when we argue that free will is an illusion. If the public thinks they they really are really puppets on the strings of our genes and our environments (which we are), then they will become nihilists, people who think that they have no moral responsibility.  Society will fall to pieces. In that way compatibilism resembles the view that morality comes from God: without the notion that we can somehow have free will, or without the Divine Command theory, civil society will dissolve.  So we can’t let the average Joe or Jill know that all their actions are determined, and we must find some way that we are morally responsible despite the fact that we lack some “free agency” in our brain.

This idea, I think, plays a substantial role in motivating philosophers to redefine free will in a way that gives us moral responsibility.  I don’t think I’m being uncharitable to philosophers here, because this view that the public will “misunderstand” determinism is explicit not only in this talk by Nahmias, but in writings by other philosophers that I’ll discuss another day.

Notice the word “threat” in Nahmias’s description of his latest book, taken from his homepage:

“…I am currently working on a book project, Rediscovering Free Will, which is contracted with Oxford University Press and partially funded by a Wisdom Grant (2008-2010) from the University of Chicago’s Arete Initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. In the book I argue that the free will debate should not be focused on the traditional question of whether free will is compatible with determinism. Rather, the free will debate should be focused on distinct threats posed by the sciences of the mind (e.g., neuroscience and psychology). I examine these threats and argue that they do not show that free will is an illusion. However, they do suggest that we have less free will than we tend to think. I also argue that these sciences can help to explain free will, rather than explaining it away…”

Why the word “threat” instead of “challenge”?

h/t: Michael

_____________________

Required reading for this week:

Nahmias, E. and Dy. Murray, 2012, Experimental philosophy of free will: an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions (free download).

This is the manuscript that, says Nahmias, supports the view that the average person is a compatibilist. Please don’t comment on this until I post about it.

8-year-old Brit finds $65K piece of ambergris

September 3, 2012 • 10:25 am

What is ambergris? Well, it’s not exactly “whale poop,” as it’s often described. But while we know that ambergris is an exudate of sperm whales, it’s still not clear exactly what it is, or even which end it comes out of. It’s a waxy substance that is excreted or vomited by whales, and may be an intestinal defense used to coat indigestible substances like squid beaks, since such beaks often found encased in the ambergris. Recent thought is that most ambergris is pooped out, though some may derive from vomit. The fresh substance, which is buoyant and soft, apparently has a repulsive dung-like odor, but it hardens as it ages, acquiring a waxy texture with an odor many find fragrant. Ambergris washed up on beaches can be decades old.

The stuff is so valuable because it’s used as a fixative in expensive perfumes.  Now that we know most of its chemical composition, it’s been largely been displaced by synthetic materials, but here, from Wikipedia, are some chemicals in natural ambergris:


It takes various forms and colors, and you can see some of that variety at the Ambergris page.

The relevant news here is that an 8-year-old British lad, Charles Naysmith, found a 6.5-pound piece of ambergris while walking on the beach in southern England, and the stuff, at $10,000 a pound, is worth $65,000. Here’s Charles with his find, and some information reported 3 days ago by ABC News:

Kemp [author of a book on ambergris; see below] said that each piece smells a bit different, and luxury perfumers say that the smallest amount makes the biggest difference to a given fragrance.

“One drop of ambergris can change a perfume,” Claire Payne, an aroma therapist and perfumer told ABC News. “It’s what we call an animalic smell, different to the citrusy or fruity scents. It’s like musk, and we use it in several of our fragrances,” she added.

Ambergris has a scent all its own—derived from its chemical component ambrein—that it imparts to popular perfumes such as Chanel No. 5. It’s often described as an odd, a fragrant in fact, mixture of tobacco, rotting wood and even furniture polish, in high demand by perfume makers because it prolongs a perfume’s scent. Roja Dove, the so-called King of Fragrance and one of the most knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to perfume, uses ambergris in a signature scent called Scandal Pour Homme that sells in luxury stores for $280 per 100ml bottle. Adrienne Beuse, the owner of one of the only international trader of raw ambergris in New Zeland, told Bloomberg Businesweek that it’s one of the few recession-proof commodities: “If I have the supply, I’ll always be able to sell it,” she said.

What’s young Charles going to do with his dosh? Something nice:

Alex Naysmith said that his son wants to use the money from his lucky find to build some kind of animal shelter. “He’s enjoying the attention he’s been getting, but I doubt it’ll last. He has a club in school that he started to look after animals, and would like to keep going with that.”

A bit more about the ambergris trade from Bloomberg Businessweek:

Like truffle sourcing, the ambergris trade is shrouded in secrecy. Chris Kemp, a neuroscientist from Grand Rapids, Mich., spent years investigating the ambergris business, which he documents in his book, Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris, to be published by the University of Chicago Press this May [JAC: it’s out now; you can buy it here.] “If you believe what you read in the media,” he says, “you’d think ambergris is something that people just find by accident.” The truth, he claims, is far more clandestine. “There’s a whole underground network of full-time collectors and dealers trying to make their fortune in ambergris. They know the beaches and the precise weather conditions necessary for ambergris to wash up on the shore.” And when whale-poop gold is on the line, he says, “it can get violent.”