Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I am immensely saddened to report the death of Pia, the pet and helpmeet of Malgorzata Koraszewska and Andrzej Koraszewski, who run the well-known Polish rationalist website Racjonalista. Pia was 14, and died from kidney failure. She was a lovely tabby:
I first became acquainted with Pia when Malgorzata asked to translate some of my website pieces into Polish for their website. Of course I assented, but, learning that they had a cat, I asked for two pictures of Pia as payment for each use, with one sent me as payment for allowing the translation and the other upon publication. Malgorzata obliged, and I wound up with hundreds of pictures of Pia (they’ve translated over 100 of my pieces). I also learned a lot about her: she liked to sit on the computer, obstructing the progress of secularism, and was fond of quail livers and beef tartare, but only when scraped from the beef rather than chopped.
After a while Andrzej began to publish “Pia Dialogues” on his Facebook page, each accompanied by a photo of Pia. She came off as a haughty but loveable diva, and her lucubrations about life often ended with a plea for nomz. Here’s one dialogue:
A: Life is but a short break in an endless oblivion.
Pia: One has to fill this break sensibly. Give me something scrumptious.
Pia died suddenly, and I hoped up to the end that she could be saved. I wanted to meet her, and had visions of visiting Poland with a packet of quail livers as a gift. But they put her to sleep to end her suffering. As Malgorzata said,
Here are facts. Pia, a feral kitten, was rescued by our friend and given to us 1998. She was the queen of the house, and of our two big dogs one adored her and the other avoided her in respect. For some time lately she was having a daily dialogue with Andrzej about, life, food, philosophy and human folly.
Here is the final and incomplete dialogue, really a monologue by Andrzej after Pia’s death:
A: I do not have to push my pen under the screen, Pia will not throw it on the floor nor will she lie on it; I do not have to check the kitchen window, Pia will not return from the orchard; I do not have to look where I step nor do I have to move carefully in my sleep. How empty can a house be without one tiny, grey creature? And how empty our life would be if we felt differently.
I have a confession. I was not keen on Lawrence Krauss’s new book on the origin of the universe, A Universe from Nothing: Why there is Something Rather Than Nothing. I couldn’t share the chorus of approbation and acclaim for the book, and wondered if I, as opposed to everyone else, was blind to its merits. (Let me hasten to add that I am a big fan of Krauss’s public lectures, and also that I haven’t read any of his other books.)
I found A Universe from Nothing awkwardly written and poorly explained; indeed, in places I felt completely at sea, and had to reread bits of it several times to figure out what he was trying to say. Even then some of it baffled me, and since I have a Ph.D. and have read a fair amount of popular physics literature, I figured this must have been a case of unclear writing rather than simple ignorance on my part.
Further, I felt to some degree cheated: much of the book was not about the origin of the universe, but dealt with other matters, like dark energy and the like, that had already been covered in other popular works on physics. Indeed, much of Krauss’s book felt like a bait-and-switch. It also seemed to me that Krauss came to grips with the real problem—how do you get matter from an initial condition of nothing?—only in the last 40 pages of the book. The whole argument could have been written more concisely, and clearly, in a smallish book the size of Sam Harris’s Free Will.
Further, Krauss defines “nothing” as a “quantum vacuum,” without giving us reasons why that would obviously have been the initial default state of the universe. Is that a sensible definition of “nothing”? If not, whence the quantum vacuum? And so on to more turtles. . .
The padding and poor writing made me peevish, but so too did Richard Dawkins’s afterword, which claimed that Krauss’s book would do for physics and cosmology what The Origin of Species did for biology: dispel the last evidence for God as seen in natural “design” or the idea of ex nihilo creation. I saw virtually nothing in the book that hadn’t already been said by Sean Carroll (see his post on the same question here) or, especially, Victor Stenger, and so couldn’t understand Richard’s over-the-top encomiums. I didn’t feel, after having digested the book, that it was anywhere close to Darwin in the thoroughness of its treatment or in its final disposal of the design-from-materialism problem.
But I didn’t say anything about this. Chalk it up to cowardice. Better, I thought, to say nothing, or even offer insincere praise, for a book by a fellow atheist and a friend-of-friends, than risk making enemies of someone with whom I’m allied in many ways. But I was uncomfortable with this, for it’s intellectually dishonest to critique those books by religious people, or people whom I don’t know, and then give a pass to a book that I didn’t like just because it was penned by a fellow atheist. So now I’ll speak out: I didn’t like A Universe from Nothing, and I think that there are other things to read that do the same job better. It wasn’t a horrible book, just a mediocre one, and has all the earmarks of being written hastily and not edited properly.
I agree with much but not all of Albert’s take. He starts by deconstructing Dawkins’s comparison of Krauss’s book to Darwin’s:
Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: conversations, say, about what it is to explain something, and about what it is to be a law of nature, and about what it is to be a physical thing. But since the space I have is limited, let me put those niceties aside and try to be quick, and crude, and concrete.
Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that everything he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” And what if he did know of some productive work in that regard? What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question? Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?
Although this may resemble the ontological argument (and perhaps the proper answer to “where do quantum-mechanical laws come from?” might be “they just are“), it’s still proper to ask, “Is our idea of ‘nothing’ really a quantum vacuum”? And here I think Albert gets at the major flaw of Krauss’s book: the failure to explain how he decides what “nothing” is. I’ll quote in extenso:
The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.
He goes on to explain the meaning of Krauss’s solution better than Krauss did:
What on earth, then, can Krauss have been thinking? Well, there is, as it happens, an interesting difference between relativistic quantum field theories and every previous serious candidate for a fundamental physical theory of the world. Every previous such theory counted material particles among the concrete, fundamental, eternally persisting elementary physical stuff of the world — and relativistic quantum field theories, interestingly and emphatically and unprecedentedly, do not. According to relativistic quantum field theories, particles are to be understood, rather, as specific arrangements of the fields. Certain arrangements of the fields, for instance, correspond to there being 14 particles in the universe, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being 276 particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being an infinite number of particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being no particles at all. And those last arrangements are referred to, in the jargon of quantum field theories, for obvious reasons, as “vacuum” states. Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.
But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.
With respect to Krauss’s complaint that now that a quantum vacuum might explain the origin of the universe, religious people have moved the goalposts and rejected his definition of “nothing,” Albert responds:
We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now. And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place. And the history of science — if we understand it correctly — gives us no hint of how it might be possible to imagine otherwise.
Where I part company with Albert is in how he deals with Krauss’s critique of religion that imbues the book. Formerly somewhat of an accommodationist, Krauss (perhaps because of his association with Dawkins) is now a much more vociferous atheist. If you’ve read A Universe from Nothing, you’ll know that it’s larded with critiques of religion and an overweening satisfaction that at last physics has explained the final redoubt of religion: the origin of the universe from empty space. The atheism seemed a bit over the top to me, but I also thought it was directly relevant to the book’s goals. But Albert thinks otherwise:
. . . the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong — or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for everything essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.
Now I’m not sure whether Albert is religious, but he’s totally off the mark here, and he should know it. For religion rests on beliefs that are assumed to be true, and if you erode those beliefs you erode religion—and with it many of its inimical effects. Albert knows this because in his youth one of the critiques of faith was that it was a “lie.” Well, that’s pretty much what both Darwin and (to some degree) Krauss have shown. If you can explain what is considered strong evidence for God as the result of a purely materialistic process, then that does a lot more than simply show that “religion is dumb.” It is showing that the buttresses of faith are weak or nonexistent. That is no small accomplishment. If religion really is as bad as the critics of Albert’s youth really thought, then one of the best ways to dispel that evil is to show that the evidence for God just isn’t there.
Perhaps Albert’s critique was sharpened by his dislike of Krauss’s attacks on faith, but nevertheless I think that his criticism of the book’s substance is largely on the mark. I remain baffled at the praise that A Universe from Nothing garnered when, after all, it says pretty much the same thing that Victor Stenger has published in several books, but more lucidly.
Yes, neurological free will is a joke, and so is this one, but I couldn’t resist putting up Kodak’s own April Fool jape, which I presume will be on their webpage for today only. Ergo, I’ve put it below, too.
Alert reader Gregg has called my attention to a new study in neuroscience that overturns the Libet and Soon et al. studies by showing evidence for free will via brain scans. Practical Ethics reports on the study, to appear in this week’s Science:
According to the authors of the study, previous neuroscientific studies have failed to detect free will because they were looking for causation in the wrong place, or at the wrong level. Most neuroscientific techniques are aimed at detecting patterns of activity at a physical level, whether macro-level, cellular, or atomic. For example, the common fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) technique essentially measures differences in blood flow to various areas of the brain. As a result, previous studies have only been able to detect the physical causes of our thoughts and actions. The group now publishing in Science has developed a new type of scanner called a Metaphysical Field Imager. Using functional metaphysical field imaging (fMFI), the researchers can detect energy patterns as they occur at sub-physical (i.e. metaphysical) levels. When superimposed over a map of the physical brain, fMFI is able to reveal the exact timing and location of flashes of free will in the brain, as people make decisions. The experimenters were able to show that, in their experiments, a flash of free will occurred in the prefrontal cortex immediately before a playing card was freely picked, strongly indicating that the free will there produced the relevant behaviour.
Here’s a figure from the paper—an fMFI scan showing the transitory signature of free will (the orange area of activity) in the prefrontal cortex of a human brain:
I’ve long espoused the idea that free will is a phantasm: a comforting fiction built into us, perhaps, by natural selection, but a good scientist knows when he’s licked. I provisionally suspend my critiques of free will. Indeed, the newest findings mandate not compatibilism, but true dualistic free will.
As usual, I tried to investigate as many indigenous comestibles as I could during my trip last week to Nashville, Tennessee, and Atlanta, Georgia. As A. J. Liebling argued, “Each day brings only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholestorol.” Mindful of time’s wingéd chariot and my few brief days in the South, I fed:
For years I’ve wanted to go to the famous Loveless Motel and Cafe on the outskirts of Nashville. It’s famous for its southern food: fried chicken, country ham, and the like, but most famous for its breakfasts, especially its biscuits. The motel part of the operation has long been closed, but the diner is thriving, and there I went with some graduate students for breakfast (click all photos to enlarge):
Note “hot biscuits and country ham” emblazoned on the sign. That is your key to paradise. As the late Persian poet wrote: “A plate of biscuits underneath the bough/A slab of ham, a swath of grits, and thou/Besides me singing sweetly of a pickup truck/O, Tennessee were Paradise enow.”
Here’s the restaurant itself:
The walls inside are completely covered with photos of famous country singers and other luminaries who have made the trip out to the Loveless for its incomparable nomz. As Wikipedia notes:
Many of the celebrities who have eaten at the Loveless Cafe have left signed photographs which now adorn the entry way. Some of Loveless’s fans include Willard Scott (of NBC Today) who stated that the restaurant has the “world’s greatest scratch biscuits,” and Martha Stewart who said “it was the best breakfast I’ve ever had…” In a volume of Country America, the magazine noted “Al Gore, Princess Anne, and just about any Country Star you could name have all pulled up a chair to Loveless Cafe’s red checkered tablecloths.”
The Loveless Cafe serves southern style cooking, and is most famous for its biscuits, country ham, and red-eye gravy. The biscuit recipe was created by Anne Loveless and is still closely guarded today.Many of the ingredients are farmed and produced in Tennessee, and all menu items are made from scratch.Loveless serves a full breakfast all day, every dayand the supper menu is served from 11:00am-closing daily. The Loveless Cafe also provides a catering menu for large group events.
The great glory of the Loveless is its biscuits. For many years they were the purview of Carol Fay Ellison, the famous “biscuit lady,” and biscuits were all she made. Sadly, she died two years ago. Here’s a shot of her taken from the Loveless website:
Although the Biscuit Lady is gone, the biscuits are still made according to her methods. And man, are they good! As soon as you’re seated, a plate of hot biscuits arrives, accompanied by homemade peach, blackberry, and strawberry preserves, along with sorghum molasses if you so desire. Really, one needs nothing else beyond biscuits, jam, butter, and coffee for a perfect breakfast:
After a few plates of these wonderful biscuits, it was hard for me to make big inroads on my real breakfast: a slab of country ham, two eggs, grits, and red-eye gravy (made with coffee):
Nashville, is of course, the country music capital of America, and is bedecked with recording studios and honkey-tonk beer bars where both unknowns and stars come to play. Here’s where it all started: the Rhyman auditorium, home of the “Grand Ole Opry” (a weekly live performance of country music that was broadcast on the radio) from 1943 to 1974:
The Rhyman sits just two blocks from Broadway, a colorful streeet lined with music stores, dive bars, and places to buy cowboy boots and hats:
The most famous venue for music on Broadway is, I’m told, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. Apparently many stars were either discovered here or go to jam here after a local performance:
And although Tenneseee is a religious state, the music was already playing, and the beer flowing, on Sunday morning at 10:30. We stopped by Tootsie’s for a beer and a listen, and the band was really good. I took a few videos to show the quality of music on tap. I’m told that nearly every barista and waiter in Nashville is an aspiring musician.
The band had a great electric guitarist and a fine singer:
A famous place for a “meat-and-three” dinner or lunch (meat and three vegetables) is the Sylvan Park Restaurant in Nashville, an unprepossessing place that has been around for over eighty years:
The menu:
And my dinner: baked chicken with rice, fried corn, stewed apples, mac and cheese, corn muffins, and, of course, sweetened ice tea, that indispensable elixir and grease-cutter of the South. (Do remember that food is not medicine):
On to Atlanta and a visit to Emory University, where my first stop was the famous Mary Mac’s Tea Room:
Lunch begins with a nourishing bowl of “potlikker”: the juice from the bottom of a pot of collard greens stewed with pork, served with a corn muffin. It’s a healthy preprandial amuse-bouche, and very hard to find, even in the South:
My lunch was a fantastic chicken pot pie (look at that crust oozing down the ramekin!), with a side of squash soufflé and one of fried okra (with corn muffins and sweet tea, of course):
All topped off with a slice of peanut butter pie (it was a tough choice between that and the banana pudding). You can see Mary Mac’s menu here.
I much enjoyed my visits to Vanderbilt and Emory, particularly the opportunities to talk to graduate and undergraduate students, who were impressive at both places. At Emory I had the privilege of speaking with a group of high-school teachers, who are on the very front lines of the evolution-creationism battle in the hottest salient of the war. They are admirable folks, working at low pay to bring enlightenment and science to a dubious population.
One other task that befell me was to introduce Richard Dawkins at his talk at the Gwinnett Center outside Atlanta. He spoke about evolution: “Darwin’s Five Bridges”, which dealt with the advances in understanding evolution produced by Darwin, his contemporary Alfred Wallace, and their forebears. Here’s a summary I got from Richard when I asked him what he’d talk about:
Bridge 1 is natural selection as a purely negative force, which lots of people got before Darwin.
Bridge 2 is natural selection as a positive force, but missing the power of the idea to explain all of life. Patrick Matthew got there.
Bridge 3 is natural selection as a positive force, with the power to explain all of life. Darwin and Wallace got there.
Bridge 4 is same as 3 but convincing the world at large with massive evidence. Darwin did that but not Wallace.
Bridge 5 is the neo-Darwinian synthesis where evolution became changes in gene frequencies in population. Nobody in the nineteenth century got that.
The talk was great, and was preceded by a ten-minute speech by Sean Faircloth on the importance of rationality and evolutionary biology. Richard really shone in the question-and-answer session, which was accompanied by much applause and laughter. Being pretty ill with a virus, I fear that my introduction didn’t do him justice, but I tried.
Here’s Richard in the Green Room before his talk, signing a copy of The Magic of Reality for a starstruck fan:
And, at the end of the evening, Richard had an hour of book-signing. He looked pretty beat after that, but revived over dinner with a beer and a steak (I am sad to report that he ordered it well done).
I write this with trepidation, for how can a philosophically unsophisticated upstart (i.e., moi) take on a friend who not only has a Ph.D. in philosophy, but criticizes me at the venerable organ Talking Philosophy? Perhaps I’m an April Fool, then, but I want to rise to the challenge of Russell Blackford’s critique, “Jerry Coyne on free will.” His piece was written in response to my essay against free will published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Sometimes I think that either I’m missing the whole point of such critiques, or the philosopher is, or something else is at issue that I don’t really understand. I want to be brief here, so I’ll address only three of Brother Blackford’s points:
He is not trying to save face. Russell doesn’t agree with my claim:
Although science strongly suggests that free will of the sort I defined doesn’t exist, this view is unpopular because it contradicts our powerful feeling that we make real choices. In response, some philosophers — most of them determinists who agree with me that our decisions are preordained — have redefined free will in ways that allow us to have it. I see most of these definitions as face-saving devices designed to prop up our feeling of autonomy.
His response is this:
I don’t think there is any reason at all to believe that; it strikes me as overly cynical. I can report, in my own case, that my past (and certainly not entirely buried) tendency towards compatibilism is not at all a face-saving device of this kind. It is a sincerely held position based on the view that we retain certain capacities even if our decisions are the product of a causally more-or-less deterministic process.
Let me first exculpate Russell in such cynicism, for I do believe him. But he either didn’t read what I wrote, or took it too personally. I deliberately said some philosophers redefine free will to prop up our feeling that we have choices. And I do believe that, for it’s explicit in some compatibilist treatments. As I recall, Dan Dennett’s notion of free will was expressly described as “the only free will worth wanting.” Other philosophers have addressed the problem with the aim of reconciling physical determinism with the express purpose of finding some descriptor that matches our feeling of agency. I think this is a losing proposition, because such descriptors always overreach, or seem ludicrous, but I certainly don’t think those compatibilists are intellectually dishonest. They’re trying to rearrange their ideas to match their emotions. But on to the major issues.
Blackford thinks he has “capacities” that are an important part of his free will. As he says:
Furthermore, reflection on what is important that reasonably falls within the ambit of the free will debate leads me to think that the capacities we retain are very important.
These capacities include: the ability to deliberate; the ability, more specifically, to deliberate about what I most value or desire in a situation; the ability to shape my own future to an extent, as a result of my choices; and, more generally, the ability to affect the future of my society and my world, to an extent, as a result of my choices. Some people – certain fatalists and passivists – seem to deny the latter abilities, at least.
My response is: so what? Yes, Russell thinks he is deliberating, and he is insofar as his brain is working and mulling over alternatives when he makes a decision. But he’s sorely mistaken if he thinks he has any control over those deliberations. They are the result of the laws of physics, and are largely deterministic, with the exception of any quantum indeterminacy (which, as I have said ad infinitum, doesn’t play a role in anyone’s notion of free will.) Blackford, by the way, does seem to be a determinist, but appears to accept that only grudgingly.
Further, Russell is mistaken if he really thinks that he has “the ability to shape [his] own future to an extent.” Here, I think, he’s sneaking in a kind of dualism. How can he affect his own future by ruminating and deliberating if that future has already been determined before his deliberations?
Yes, humans have evolved an elaborate system of weighing inputs before giving an output—a “choice”—but the apparatus and the results of the deliberations are also part of a deterministic system of molecular interactions. It is true, as Russell says, that his own actions and words “affect the future of [his] society and [his] world,” but none of this is a result of a free choice on his part. What Russell doesn’t address is whether his ability to deliberate really could lead to more than one possible outcome in a session of deliberation (it can’t), nor does he explain what he means when he says that he can “shape his own future.” How is that supposed to happen? What he means is that his future has already been shaped, before deliberation, by the peculiar (and handsome) configuration of molecules that is Russell Blackford and his environment.
Blackford finds free will in the contradictory idea that “I could have done otherwise had I wanted to.” As he says:
Even this is problematic. The idea of “could have chosen otherwise” (which some philosophers do, indeed, use as a definition of free will) is at best equivocal.
On one interpretation, to say that I could have chosen otherwise simply means that I would have been able to act differently if I’d wanted to. Say a child drowns in a pond in my close vicinity, and I stand by allowing this to happen. The child is now dead, and the child’s parents blame me for the horrible outcome. Will it cut any ice if I reply, “I couldn’t have acted (or couldn’t have chosen) otherwise?” No. They are likely to be unimpressed.
What more would I have needed to have been able to act otherwise? I was at the right place at the right time. I can swim. No special equipment that I lacked was actually needed … and so on. The parents are likely to reply that it’s not that I couldn’t have chosen to act otherwise, but that I merely didn’t want to act otherwise.
This reminds me of an argument I had with my sister when we were very young. She maintained that our father was a “perfect man,” and could do anything. “He could even fly if he wanted to,” said my sister. “Well then,” I responded, “Why don’t we ever see him fly?” “Because he doesn’t want to!” she answered.
Need I point out that (especially given the unconscious nature of motivations and desires, long adduced by psychiatrists but now revealed by neuropsychological experiments), the idea that you do something because you “want to” is simply a tautology. There is no difference between saying “I couldn’t have chosen otherwise” and “I didn’t want to do otherwise”. What does it mean to say “I wanted to go dancing but had to study”? To a determinist, all that means is that you had a desire to go dancing but that was trumped by a greater “want” to study. One could say that you really wanted to study, but the idea of “wants” is irrelevant here anyway. What one can best say is that “For reasons I don’t really understand, I studied instead of danced.” One can certainly acknowledge conflicting desires, but those cannot be instantiated in different actions in an identical situation.
So when Russell says something like this—
Surely there are many cases like this where the reason that I didn’t act otherwise was not any lack of capacity, equipment, being on the spot, etc., but merely that I didn’t want to act otherwise. The most salient thing determining how I acted was my desire-set. Leave everything else in place, but change my desire-set, and I would have acted otherwise. In those circumstances, it is true that I could have acted otherwise. In those circumstances, someone can rightly say to me: “It’s not that you couldn’t have acted otherwise; it’s that you didn’t want to.”
—he’s simply is making up a new word for “the physical factors that impelled one to act”: he calls it the “desire-set.” Yes, of course if you change the “desire-set” construed in that way, then your actions would have been different. But, Russell, your desire-set is fixed by your molecules: by your genes, physiology, and the determined environmental factors that impinge on them. You haven’t said anything new here or adduced a new argument for why one’s choice is “free.” Indeed, Russell sort of admits this later in the article.
What it appears to boil down to—if Russell does agree with me that his desire set is fixed and he can only ever do one thing, even after “deliberating about it”—is whether or not the parents of the drowned child have a right to reproach Blackford for his dilatory and selfish behavior:
But as long as the explanation as to why I didn’t act otherwise is just those states of my neurology – the ones that constitute my desire-set – the parents are quite right to complain that I could have chosen to do otherwise and saved their child. “You just didn’t want to,” they say, correctly. I was someone whose desire-set was such that I wouldn’t act otherwise in such circumstances, but I was not someone who couldn’t do so.
But in what sense are they “quite right” to complain that Russell didn’t save their child? They certainly feel aggrieved about this, for such feelings are evolved and powerful, but in my view Russell had no “moral responsibility” to save the child: he could only do what he did. Yes, the parents could complain about what he didn’t do, and that, indeed, may affect not only Russell’s future behavior, making him more altruistic, but influence others to act more altruistically in the future. (Nobody—even pure determinists—deny that social approbation or disapprobation can influence people’s future behavior.) The parents’ statement that Russell “didn’t want to save their child” is in fact identical under determinism with his statement that Russell “couldn’t save their child.” Blackford’s claim that these statements differ in substance is wrong. Or, if there is a relevant difference here, Blackford hasn’t made it clear, especially if he’s a determinist.
In his attempt to save free will, Blackford concludes:
Thus the “couldn’t act otherwise” argument, based on causal determinism, should not convince us that we lack free will. When I failed to save the child, I could, indeed, have chosen to do otherwise.
This statement leaves me completely baffled. When Russell says “I could, indeed, have chosen to do otherwise,” he seems to mean only, “had I been somebody other than Russell Blackford at that moment, I might have done otherwise.” And in what sense is that free will? It’s one thing for people to chastise somebody for making a “bad choice” (an emotion that feels natural but is at bottom irrational), but it’s a different thing to think that somebody actually can act in different ways at a single time.
So I ask Russell—and I’m confident that he’ll answer me—where is the “freedom” in your notion of free will? Are you agreeing with me that all of our actions are determined? If so, then where does the notion of “freedom” come in?
I freely admit that we feel we have free will, but I adamantly deny that this is anything other than an illusion.
UPDATE: I’m still confused about what Russell means by the difference between “could have done differently” and “could have done differently if I wanted to”. If by the latter he means “I could have made a different decision had circumstances been slightly different,” then I agree with Russell completely. But that was never my argument to begin with, and I doubt that anyone takes issue with it.
All hands employed in making April fools. — at midnight almost nearly all the watch below was called up in their shirts; carpenters for a leak: quarter masters that a mast was sprung. — midshipmen to reef top-sails; All turned in to their hammocks again, some growling some laughing. — The hook was much too easily baited for me not to be caught: Sullivan cried out, “Darwin, did you ever see a Grampus: Bear a hand then”. I accordingly rushed out in a transport of Enthusiasm, & was received by a roar of laughter from the whole watch. —
Actually, though, a grampus is a species of dolphin, also known as Risso’s dolphin (Grampus griseus), and the only species in its genus:
In honor of April Fool’s Day (no, I don’t have the heart to play a prank today), the famous AdBlock ad is turning into CatBlock. Yes, that’s right, every ad today, and perhaps for the next few days, will be replaced by a felid. And, if you subscribe monthly, you’ll be sent a permanent CatBlock app.
See details, and a lolzy presentation, here. To enable CatBlock for the few days it’ll be up, the inventor says this:
I’ll leave CatBlock in place for a few days, during which you can enable or disable it on the AdBlock toolbar button → Options page.
