As I noted yesterday, the Chronicle of Higher Education has a special section in its latest issue devoted to the question, “Is free will an illusion?” I’d like to give my brief (I hope!) reaction to each of the five essays (I don’t include mine).
Note first that every writer affirms that there is no dualism: our choices are purely products of a material brain. The ineluctable conclusion is that determinism reigns, so that contracausal free will is indeed an illusion. But many nevertheless try to save the concept of free will. Now I know that compatibilism (the idea the free will is compatible with physical determinism) has a long history, even preceding modern neurobiology’s finding that there is no “spooky” soul that can direct our choices.
But many compatibilist philosophers try to save the “notion” of free will by separating it from its historical definition (“I could have chosen otherwise”). Some of this effort is admirable, as when philosophers try to square determinism with how we think about “moral responsibility,” or how we might change our system of punishments and rewards in light of science. But other thinkers seem to me to engage in rearguard philosophy—trying to save the notion that we are free agents, since that notion is so ingrained in us. The latter tactic approaches the method of theology: the post facto rationalization of a comforting fiction that must be saved in the face of contrary scientific evidence.
Alfred R.Mele, “The case against the case against free will”. Mele notes that he is director of a big Templeton Foundation initiative on free will. His first assertion is that, contrary to my claim, most people don’t have an intuitive view of free will that is dualistic; they don’t really think that their choices aren’t determined. His evidence is this:
But philosophers don’t own this expression. If anyone owns it, people in general do. So I conducted some simple studies.
In one, I invited participants to imagine a scenario in which scientists had proved that everything in the universe is physical and that what we refer to as a “mind” is actually a brain at work. In this scenario, a man sees a $20 bill fall from a stranger’s pocket, considers returning it, and decides to keep it. Asked whether he had free will when he made that decision, 73 percent answer yes. This study suggests that a majority of people do not see having a nonphysical mind or soul as a requirement for free will.
To me this doesn’t say much about whether most people view free will as contracausal. They are told that “everything is physical” and that a mind is a “brain at work,” but it’s not obvious that they conclude from this that all actions are predetermined by physical processes. Accepting the scientific scenario may just be something people do to go along with the experimenter; it’s not at all clear that they think deeply about what it means vis-à-vis their actions. I am not convinced by this description of the study (n.b.: I haven’t read the study) that most people aren’t determinists. Drawing that conclusion, I’ve found, requires engaging in long conversations with people to explore their thoughts; I doubt it can be derived from a single quick question.
Mele then criticizes the experiments by Soon et. al. (and by extension that of Libet) showing that neurological scans can predict decisions before the decider is conscious of having decided. He notes that the accuracy is only 60% (I think it’s up to 70%) in some experiments, and that he could do nearly as well with the 50% accuracy of a coin toss. This is fatuous. It’s early days yet, and we may be able to predict decisions in advance with substantially more accuracy when we know more about the brain. He concludes that there is only a “slight unconscious bias toward a particular button.” But that misses the point that the “bias” can be seen in the brain before the subject is conscious of it, and, as I recall, there were no biases towards pressing the left or right button, which renders Mele’s conclusion completely wrong.
Finally, Mele doesn’t define what he means by free will, which makes his essay useless.
Michael Gazzaniga: “Free will is an illusion, but you’re still responsible for your actions.“ I like this essay, probably because, by and large, Gazzaniga agrees with me. He’s absolutely insistent on determinism and thinks the concept of free will is incoherent:
Neuroscience reveals that the concept of free will is without meaning, just as John Locke suggested in the 17th century. Do robots have free will? Do ants have free will? Do chimps have free will? Is there really something in all of these machines that needs to be free, and if so, from what? Alas, just as we have learned that the world is not flat, neuroscience, with its ever-increasing mechanistic understanding of how the brain enables mind, suggests that there is no one thing in us pulling the levers and in charge. It’s time to get over the idea of free will and move on.
But he wants to save the idea of personal responsibility nonetheless. Well, I agree with him in the sense that people must be held accountable for their acts. Absent accountability, punishment, and the like, society couldn’t function. But he sneaks in a sort of anti-determinism when he says that people are responsible in the sense that they can choose whether to follow society’s rules:
Holding people responsible for their actions remains untouched and intact since that is a value granted by society. We all learn and obey rules, both personal and social. Following social rules, as they say, is part of our DNA. Virtually every human can follow rules no matter what mental state he or she is in.
Thus Jared Loughner, who has been charged with shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords, is judged to be insane. Yet he followed one kind of rule when he stopped to make change for the taxi driver on the way to murder and cause mayhem. Should society really allow that the act of not following another kind of rule (not to kill anyone) be accepted as an excuse for murder? Since responsibility exists as a rule of social interaction and not normal, or even abnormal brain processes, it makes no sense to excuse the breaking of one kind of social rule but not another.
The flaw here is this: if our actions really are predetermined, how can we “choose” whether or not to follow the rules? Loughner was predetermined to make change for the driver, but predetermined to kill as well. What is the contradiction in that? He followed the rules in one case but not the other, but in what sense was he making free “choices”? And who on earth is “excusing” breaking one kind of social rule but not another? Breaking a “no murder” rule is far more serious than not making change properly; neither is in the strict sense “excusable,” but flouting one rule is far more serious than flouting another, and society comes down far harder on murder than on not making change. This is proper, for punishing severe violations of the social order has more salutary consequences: it affects both the miscreant’s brain and those of onlookers, prompting the former, perhaps, to reform and the latter to not emulate Loughner. Excessive punishment for small infractions is damaging to society.
Outside of that, I agree with Gazzaniga’s conclusion that people are accountable but we need to take into account determinism when thinking over how we punish wrongdoers. The problem is that he uses “responsibility” in the sense of “that person did it”, while many conceive of the word as meaning “that person had a choice whether to do it.” I agree with the former but not the latter, which is what I see as the erroneous notion of “moral responsibility.” To me, moral responsibility implies true choice.
Hilary Bok, “Want to understand free will? Don’t look to neuroscience.” Bok, a philosopher, seems to be taking the theological route, trying to preserve our feeling that we’re free by defining free will in a way that allows it. She doesn’t want to go where the science takes us, I think, but prefers to engage in semantics:
The problem of free will for compatibilists is not to preserve a role for deliberation and choice in the face of explanations that threaten them with elimination; it is to explain how, once our minds and our choices have been thoroughly naturalized, we can provide an adequate account of human agency and freedom.
How can we reconcile the idea that our choices have scientific explanations with the idea that we are free?
But that “adequate account” of agency must come from science, not philosophy. And what does she mean by “freedom”? She never defines it (a flaw in some of these essays) unless she means “our feeling that we decide freely.”
In the end, she takes what I see as a philosophical cop-out, i.e., free will lies in our ability to make seemingly reasoned choices:
A person whose actions depend on her choices has alternatives; if she is, in addition, capable of stepping back from her existing motivations and habits and making a reasoned decision among them, then, according to compatibilists, she is free.
But what is it mean to be “free” if the decisions we make after “reasoning” about them (a process that of course is not free, but itself determined by physics), were determined in advance? That just gives us the feeling of freedom, but not actual freedom. If you want to take the former to be the latter, fine, but then admit that even one’s reasoning is determined. In this sense humans have free will in the same way that crows or chimps do—animals that also “reason.” If by “free will” we mean the Dennett-ian sense that “we are highly evolve beasts to take in and mull over inputs before coughing up an output,” then we should simply say “decisions arrived at after pondering” rather than “decisions made by free will.” It’s so much less confusing that way, and jettisons the historical and religious baggage associated with free will.
Owen Jones, “The end of (discussing) free will.” I like this piece, first because of Jones’s explicit rejection of non-determinism:
The problem with free will is that we keep dwelling on it. Really, this has to stop. Free will is to human behavior what a perfect vacuum is to terrestrial physics—a largely abstract endpoint from which to begin thinking, before immediately moving on to consider and confront the practical frictions of daily existence.
I do get it. People don’t like to be caused. It conflicts with their preference to be fully self-actualized. So it is understandable that, at base, free-will discussions tend to center on whether people have the ability to make choices uncaused by anything other than themselves. But there’s a clear answer: They don’t. Will is as free as lunch. (If you doubt, just try willing yourself out of love, lust, anger, or jealousy.)
Too many philosophers (and others) aren’t willing to make a statement this strong and true. You’ve probably seen—on this website and elsewhere—people saying that we shouldn’t go around proclaiming determinism because it’s bad for people to think that their actions are all predetermined. But if Mele is right, and most people don’t think that, then what’s the harm? (I don’t think Mele is right.)
And I like Jones’s clear statement that our understanding of determinism has real implications for the law, and for punishment. I agree with him 100% here:
Which brings us to law. How will insights from the brain sciences affect the ways we assess a person’s responsibility for bad behavior? Answer: only somewhat, but sometimes significantly. Many people assume that legal responsibility requires free will, such that an absence of free will necessarily implies an absence of responsibility. Not true, as many scholars have amply demonstrated. Full, complete, utterly unconstrained freedom to choose among available actions might be nice to have, but it is not in fact necessary for a fair and functioning legal system.
This is not to say that degrees of freedom are irrelevant to law. Science hasn’t killed free will. But it has clarified various factors—social, economic, cultural, and biological in nature—that constrain it.
My single quibble with Jones here: his statement that “science hasn’t killed free will.” But he implied earlier that there’s no such thing as free will! If he thinks there’s a form of free will that remains viable, he needs to define it. He doesn’t, which is a flaw in an otherwise admirable piece.
Paul Bloom, “Free will does not exist. So what?” Bloom’s thesis is that we’ve long known that determinism rules, so there can’t be contracausal free will. But his take is that it doesn’t matter:
Our actions are in fact literally predestined, determined by the laws of physics, the state of the universe, long before we were born, and, perhaps, by random events at the quantum level. We chose none of this, and so free will does not exist.
I agree with the consensus, but it’s not the big news that many of my colleagues seem to think it is. For one thing, it isn’t news at all. Determinism has been part of Philosophy 101 for quite a while now, and arguments against free will were around centuries before we knew anything about genes or neurons. It’s long been a concern in theology; Moses Maimonides, in the 1100s, phrased the problem in terms of divine omniscience: If God already knows what you will do, how could you be free to choose?
But he then falls into the same trap as Bok: true free will comes from the facct that our predetermined decisions are produced after a process of deliberation:
More important, it’s not clear what difference it makes. Many scholars do draw profound implications from the rejection of free will. Some neuroscientists claim that it entails giving up on the notion of moral responsibility. There is no actual distinction, they argue, between someone who is violent because of a large tumor in his brain and a neurologically normal premeditated killer—both are influenced by forces beyond their control, after all—and we should revise the criminal system accordingly. Other researchers connect the denial of free will with the view that conscious deliberation is impotent. We are mindless robots, influenced by unconscious motivations from within and subtle environmental cues from without; these entirely determine what we think and do. To claim that people consciously mull over decisions and think about arguments is to be in the grips of a prescientific conception of human nature.
I think those claims are mistaken. In any case, none of them follow from determinism. Most of all, the deterministic nature of the universe is fully compatible with the existence of conscious deliberation and rational thought. These (physical and determined) processes can influence our actions and our thoughts, in the same way that the (physical and determined) workings of a computer can influence its output. It is wrong, then, to think that one can escape from the world of physical causation—but it is not wrong to think that one can think, that we can mull over arguments, weigh the options, and sometimes come to a conclusion. After all, what are you doing now?
But exactly how is this claim mistaken: “We are mindless robots, influenced by unconscious motivations from within and subtle environmental cues from without; these entirely determine what we think and do. To claim that people consciously mull over decisions and think about arguments is to be in the grips of a prescientific conception of human nature.”? That seems pretty accurate to me; in fact, it’s what Bloom agreed with at the outset.
I agree that our predetermined decisions arrive after humans appear to think about stuff, but those decisions remain predetermined. In what sense, then, is there any “freedom”? To me, the claim that “conscious deliberation and rational thought” can affect our decisions is a form of snuck-in dualism, for those thought processes themselves are based on the laws of physics, and their outcome is determined. External forces like other people, or insults to the brain, can affect the output, but the deliberations themselves cannot. That is dualism.
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In the sense that any of these thinkers agree that our will is “free,” they mean that some of our decisions appear to be made after conscious processes of deliberation—after thinking about them. Of course, that’s a result of evolution, and many animals probably do the same thing. Perhaps these folks will agree that humans aren’t unique in having this form of “free will,” for all beasts are evolved to absorb and process input before producing a behavioral output. But where is the “freedom” in all this? What, exactly, are we free to do? We’re not free to think—that’s a result of evolution—and we’re not free in how our thought processes operate, or in what “decision” they produce. Perhaps some readers can explain to me what the “freedom” is in this form of free will. I don’t get it. Sure, we can mull over things more than, say, a slug, but so what? Our form of “mulling over things” is merely a more sophisticated version of what a slug does when it surveys its environment, and there’s no qualitative difference in either the determinism or in the way the nerves and ganglia work.
Pray where, oh where, is all that vaunted “freedom”?
