Sean Carroll on free will

July 14, 2011 • 5:18 am

I’ll be brief here, as I promised not to post on this topic for a while—a promise I’m now breaking for the third time. But I wanted to draw attention to Sean Carroll’s new and thoughtful post on the “free will issue.” It’s at his website Cosmic Variance, and is called “Free will is as real as baseball.” What does he mean by that? That both the game and our appearance of choice are emergent properties that are useful to consider as wholes rather than simply as groups of atoms obeying the laws of physics:

The concept of baseball is emergent rather than fundamental, but it’s no less real for all of that.

Likewise for free will. We can be perfectly orthodox materialists and yet believe in free will, if what we mean by that is that there is a level of description that is useful in certain contexts and that includes “autonomous agents with free will” as crucial ingredients. That’s the “variety of free will worth having,” as Daniel Dennett would put it.

Carroll is a materialist, and believes,as do I, that quantum uncertainty plays little role in macroscopic human behaviors.  And it follows that he’s a complete physical determinist. But our inability to predict human behaviors that are already determined is what he construes as “free will”:

If we know the exact quantum state of all of our atoms and forces, in principle Laplace’s Demon can predict our future. But we don’t know that, and we never will, and therefore who cares? What we are trying to do is to construct an effective understanding of human beings, not of electrons and nuclei. Given our lack of complete microscopic information, the question we should be asking is, “does the best theory of human beings include an element of free choice?” The reason why it might is precisely because we have different epistemic access to the past and the future. The low entropy of the past allows for the existence of “records” and “memories,” and consequently forces us to model the past as “settled.” We have no such restriction toward the future, which is why we model the future as something we can influence. From this perspective, free will is no more ruled out by the consequence argument than the Second Law of Thermodynamics is ruled out by microscopic reversibility.

As far as I can see, then, Carroll mostly agrees with me, but decides to label as “free will” the observation that humans appear to make choices.  I say “appear,” because if you’re a determinist you don’t believe that they are really choices—that is, you could not have done otherwise in any situation.  That’s certainly “will,” but in what sense is it “free”? It only appears to be free.

At the end, Carroll admits that whether choices really are “free” is important in our notion of moral responsibility and punishment:

We don’t find people guilty of crimes simply because they committed them; they had to be responsible, in the sense that they had the mental capacity to have known better. In other words: we have a model of human beings as rational agents, able to gather and process information, understand consequences, and make decisions. When they make the wrong ones, they deserve to be punished. People who are incapable of this kind of rationality — young children, the mentally ill — are not held responsible in the same way.

The problem here is that maybe criminals are no more “responsible” for their crimes than are miscreant “young children” and “the mentally ill.”  If all acts are, as Carroll believes, physically determined on a macro scale, then there’s no difference between these groups, and any lawbreaker is as guilty as any other.  What does Carroll mean by “responsibility” if someone’s crime looked like a choice (even if the person had the “mental capacity to have known better”), but in reality the crime was already determined by his genes and environment?

To me the important question—and I recognize that people will disagree—is this:  did a criminal really have a “choice” to commit a crime, or was his behavior determined well before the moment of the crime? One can still have a valid theory of punishment under a completely deterministic world view, and I’ve talked about this before.   But if, like Carroll, you’re simply defining “free will” as “the observation that humans pick one thing to do one then when there are many apparent alternatives”, then I say that he should slap a warning label on that definition: “NOTE:  Agent was not really capable of making any “choice” other than the one he made.  It only looks as if he could.”

Carroll winds up asserting again that we have free will because it’s a good model of human behavior:

Thinking of the collections of atoms we call “people” as rational agents capable of making choices seems like a pretty good theory to me, likely to remain useful for a long while to come. At least, that’s what I choose to think.

Well, yes, it’s hard to accept (as I really have) that my choices are all determined before they’re made, and we can’t live our lives thinking that.  That way lies madness—and nihilism. And it’s impossible in most cases to predict what those choices will be.  But Carroll might be a bit clearer about his last sentence, which I’d rewrite like this, adding the stuff in bold:

Thinking of the collections of atoms we call “people” as rational agents capable of making choices, even though they aren’t really capable of free choice between alternatives, seems like a pretty good theory to me, likely to remain useful for a long while to come.

And I guess I don’t really agree that it’s a “pretty good theory”, because it ignores things that are important in our philosophy and practice of punishment.  If science shows, in the future, that a “common criminal” had no more freedom of action than a criminal who was young or mentally ill, then Carroll’s theory is not quite so useful.  Determinism is the elephant in this philosophical room: we may know it’s there but pretend otherwise.

The good news and the bad news

July 14, 2011 • 3:53 am

First the bad. This is what greeted me this morning: a lovely comment, which I’ve posted, from a twelve-year-old lad (presumably male) who runs the website basketballonmymind.

I hate your site and your book there is no such thing as evolution only God could make the beautiful plants,animals, and people we see today this site is a scam to make people think we as humans know everything but we don’t God does even Charles Darwin himself declared at his death bed that God created it all thank you for your time and God bless You

If you wish to educate him, there’s an email at the site, but please—no invective or harshness. Maybe a few recommended readings would suffice, but of course it’s likely to be a futile effort.  After all, he implies that he’s read my book.

The good news is that reader Glenn read this on my Aquinas post:

Unless you read literally hundreds of books, you don’t qualify for your Discussing Theology merit badge.  In contrast, you can read only one book to fully grasp both the tenets and evidence for evolution.

and made me a merit badge! (I don’t deserve it yet as I haven’t started Aquinas.)

Lawrence and Arabia

July 13, 2011 • 1:29 pm

by  Greg Mayer

Both Jerry and I have an interest in T.E. Lawrence, the archeologist, linguist, author, soldier, and diplomat, and a couple of years ago Jerry happened to be visiting around the time I prepared an exhibition and public lecture on “Lawrence and Arabia“. There are many misconceptions about Lawrence– he was either a pro-Arab or Zionist or imperialist or anti-imperialist spy who deceived everyone while being manipulated by everyone, and so on;  plus, there is an inordinate amount of interest in his sex life, given that he had so little interest in it himself. So, here’s a brief precis of some of the reasons he’s interesting.

Lawrence (detail). Augustus John. 1919.

Lawrence (b. 1888) observed and participated in the creation of much of the modern Middle East. When he first traveled there as an Oxford undergraduate in 1909, much of the Arab world had been under the rule of the Ottoman Turks for centuries.  At its peak, the Ottoman Empire had professed a multinational and even multireligious unity– the Sultan was both Caesar and Caliph. But by the early 20th century these ideas were stale, and nationalism was on the rise among both the Turks and the various subject nationalities. Tensions were growing, and secret societies aimed at Arab independence were being formed.

Carchemish field crew; Dahoum at far right.

It was into this milieu that Lawrence stepped, first as an undergraduate, and then as an archeologist from 1910-1914. Based at Carchemish, he traveled, mostly on foot, throughout Syria, Palestine, northern Mesopotamia, and Sinai. Being, as he noted, poor, he went to places and met people that most Western travelers did not. He lived among the Kurds, the Armenians, and the Arabs. Working with the large Arab labor force at Carchemish, he learned how to persuade, and to lead them. Asked years later how he ‘handled’ Arabs, he replied, just as you do “Englishmen, or Laplanders, or Czechoslovaks: cautiously at first, and kindly always.”

Feisal. Augustus John. 1919.

After the outbreak of the First World War he was posted to Cairo, and in 1916 he traveled to the Hejaz, where Sherif Hussein of the Hashemite family of Mecca had declared the Arab Revolt against the Turks. Lawrence met Hussein’s son Feisal, and found him to be the man who could lead the Arab army north from Mecca to Damascus and beyond.

Bedouin; Auda abu Tayi of the Howeitat, 2nd from right.

The Arab Army was a mixed force, but its key element was irregular Bedouin cavalry (or ‘camelry’). The Bedouin brought to the army the assets of “movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, [and] courage.”  Rather than drive the Turks from the Hejaz, Lawrence saw that allowing them to remain in Medina (which the prestige of possessing one of the holy cities also demanded of Turkish pride) would hold large numbers of Turks down defending their railway supply line, while the Arab army could flow through and around them.

The Arab Army approaches Akaba.

The Arab Army seized Akaba, providing a secure base from which it could be supplied by the Royal Navy. The base at Akaba also put the Arab Army on the right flank of General Allenby’s army moving against the Turks out of Sinai. Both armies moved north in stages. At each move, the Arab Army recruited fresh fighters as new tribes declared for Feisal and the Revolt. With Feisal’s army in the deserts to the east threatening Turkish supply lines, Allenby took Jerusalem in December 1917. In October 1918, both armies entered Damascus, and the Ottoman government sued for peace.

Destruction along the Hejaz railway.

Lawrence and Feisal used classic principles of guerilla warfare: mobility, avoidance of battle, and popular support. Lawrence wrote,“Our tactics were always tip and run, not pushes, but strokes. We never tried to maintain or improve an advantage, but to move off and strike again somewhere else. We used the smallest force, in the quickest time, at the farthest place.”

The Sykes-Picot agreement (from Wilson, J. 1990. Lawrence of Arabia: the Authorized Biography).

Lawrence knew that the British government had given conflicting assurances to its various allies concerning the postwar settlement. His goal of autonomous Arab states would have to contend with promises made to the French, and with the India Office’s desire to extend its administration into Mesopotamia. Even before the war was over, Lawrence returned to England and began a campaign of private diplomacy, through meetings with and briefing papers for the Eastern Committee of the War Cabinet, and public diplomacy, through articles in the Times highlighting the Arab contributions to the Allied war effort.

Feisal's delegation at the Paris Peace Conference.

After setting up an Arab administration for Syria in Damascus, in late 1918 Feisal went to Europe for the Paris Peace Conference, and Lawrence joined his delegation. Despite making a strong impression on the gathered presidents and ministers, essentially nothing was achieved: the French proceeded to overthrow Feisal’s government in Syria, and an oppressive Indian-style colonial administration was imposed on Mesopotamia.

Cairo Conference, 1921.

Depressed and embittered, Lawrence began a public campaign to change British policy, publishing biting critiques in newspapers throughout 1920. Winston Churchill took note of both the critiques and the policy failures (Mesopotamia was in open rebellion), and upon his appointment as Colonial Secretary he made Lawrence a chief adviser. At the Cairo Conference in 1921, the postwar settlement was remade. Feisal was made king of Mesopotamia (Iraq) and his brother Abdullah emir of Transjordan (later king of Jordan), while their father Hussein continued to rule the Hejaz (he was soon driven out by Ibn Saud). Lawrence regarded this as at least a modest redemption of Britain’s war time promises to the Arabs, and he retired from public life after leaving the Colonial Office in 1922.

He enlisted in both the Army and the Royal Air Force, but it was difficult to achieve the anonymity he sought in the ranks. He eventually settled down in the RAF, becoming a specialist in the design of fast boats used for retrieving downed fliers at sea. All the while he was writing: his masterpiece war memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a memoir of RAF life, The Mint, translations from Greek and French, and an enormous output of letters, to artistic and political luminaries and common men alike. He died as the result of injuries received in a motorcycle accident shortly after leaving the RAF in 1935.

_____________________________________________________________

Brown, Malcolm. 2003. The British Library Historic Lives: T.E. Lawrence. The British Library, London. (A short bio with some nice pictures– a good medium between Wilson’s massively documented tome, and Brown’s later picture book.)

Brown, Malcolm. 2005. Lawrence of Arabia: The Life, the Legend. Thames & Hudson, London. (Lots of good pictures.)

Lawrence, T.E. 1935. Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A Triumph. Doubleday, Doran, New York.

Lawrence, T.E. 2003. Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The Complete 1922 Text. Castle Hill Press, Fordingbridge, UK. (An earlier and longer draft, preferred by some critics.)

Lawrence, T.E. 2005. T.E. Lawrence in War and Peace: An Anthology of the Military Writings of Lawrence of Arabia. M. Brown, ed. Greenhill Books, Barnsley, UK. (Also includes his diplomatic writings.)

Wilson, Jeremy. 1990, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography. Atheneum, New York. (The Lawrence biography, the first based on the many British official papers released beginning in the 1970s.)

Many of Lawrence’s writings, along with a great deal of history and background on Lawrence, can be found at T.E. Lawrence Studies, a website maintained by Jeremy Wilson (who also, at Castle Hill Press, publishes fine press editions of many of Lawrence’s writings). The site has Wilson’s analysis of the historicity of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia; the title of the analysis, Lawrence of Arabia or Smith in the Desert?, gives away Wilson’s conclusion.

O noes! I have to read Aquinas

July 13, 2011 • 7:32 am

Edward Feser, a Catholic philosopher and associate professor at Pasadena City College, has taken strong exception to my complaints about having to read theology.   In response, he’s written a long critique on his blog, largely in the form of a dialogue, called “A clue for Jerry Coyne.”

It doesn’t really merit much discussion, since in the end he pushes one line of “strong” evidence for God (see below), but I would be remiss if I didn’t address his claims.  Feser first takes exception to my taking guidance from Eric MacDonald for a theology reading list.  He implies that MacDonald isn’t neutral but biased against religion.  Well, Feser can stuff it here: yes, Eric rejected faith and resigned as an Anglican priest, but the stuff he’s recommended to me is straight-out mainline theology, written by distinguished theologians—most of them good Christians.  Nothing he’s recommended has been critical of theology, much less written by agnostics or atheists.

The main part of Feser’s post is an imaginary dialogue between two people: “Scientist” and “Skeptic,” designed to mock my disparaging remarks of theology.  “Scientist” tells “Skeptic” (someone who wants to learn about science), that to master the field he has to read all kinds of stuff.  That stuff, according to “Skeptic” (read Feser here) is just as pretentious and obscure as theology, and, further, never provides evidence for its claims. Here’s part of the dialogue.

  • Skeptic: Not in what I’ve read these last few weeks.  For example, read a book like Gregory’s Eye and Brain and you’ll find he talks about how evolution did this or how photons do that.  But he never gives us any argument for the existence of these “photon” thingies, and he never answers all the objections people have made to evolution.  It’s all based on faith. 
  • Scientist: He doesn’t address those things at length because the book is about vision, and not photons or evolution per se.  He can take that stuff for granted because other people have argued for it elsewhere.  He isn’t even trying to answer skeptics about evolution or modern physics in a book like that.  Really, do you expect every science book to start from square one and recapitulate what others have already said about every issue that might be relevant to a subject, just to satisfy skeptics like you?
  • Skeptic: But their belief in these things is not based on argument.  It’s based on peer pressure, groupthink, the fear of being ostracized.  The so-called “arguments” you refer to are just rationalizations for what scientists were indoctrinated into believing while in school and what all their colleagues expect them to believe when they go to conferences, try to get tenure or funding or to get their papers accepted for publication, etc.  It reflects the worship of science that dominates our society – its pop culture, its educational institutions, commerce and industry, you name it.  It’s all socially constructed, not based in reality.

According to Feser, if you replace “Skeptic” with “Coyne” and “Scientist” with “Theologian,” then “you’ve got a dead-on summary of Coyne’s attitude toward theology”.

Well, pretty much—except for one thing.  Two actually.  First, unlike theologians, scientists do have credible evidence for the existence of photos, evolution, and other claims about science.  Second, you can get the evidence for, say, evolution, in pretty much one book: WEIT, or Mayr’s What Evolution Is, or Futuyma’s Science on Trial, or Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth.  You don’t have to read a whole library, or endless exegeses (is that the right plural?) to see why scientists accept scientific facts.  There is no “naive” science or “sophisticated” science.  There’s just science, much of it accessible to the layperson.

Now Feser’s point is this:  in my un-serious quest to learn theology, I am neglecting the Very Powerful Evidence for God that Dawkins failed to present in The God Delusion.  What is that evidence?

Aquinas’s cosmological argument!

Recall what that argument is: it’s a First Cause argument, which has various versions, most involving the claim that every contingent being (or the Universe itself in the  Kalām version) had to have a cause, and contingent beings can’t ultimately be caused by other contingent beings. Therefore there must be a necessary being—a First Cause—to get it all rolling, and that’s God.  QED.  Alternatively, what “caused” the Universe. It couldn’t cause itself, so there must have been God.

The counterarguments to this claim are well known, and in fact Dawkins summarizes them well. The most obvious one is the unsupported claim that the First Cause doesn’t need a cause itself: it is, uniquely exempt from cause. In other words, you’re not allowed to ask, “What caused God”?  But that’s not a proof but an unsupported claim.  And, of course, there are some things in the universe that don’t have causes, one being radioactive decay.  As far as we know, that just happens without any cause.  And, likewise, the Universe could just “happen”, as physicist Victor Stenger maintains.

These are only a few of the many problems with the cosmological argument; you can see others in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy entry.

Now, according to Feser, my summary above is surely unsophisticated, and I guess so is the Stanford Encyclopedia’s. You must, he says, read many books to grasp the subtlety and strength of this argument:

Traditionally, the central argument for God’s existence is the cosmological argument, and (also traditionally) the most important versions of that argument are the ones summed up in the first three of Aquinas’s Five Ways.  But the typical modern reader is simply not going to understand the Five Ways just by reading the usual two-page excerpt one finds in anthologies.  For one thing, the arguments were never intended to be stand-alone, one-stop proofs that would convince even the most hardened skeptic.  They are only meant to be brief sketches of arguments the more detailed versions of which the intended readers of Aquinas’s day would have found elsewhere.  For another thing, the terminology and argumentative moves presuppose a number of metaphysical theses that Aquinas also develops and defends elsewhere.

So, to understand the Five Ways, the modern reader needs to read something that makes all this background clear, that explains how modern Thomists would reply to the stock objections to the arguments, and so forth.  Naturally, I would recommend my own book Aquinas, since it was intended in part precisely as an up-to-date explanation and defense of these arguments, and will provide the reader with a useful survey of what not only Aquinas, but the Thomistic tradition more generally, has said about them.  (I do some of this in The Last Superstition too, of course.  But that book does not deal with the Third Way, as the Aquinas book does.  Moreover, New Atheists – who have a sense of humor about everything but themselves – are likely to make the polemical tone of TLS an excuse for dismissing its arguments.  This is unreasonable, of course, especially given their own excessive polemics – I’m only fighting fire with fire – but there it is.)

Feser goes on to list seven more books and six articles that I have to read, including stuff by William Lane Craig.  There is never an end to it!  Like the Cosmological Argument itself, grasping it apparently requires an infinite regress of reading, and if I still reject the evidence after reading Aquinas and Feser’s own book, well, I just have to read more books.  And if I still don’t grasp the argument then, well, there are shelves of books in the University of Chicago Library that I must consult.

This is madness.  And if I reject the cosmological argument, there are other “subtle” theological arguments for God that I don’t fully grasp, and shelves of books to support them.  Unless you read literally hundreds of books, you don’t qualify for your Discussing Theology merit badge.  In contrast, you can read only one book to fully grasp both the tenets and evidence for evolution.

Well, I think the Cosmological Argument is just dumb, and so do many philosophers.  But to do Feser a favor, I will read Aquinas.  Fortunately, someone, and that someone is the creationist Paul Nelson, placed a copy of Aquinas in my department mailbox this week—just in time!  Now that’s proof of God!

BBC Radio 4 tonight: a revolution in evolution? NOT

July 13, 2011 • 4:58 am

Over my whole career, but especially in the last half-dozen years or so, I’ve heard that neo-Darwinism (the modern theory of evolution) is either wrong, in a crisis, or about to undergo a profound Kuhnian paradigm shift.  And it’s never happened.   Neo-Darwinism gets expanded (things like the “neutral theory,” for example, were adopted and largely verified during my own career), but the basic paradigm of mutation, selection, drift, and speciation hasn’t much changed.  New findings, like punctuated patterns that appear in the fossil record—patterns once foolishly touted by Gould & Co. as evidence that neo-Darwinism was “effectively dead”—eventually get folded into our current view of evolution, which expands and gets richer.  Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini wrote a book claiming that natural selection was theoretically incoherent and not responsible for adaptation, but they were dead wrong.  The basic framework of how lineages evolve and split hasn’t changed since the 1950s, and I doubt that it will.  (As always, however, I could be wrong.)

A half-hour show on BBC Radio 4 tonight, “An idea whose time has come,” promises to uncover this “revolution” for the layperson.  It won’t, because there is no “revolution.”  Many of the show’s participants are the same old crew of “Darwin-was-wrongers,” as you can see from the cast list below (Dan Dennett and Lewis Wolpert are some welcome exceptions).  Expect to hear a lot of nonsense, and, from Conway-Morris, perhaps his idea that evolutionary convergence proves Jesus.

The BBC’s blurb:

But the field in which it is increasingly clear that simultaneous invention is much more common than previously thought, is life itself. Convergent evolution is famously exemplified in the similarity of eye structure in unrelated species. But other instances are myriad and it also happens on all scales, from large population dynamics, down to fundamental molecular patterns.

Our question is: Are the same processes of change at work in science as in evolutionary biology itself?
Through discussions with a wide variety of practitioners and commentators in diverse fields, including Lynn Margulis, Paulien Hogeweg, Barry Cunliffe, Dan Dennett, Lewis Wolpert, Eva Jablonka Denis Noble, Rupert Sheldrake, Lucy Duran and Simon Conway-Morris, it appears that something like a revolution in evolutionary theory is underway and it’s happening very fast.

Symbiogenesis, bioinformatics, epigenetics and the reinvestigation of Lamarckism are all extending what we understand to be the processes by which evolution promotes change, throwing light on the astonishing sophistication of cooperative and collaborative patterns in nature, in contrast to the harsh competition in neo-Darwinian theory. This emerging variety of evolutionary pathways provokes strong opinions on whether patterns in the development of music, science and life itself, can appear to be inevitable.

Oh, and this,

something like a revolution in evolutionary theory is underway and it’s happening very fast.

is, as they say, what comes out of the south end of a bull facing north.  Shame on the BBC for this kind of scientific sensationalism, which reminds me of the New Scientist‘s “Darwin Was Wrong” cover.

I am not going to listen, but those readers who do, at 9 p.m. BST (4 pm EST), please report back. You can listen live by clicking on the “listen” icon at this page.

Kitteh contest: Kermit

July 13, 2011 • 4:57 am

Rebecca Rundell was a grad student at the University of Chicago (I believe she took my Speciation course) and is now a postdoc at the University of British Columbia studying marine invertebrates.   She submitted her feline, Kermit, to our kitteh contest:

Kermit has the easygoing worldview, attitude and intelligence of Jim  Henson, coupled with the wit and jumping ability of his namesake frog.  Adopted from the Chicago Anti-Cruelty Society, the tiniest in a cage  of kittens mostly more white than he, Kermit possesses a belt that  doesn’t quite stretch around his fuzzy middle. His giant collar from  the shelter weighed down his head, which barely made it over the lip  of his food dish. Superior eating skills surfaced later. Kermit’s  internal poultry detector is unrivaled in the animal world. His  domestic habits belie a fierce mousing ability, which was widely  lauded among Hyde Park apartment residents. Occasionally found  napping, dislodging keys from my laptop with his stiletto paws,  getting into precarious shelf positions, flipping a half-dead mouse in  the air like a tennis racket, wedging into a crevice to hide from the  landlord, or simply dragging an entire turkey carcass onto the floor.  Kermit knows how to live. And he keeps you on board with the program,  while still keeping cool about it.

He wants a copy of this book. And when he gets it, he will sit on it.

When Rebecca entered last November, she submitted this picture:

I asked her for an updated photo, and she sent the following. The little dude has grown!