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.
Lawrence Krauss is one of the most engaging science lecturers that I’ve seen. In this 45-minute video (via Vimeo), filmed at Conway Hall in London last October 16, he covers a diverse array of subjects from physics. The title is “Cosmic Connections,” and it’s part of a Sunday lecture series called “The School of Life.” You can see more videos from the series here, unfortunately including a talk by Karen Armstrong.
Krauss’s topics include how stars are born and die, why the greatest privilege of being a scientist is being wrong, why he thinks that we’ll find life on Mars, how both general and special relativity have a direct impact on our lives, and why each time we inhale we take in ten molecules from Julius Caesar’s dying breath.
Now I know that much of this may not be new to some readers, for there are physics-savvy folks among us, but I found it good value for a brief expenditure of time. And it’s a good model for how to lecture about science to the general public.
I want to point out two pieces by website comrades that appeared today; both are worth reading.
Over at EvolutionBlog, Jason continues his survey of scriptural morality in a nice post called “Is the Bible a reliable guide to morality?” He’s discussing an essay by David Lose on PuffHo in which Lose, while acknowledging that the Bible didn’t get it right on matters of morality (Jason’s example in his great post last Thursday was homosexuality), it nevertheless can be a “profound guide to life”. Jason responds:
But let’s grant that the Bible sometimes gets it right and sometimes gets it wrong on moral questions. My question is: What part of that suggests that the Bible’s primary function is as a guide to living? When we see a few decent moral teachings mixed in with a lot of primitive tribal BS, why not simply conclude that the Biblical texts represent the thinking of primitive people laboring without the benefit of divine guidance?
Lose goes on to show how one can “resolve” issues like the scriptural proscription of homosexuality by looking to other sections of the Bible involving “communal responsibility, mutual and loving commitment, and the intricate nature of our human relationships”—sections than support our notion of gay rights. Jason finds this laughable, for it is, as we can clearly see, simply a way to use the Bible to buttress our secular morality. For that’s what this kind of moral exegesis clearly shows: Christians pick and choose those parts of the Bible that support their own extra-religious morality. Morality clearly doesn’t come from God. Jason concludes:
The Bible has some historical and literary value, but it contains almost nothing of relevance to modern moral concerns. Clear thinking about morality cannot begin until it is placed harmlessly back on the shelf where it belongs. There are countless literary works of demonstrably human origin that are far greater repositories of moral insight than is the Bible.
____
And over at Choice in Dying, Eric MacDonald discusses “Elaine Ecklund’s militant campaign,” which of course is to persuade us that American scientists are far less atheistic than we really are. He nicely summarizes the many distortions that pervade the conclusions of Ecklund’s Templeton-funded study. Eric also includes a new video in which Ecklund perpetuates these distortions—against a visual background of praying hands, Stars of David, crosses, Bibles, and Muslims at prayer. Listen at the end when Ecklund says that “these atheist scientists actually wanted to expose their children to a variety of [religious] choices. . . it shows that religion and family life are very deeply intertwined in the U.S.”
Well, that may be true as a general statement, but it’s hogwash among the group that Ecklund studied. Her survey of atheist scientists showed that only 17% of them—about one in six—took their children to church at least twice a year. And most of those did so because of pressure from a religious spouse! And that is supposed to show a deep intertwining of religion and family life??? The woman is a spin-doctor from the get-go, but it’s especially striking to see her distort her data as she appears on camera. Is any sociologist going to criticize Ecklund’s conclusions, or is that left to people with websites like Jason, Eric, and me? Where is peer review in that field?
It’s palpably obvious that acceptance of evolution is impeded by religion. The data are many, including surveys of different denominations, a strong negative correlation among countries between their degree of religiosity and their inhabitants’ acceptance of evolution, the statements of religious people themselves to the effect that evolution threatens their view of scripture, morality, or self-worth, and the fact that creationism throughout the world is always connected with religion. And then there’s this, from an analysis by David Masci at the Pew Forum in 2007:
When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding, according to the results of an October 2006 Time magazine poll. Indeed, in a May 2007 Gallup poll, only 14% of those who say they do not believe in evolution cite lack of evidence as the main reason underpinning their views; more people cite their belief in Jesus (19%), God (16%) or religion generally (16%) as their reason for rejecting Darwin’s theory.
It also seems obvious that religion impedes acceptance of not just evolution, but science in general—at least that brand of science, like stem-cell research or work on global warming—that threatens religious views. That conclusion has just been buttressed by a new paper by Darren E. Sherkat in Social Science Quarterly, “Religion and scientific literacy in the United States.” Sherkat’s analysis plainly shows that even excluding issues of evolution, religion in America plays a substantial role in reducing science literacy. (I’m not sure if this paper is behind a paywall. If it is, email me and I’ll send it to you.)
Sherkat took data from the 2006 General Social Survey (GSS) collected by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) here at the University of Chicago, a survey of 4,510 randomly chosen Americans who were asked questions about their race, income, immigrant status, geographic region of residence, gender, urban or rural home, and so on. To a randomly sampled subset of 1,863 of these individuals, NORC gave a 13-question science literacy exam. Here’s what people were asked:
The GSS employed a 13-question science examination covering: (1) understanding experimental control groups; (2, 3) two questions about probability regarding disease in a brief vignette; (4) knowledge of the core temperature of Earth; (5) understanding that radioactivity is not simply manmade; (6) knowledge of male determination of sex in human reproduction; (7) understanding that lasers are light waves and not sound waves; (8) knowledge that electrons are smaller than atoms; (9) understanding that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around; (10) that a revolution of the earth going around the sun takes a year; (11) that the universe began with a huge explosion; (12) that continents have drifted over time, and continue to move; and (13) understanding that antibiotics do not kill viruses. A question about evolution was eliminated, since the purpose is to see if religious factors have a bearing on scientific understandings outside that controversial realm. The scale approximates one developed by Miller (1998) for the measurement of civic scientific literacy. A reviewer suggested that sectarians and fundamentalists might answer the “big bang” question correctly by interpreting it through the lens of their distinctive faiths; however, that should minimize rather than augment their differences from others.
The GSS also surveyed people about their religious identification and how they interpreted the Bible:
Religious identifications are classified into five broad groups following prior research on U.S. religion (Roof and McKinney, 1987; Sherkat, 2001): (1) sectarian Protestant identifications (Baptists, Pentecostals, Churches of Christ, Nazarenes, etc.); (2) other Protestants (mostly mainline groups such as Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Lutherans); (3) Catholics; (4) non-Christians (including Jews, Buddhists, Moslems, Hindus, and other faiths); and (5) no religious identification. Religious beliefs are gauged using a question identifying whether respondents believe (1) “The Bible is the actual word of God and should be taken literally, word for word”; (2) “The Bible is the inspired word of God, but not everything in it should be taken literally”; and (3) “The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men.” The first answer to this question is commonly used as an indicator of religious fundamentalism.
Sherkat then did statistical analyses of this data to see which factors affected science literacy, and also performed a multivariate analyses to see which factors were important independent of the others. The results, especially for the effect of religion, were striking:
The percentage of correct answers on the science exam was strongly (and statistically significantly) affected by religious beliefs. Those who take the Bible as the literal word of God scored 54% correct, those who see the Bible as “inspired by God” got 68% correct, and those who see the Bible as a “book of fables” got 75% correct. This classification explained 13% of the total variation in science literacy.
Dividing up people by religious identification rather than by how they regarded the Bible, we also see strong effects on science scores. Sectarian Protestants scored 55% correct, Catholics 65%, “other Protestants” and non-Christians 68%, and nonbelievers (yay!) 72%. The difference between sectarian Protestants and the others is statistically significant, as is the difference between Catholics and everyone else, though the difference between Catholics and “other Protestants” is a small 3%. All together, these religious identifications explain 15% of the variation in science literacy.
To put these figures in perspective, race accounts for 9% of the variation in science literacy, education for 20%, income 9%, and gender 4%. Sherkat concludes that “religious factors are as important for predicting scientific proficiency as are many common sociological characteristics such as race, education, income, and gender.”
One must, of course, control for cross-correlation of factors (for example, perhaps sectarian Protestants are less educated than nonbelievers, and do worse solely because of that) by performing multivariate analysis. When one does this, we still find that sectarian Protestants have significantly lower science literacy than do “mainline” Protestants and nonbelievers. Catholics, too, remain significantly lower in science literacy compared to other Protestants and nonbelievers, but Catholics now don’t differ from sectarian Protestants in their lower degree of science literacy. Remember, this analaysis measures the effect of religious affiliation with all other factors held equal, and these factors include whether or not one has a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible.
Biblical interpretation by itself is also significantly associated with science literacy with other factors (like religious identification) held equal. Fundamentalists are less science literate than those who see the Bible as inspired by God, who in turn are less science literate than those who see the Bible as a book of fables.
Perhaps contrary to popular belief, the South is not a hotbed of science ignorance by virtue of geography alone. When one removes religious factors (for the South harbors more sectarian Protestants and fundamentalists), the South isn’t associated with less science literacy, though rural areas remain less science literate than urban ones.
Sherkat concludes that:
The gap between sectarians and fundamentalists and other Americans is quite substantial. Indeed, only education is a stronger predictor of scientific proficiency than are religious factors. . . .Scientific literacy is low in the United States relative to other developed nations, and this research suggests that religious factors play a substantial role in creating these deficits. This study adds to a growing body of research demonstrating the importance of religious commitments for structuring stratification outcomes, and pointing to the negative impact of sectarian Christian commitments for life chances.
Sherkat also found that Catholicism is a significant factor reducing science literacy, though given the common perception that Catholicism is science-friendly (the Church, for example, accepts the fact of evolution), this result awaits explanation. His suggestion:
Catholic deficits in scientific literacy are less pronounced, and mostly arise after controls for education. This suggests that while Catholics have achieved considerable gains in educational attainment (Keister, 2007), their scientific proficiency does not match their educational position. It is possible that Catholic scientific disadvantages are a function of limited scientific offerings in Catholic colleges and high schools. However, the lack of a significant interaction between educational attainment and Catholic identification suggests that Catholics’ social networks may de-emphasize scientific knowledge, and channel intellectual curiosity into other pursuits.
Note, too, that science literacy is lower for religious folks than for nonbelievers even when you don’t consider evolution but ask questions only about things like continental drift, antibiotics, astronomy, and so on. This is independent of the respondents’ education. One may ask why, when you eliminate hot-button issues like evolution and global warming, religious belief remains associated with lower science literacy. Readers will have their own take here, but I suggest that the willingness to believe in fables and superstition makes one more resistant to believing things that are true, especially when those things fall into a category, “science,” that can be perceived as a threat to belief systems based on superstition. Regardless, Sherkat’s data provide additional evidence, as if we needed any, that science and religion are incompatible.
In homage to Henri Cartier-Bresson, my greatest hero of photography, I try to take photos showing the fortuitous blending of human activities into what seems to be a “decisive moment.” (I of course don’t pretend to approach Cartier-Bresson’s skill, and, unlike his, most of my “moments” are accidents.)
Or, as the master himself would have done it (his greatest photos are in black and white, taken with a small rangefinder Leica):
I have a ton of photos from Spain, including of course many food photos. Later this week I’ll post about the great paellas of Valencia, and about the fantastic market there.
I love Turkey, one reason being the friendliness and good humor of the inhabitants. Both are on display here as a hapless Japanese tourist tries to buy ice cream in Istanbul. To his credit, he proves a good sport:
Since modern religion loves metaphors, this could be one for “sophisticated” theology—except that after much elaborate trickery you never actually get the truth. Scientists might be reminded of the NSF grant process, where you have to try a gazillion times before you get one.
I’ve received some emails from Dr. William Widdowson, a reader of this website and an emeritus professor of architecture and interior design at the University of Cincinnati. (The diversity of my readers always amazes me.) Anyway, Bill had some things to say about the history of the term “scientism,” a word so often used by the faithful to tar atheists and rationalists. Since I thought his comments would be of interest, I’m reproducing them here with his permission.
This is a follow-up on a previous e-mail (14 Nov) in which I suggested that a good way to get into the topic of “scientism” would be to look at Hayek and Popper. I have given the matter a bit more thought and would like to offer the following expansion because there was an issue that I felt needed to be highlighted, i.e., how the use of the term has changed as it’s been expropriated.
Scientism (sensu stricto) began as a label for the doctrine that truth is fixed, a priori and universal; that inductive science is the only means to its discovery and certainty is a realistic outcome. This doctrine was rejected by a particular group of philosophers of science belonging to a tradition pioneered by Charles Sanders Peirce in the late 19th c., carried forward by William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead in the early 20th c. and later by Fredrick Hayek, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, and Thomas Kuhn during the mid-20th c.
Key documents in the history of this tradition would be the essays by Peirce published in Popular Science in the 1890’s and “The Quest for Certainty” by John Dewey. Also important would be essays by, and correspondence between, Hayek and Popper in the 1950’s, for this is when the term was coined (by Hayek) and clarified (by Popper) to their mutual satisfaction.
“Scientism (lite)” has become a label for the doctrine that science is the only way to the truth, a doctrine rejected by theist apologists, accommodationists, and NOMAtics of all stripes because they are committed to the proposition that there are:
1. many other ways of knowing, or
2. many other kinds of truths, or
3. some combination of 1. and 2.
Briefly then, my point is that challenging science’s claim to exclusivity by labeling it Scientism (lite) is very different from using the same label to challenge science’s claim to certainty (Scientism-sensu strictu). If the apologists, accommodationists and NOMAtics presume to claim some of the legitimacy of the philosophy of science by borrowing its terminology, they could at least get it right.
From National Geographic News (spotted by our own Matthew Cobb) comes this amazing discovery: a nest of 15 babies of a dinosaur related to Triceratops. The nest, about 75 million years old contains juvenile Protoceratops andrewsi, and was found in Mongolia. Here’s the parent:
Photograph by Phil Degginger, Carnegie Museum/Alamy
This is a small dinosaur, about 1.5-2 meters long as an adult and weighing roughly 400 pounds. It has the characteristic neck frill of the group, a feature whose function is unknown. Wikipedia suggests the trait could have been for protection from predators (this species was herbivorous), to anchor neck muscles, or to “impress other members of the species” (I presume this is sexual selection, but in that case the neck frill would be larger in males and one should see sexual dimorphism in fossil adults), or a combination of these.
The high concentration of individuals in some areas has suggested that they might have lived in herds.
And the nest, which is 0.7 m (2.3 feet) wide:
Photograph courtesy Khishigjav Tsogtbaatar, Mongolian Academy of Sciences
The presence of all these babies together suggests to one of the discoverers, David Fastovsky, that there was parental care. Since these aren’t newborns—they’re estimated at about a year old—I can’t imagine what other explanation there could be, unless baby dinos stayed together in the nest without parents for a year.
Photograph courtesy Khishigjav Tsogtbaatar, Mongolian Academy of Sciences
All the babies are facing the same way, suggesting to Fastovsky that they died in a sandstorm, facing away from the wind. If that was the case, they could have been covered by an encroaching dune.
Photograph courtesy Khishigjav Tsogtbaatar, Mongolian Academy of Sciences
And a beaked baby:
Photograph courtesy Khishigjav Tsogtbaatar, Mongolian Academy of Sciences
National Geographic adds:
Another fossil discovered in the same region shows an adult Protoceratops and a velociraptor locked in an apparent death grip. “So you have two stunning examples of dinosaur behavior frozen for us to see some 75 million years later,” Fastovsky said.
It’s likely that velociraptors preyed on Protoceratops young, he added: “The desert environment where they lived just had to be hard, and possibly there were relatively high mortality rates.”
I’m no paleontologist, and the people who discovered these are, but I’m still curious how herds of large herbivores could have survived in the desert, and whether the area might have been more lush than the article portrays.
The issue of free will continues to inspire discussion among philosophers and neuroscientists. Since October, for example, there have been two pieces in the New York Times about free will (here and here), and a big review piece in Nature. And, of course, many websites and blogs are dealing with it.
When discussing free will, some philosophers appear to show an intellectual kinship with theologians. Their shared characteristics are two:
Turf defense: some philosophers claim that one must read extensively, including the “sophisticated” literature, before one is qualified to even discuss free will. (The parallel, of course, is with “sophisticated” theology, viz., Terry Eagleton’s critique of The God Delusion.)
Making virtues of necessities. Many theologians rationalize the findings of science post facto as the kind of stuff we would have expected God to do all along. Now that we know that evolution is true, for instance, theologians like John Haught argue that of course that’s how God would have created life. So many philosophers of free will, now aware of physical determinism at the macro level, and of the complete absence of a nonmaterial “soul” or “will”, argue that that free will never really rested on the concept of a mind/brain duality—on the “ghost in the machine.” No, we should have known all along that we have free will for other reasons. In my view, some philosophers engaged in the free-will debates are, like theologians trying to deal with evolution and the Big Bang, engaged in an elaborate form of rationalization. And theologians and philosophers may rationalize for the same reason: to protect cherished views whose abandonment would cause psychological stress. In the case of philosophy, we must protect our views that we really do make decisions and that we are morally responsible for the results of those decisions (these are, of course, two separate issues).
The discussion continues over at Massimo Pigliucci’s website, Rationally Speaking, with a post about a “Free will roundtable” that involved five scholars. Here’s Massimo’s description:
The idea was to have a serious discussion about the various concepts of free will, as well as what exactly neuroscience can tell us about them. (I will not address the simplistic take that has predictably been featured on the topic by the usual suspects, among whom are Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne.
On Nov. 6, 2011, the Center for Inquiry-New York City explored these and related questions by presenting a panel discussion featuring:
* Hakwan Lau, Columbia University [cognitive neuroscientist].
* Alfred Mele, Florida State University [professor of philosophy].
* Jesse Prinz, City University of New York [professor of philosophy]
* Adina Roskies, Dartmouth College [professor of philosophy with speciality in neuroscience]
* Massimo Pigliucci, City University of New York [philosopher with three doctorates, one in biology.
Here’s the video of the 1.5-hour discussion, which wasn’t bad. There’s some good stuff here about the relationship between consciousness and free will, involving experiments showing that human “decisions” in a lab setting can be predicted as long as seven seconds before the subjects are aware of having made a choice:
Unfortunately, in his blog post summarizing the discussion, Dr.3 Pigliucci can’t resist taking a swipe at those of us he considers philosophically unsophisticated:
(I will not address the simplistic take that has predictably been featured on the topic by the usual suspects, among whom are Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne. There are only so many times when I feel like pointing out that someone ought to read the relevant literature before pontificating ex-cathedra.)
Well, I can’t speak for Sam, but Pigliucci doesn’t know how much I’ve looked into the issue, and I have to say that I’m not at all unacquainted with how modern philosophers and neuroscientists deal with free will. I have, for example, read much of The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, and tons of recent literature from both philosophy and neuroscience. And I’ve also read Adina L. Roskies’s paper from the 2010 Annual Review of Neuroscience, “How does neuroscience affect our conception of volition?”, a paper Pigliucci characterizes in his post as “one of the best papers on free will of the last decade.” (It’s not: it’s actually not very good, and I’ll discuss it in the next few days.)
But I’m not here to defend my own good name. Let me just say that you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in philosophy to discuss free will, and that I haven’t noticed that any of Pigliucci’s three doctorates are in cognitive neuroscience (Sam’s of course is). Instead, I want to raise a few points inspired by Massimo’s post. There seem to me to be seven distinct issues in the free-will debate.
1. What do we mean by free will? So many people who discuss free will don’t begin by defining what they mean by it. That’s a problem, for instance, with Roskies’s paper. Although she notes that the term could mean many things, she repeatedly argues that the findings of neuroscience do not “undermine the existence or efficacy of the will” nor contradict “traditional views” of free will, without saying what she means by “free will.” My own definition is that if one reran the tape of life up to the moment of “choice,” with every physical atom and electron in the same position at that moment, there is free will if one could have chosen otherwise. (I exclude different “choices” based on things like quantum indeterminacy.)
2. Is there a mind/brain duality? To me, and to many people, the “classical” notion of free will involves us being able, at a given point of time, to choose freely between alternatives, and that “choice” could not rest on any random indeterminicies of physics (e.g. quantum behavior of electrons). Pigliucci asserts, correctly, that “nobody any longer seriously defends a notion of free will that relies on dualism or, a fortiori, even more metaphysically suspect concepts like souls.”
That’s all well and good, but I don’t think that message has trickled down to the layperson, especially to those of the faithful who think we have a soul. A soul, of course, must be a nonmaterial entity, since it survives our physical bodies, and so could be the vehicle for free will. More of us expound the message out that neuroscience gives no evidence for a soul. Sam, whom Pigliucci scorns, has been especially good at promulgating the “no-soul” data.
But if there’s no mind/brain duality, then our will must reside solely in the physical substance of our brain, and that raises the next issue:
3. Are our decisions completely determined by the laws of physics? I don’t see how the answer to this can be anything but “yes,” barring those decisions that could be affected by true indeterminacies, like those involved in quantum mechanics. (I think the data now show that there really are true indeterminacies in physics—things with no deterministic “cause”. One of these, for example, appears to be when a specific radioactive atom decays.)
But some physicists, Sean Carroll among them, don’t think that this kind of indeterminacy affects our behavior, and thus can’t affect even the appearance of choice. And even if it could—even if, say, the movement of a specific electron really could affect a decision—that isn’t what we think of as part of a “free choice.” (Further, even if there are true quantum indeterminacies, the fact that arrays of particles adhere to well-defined probability distributions may rule out any effect of indeterminacy on our behavior.) Massimo recognizes this. But he’s not convinced that determinism holds even on the macro level, and in his latest post declares himself “agnostic” on determinism.
Massimo’s “A handy dandy guide for the skeptic of determinism” lists several reasons why he isn’t convinced that the laws of physics on the macro scale are deterministic. I strongly disagree with his take on this, but since I’ve discussed the issue with Sean Carroll, who knows a lot more about this than do I, and because Sean promises to post on physical determinism very soon, I’ll leave the physics stuff to him. But I can’t resist noting that Massimo uses the newest post to take yet another swipe at me and Sam Harris, as well as at Alex Rosenberg. Pigliuccci simply can’t help flaunting his credentials by impugning ours; as he says:
I got so sick of the smug attitudes that Rosenberg, Coyne, Harris and others derive from their acceptance of determinism — obviously without having looked much into the issue — that I delved into the topic a bit more in depth myself. As a result, I’ve become agnostic about determinism, and I highly recommend the same position to anyone seriously interested in these topics (as opposed to anyone using his bad understanding of physics and philosophy to score rhetorical points).
Oh, Massimo, I much regret that the laws of physics have made you such a pompous fellow.
As for Pigliucci’s physics and philosophy on this issue, I disagree that “if you believe in laws of nature you do need to come up with an account of their ontology.” Nope, all we have to show is that those rules hold ubiquitously, universally, and enable us to make predictions that work. (His argument here resembles that of theologians who impugn science because we can’t explain the usefulness of science without God.) We don’t need to come up with any stinking ontology to accept strict physical determinism at the macro scale.
And I don’t understand this argument of Pigliucci at all:
And one final point: particularly when it comes to discussions of free will, we keep hearing that the latter is impossible because in a deterministic universe the past determines the future. But as Hoefer points out (and he has expanded on this in a 2002 paper: Hoefer, C., “Freedom From the Inside Out,” in Time, Reality and Experience, C. Callender (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 201–222), the “laws” of physics treat time as symmetrical, which means that the present and the future “fix” the past just in the same way in which the past “fixes” the present and the future. No particular area of the time axis has priority over the others. Chew on that for a while.
Maybe I am unsophisticted, but I don’t see how time symmetry has any bearing on whether the future is determined by the past and present.
4. Is our future behavior completely predictable from the present and past? This question differs from that above because even a completely deterministic system may not be predictable. We can never have perfect knowledge of all conditions, and, as advocates of chaos theory (a deterministic theory) know, even tiny differences in initial conditions—differences that may be too small for us to measure—can produce radically different outcomes. Therefore, even if determinism reigns (and, if it does, there’s no free will under my definition), that doesn’t mean that we can predict our future behavios from what we know now. But it does mean that there is only one set of behaviors that we can evince in the future: that is, we can never do other than what we do.
5. Does free will require that we be conscious of having made a decision? In light of the results of studies by Libet and Soon et al. that decisions appear to be made long before we’re conscious of having made them, we need to discuss the relationship of consciousness to free will. This is one area that seems ripe for a confab between philosophers and neuroscientists. I would claim that in many cases yes, we must be conscious. When you choose a flavor of ice cream at the ice cream counter, if that decision can be predicted an hour in advance, when you first decide to go to the shop, I would argue that that choice is not “free,” at least in the conventional sense. Certainly the predictability of decisions made under experimental conditions undermines our traditional notions of free will (Roskies argues otherwise), and philosophers have to take that into account. Pigliucci and several panel members appear to wave this problem away, saying that free will can involve unconscious “choice”, but I don’t think the problem is so easily dismissed.
6. If our choices are determined, or at best are subject to the deterministic and indeterministic principles of physics, how can our will be “free”? This is the big problem that compatibilist philosophers are dealing with, and I won’t reprise their many arguments here. Pigliucci offers one solution (he appears to be a compatibilist, that is, someone who thinks that free will is compatible with physical determinism):
Many philosophers have located freedom of the will in the ability to choose freely [note: this doesn’t mean “a-causally”] which intentions to form.
That’s a solution I don’t understand, for I don’t know what he means by “choose freely” if the choice is completely caused by physical conditions. What does “free” mean then? By “choose freely,” Pigliucci mean “the appearance of having chosen freely”?
I have read a lot of compatibilist philosophy, and none of it has convinced me. It all sounds too much like rationalization of what people want to believe a priori. I am a big fan of Dan Dennett, for instance, but I’m not on board with the solution he offers in Freedom Evolves. One can, of course, redefine free will so that we have it despite complete physical determinism, but that seems to me a cop-out. Better to get rid of the term than redefine it in a way that doesn’t comport with how regular people conceive of it, or how it’s been used historically. That would be like redefining “God” as “the laws of physics”—it completely finesses long-standing discussions of the problem.
7. If our choices are completely determined by our genes and environments, according to the laws of physics, are we morally responsible for our actions? Again, this is too big an area to cover, and depends on what one means by “moral responsibility”. My own view is that holding people “responsible” for their acts, whether good or ill, is something that we need to do to preserve an orderly society. (I’m not sure we should consider this a form of “moral” responsibility.) But we should certainly inform our system of justice, punishment, and reward in light of what neuroscience tells us. We already do this, to some extent—mentally ill criminals are treated differently from “normal” criminals—but we need to do more.
It’s my contention that, in light of the physical determinism of behavior, there’s no substantive difference between someone who kills because they have a brain tumor that makes them aggressive (e.g., Charles Whitman), and someone who kills because a rival is invading their drug business. We need to reconceive our judicial system in light of what science tells us about how the mind works. And that’s why discussing the bearing of neuroscience and philosophy on free will is far more important than our usual academic discourse.
