Maybe the free will debate is really about the scope of causal influences on our decisions.
With Daniel Dennett’s death, a lot of podcasters have been replaying his interviews, many of which concern his stance as a free will compatibilist. That and a recent Mind Chat episode focused on Kevin Mitchell’s strong emergence understanding of free will, left me mulling this subject again.
Cards on the table, my stance is pretty similar to Dennett’s. I’m a compatibilist who sees free will as the capacity to act with forethought, to simulate possible and probable consequences of an action and take them into account when making decisions. That ability makes the causal factors in our actions broader than the immediate circumstances, leaving something to judge aside from those circumstances, and making social responsibility a coherent and useful concept.
Of course, that isn’t libertarian free will, the putative ability that provides a freedom from the overall laws of physics. Often this is discussed in terms of determinism, with the idea that maybe if the laws have some kind of randomness in them, a level of indeterminism, it allows for an ability to have acted differently even with the same history of the universe up that point. But I can’t see how this works for social responsibility. If I can blame the deterministic laws of physics for my actions, why can’t I just as well blame the indeterministic laws?
And adding fundamental randomness actually reduces the type of freedom that makes responsibility reasonable. We want my actions based on my nature and experiences. If randomness undermines that, then how does it make sense to judge me for them? All randomness does is frustrate any ability to predict actions. But given the complexity of the processes involved with those decisions, there’s no feasible way to do that anyway.
No, for libertarian free will to be coherent, it requires that the causes of my actions transcend the causal framework of the universe, to be broader than or orthogonal to it. Which is why this type of free will is usually coupled with some form of mind-body dualism, that the mind is something different in kind. It also fits with religious traditions that involve an ultimate judge. For judging us to make sense, at least some of the causes of our actions have to be outside of that judge’s created framework. (Whether that makes sense theologically, I’ll leave to others to figure out.)
It’s also worth noting that this holds if we’re in a Matrix type simulation where our minds exist independent of the actual simulation. If the Matrix Architect judges Agent Smith, it has to be as a part of the simulation going wrong, whereas from his view actual humans like Neo have an independent will. From the Architect’s perspective, Neo’s mind is of a different kind from his body in the simulation. (David Chalmers makes a similar point in Reality+.)
So maybe the real distinction between free will libertarians and compatibilists is the scope of influences we regard as necessary for the label “free will”. Hard determinists tend to agree with libertarians on this, that the scope of that freedom must transcend physics (or at least standard physics). It’s just that hard determinists regard that as non-existent. Compatibilists generally agree with hard determinists on that non-existence, but disagree that smaller scopes of influence aren’t meaningful. It may not be for God or the simulation owner, but should be enough for human judges.
Unless of course I’m missing something?
SelfAwarePatterns 
Imagination evolved so that we could war game situations. Why would the faculty of being able to consider options exist if we weren’t able to choose from among the better options?
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Well said!
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I see two main sources of incompatibilism. (Incompatibilism =df. the claim that determinism, if true, would rule out free will. I’ll stipulate “incompatibilism+” as the view that universally applicable laws of nature, whether deterministic or probabilistic, would rule out free will.) One about the self, another about time and causality.
To a certain kind of dualist, “you” are essentially a nonphysical soul. Therefore if physics explains everything, you explain nothing. Hence, incompatibilism+. But what happens when a dualist gives up dualism? Well, what happens when a person who’s afraid to walk over a ventilation grating in the sidewalk learns that the grating is far more than strong enough to support them? Answer: their head is convinced, but their gut goes on worrying. And that, as a crude metaphor, is what is going on with some converts to materialism. Intellectually, they affirm that “I am my brain-and-body-processes”, but in some deeper part of their mind, they haven’t really grokked this truth.
The second source of incompatibilism is the intuitive physics of time and causality. Note, a person can be motivated by both sources at once, and many are. But I think among the smarter anti-free-will crowd, and the smarter thank-goodness-for-libertarian-free-will crowd, this second source dominates. That’s because it’s a lot harder to see where it goes wrong.
I’ve recently rediscovered the first step one must take to see where it goes wrong: one must give up the intuitive physics ideas, which Aristotle codified, that force is needed to make things go (rather than come to rest), and that the mover is active while the thing moved is passive. One must grok Newton’s third law: “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Except that this way of putting it already concedes too much to Aristotle! It should be, “there is an equal and opposite action.” See – I warned you that intuitive ideas can sneak in when you’re not paying attention!
But that’s just the warm-up. The hard part is to understand that there is an equal and opposite (technically, charge-parity-time reversed) action in time as well as an equal action in space. And then to understand thermodynamics/statistical mechanics well enough to see why, at the macroscopic level where we live and breathe, the action all looks unidirectional.
Here’s my essay on the hard part, in case anyone’s interested.
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I’m completely with you on remnant dualist intuitions. I think it infects a large portion of the philosophy of mind. But even hardline atheists tend to be affected. Often they’re the most adamant incompatibilists, mostly related to that whole ultimate judge thing and a desire to disprove one of the theodicies (that evil exists because we have free will, not because God created it). But their version of “you” often seems inherently dualist, a conception of something constrained by physics (not free) rather than part of it.
But I have to admit to (probably) not getting the other point. For sure, Aristotle’s conception of physics has misconceptions, albeit understandable for someone in his time. And causality isn’t a concept in fundamental physics. But at a macroscopic level entropy virtually always increases, and so cause and effect emerge. I struggle to see the implications for free will. Maybe I just need to make additional passes through your essay.
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The first key idea is to distinguish interaction (which applies to any two events related by physical law, and can be symmetric) from causation proper (which let’s just define as an antisymmetric relation). The second key is to notice that incompatibilist arguments about the past rely on the assumption that causation proper pervades all.
Physical laws do relate us to events before our births, but that doesn’t give the past mastery over our present. Universal physical law, even if the law describes a 1:1 non-probabilistic mapping, does not imply universal causality. The past is not “fixed”, where that means independent of what we do. We interact with the past. We just can’t see how the events in the past correspond to current actions, so we can’t control the past – which makes the past look fixed. But we don’t need to control the past to get the present action and future result we want. Interaction suffices to remove the imaginary constraints on our action that our naïve physical intuitions hallucinate there. (It probably requires some reflection to see why interaction suffices, but just think about it.)
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Thanks for running through it again. I guess the part where I start to stumble is the statement about the past not being fixed. That seems to imply it’s mutable? Although you say we can’t control the past. So what would be an example of something we do in the present altering the past, albeit in a manner we can’t control?
Of course, in a deterministic universe, the future is also fixed. What I’m about to type is what I will type. However, I’m unable to simply sit back and watch it happen. For it to happen, I must actively consider alternatives and make decisions. If I don’t, nothing will happen. What I’m going to decide might be set, but that view does me no good. Although it might make me feel better if I make mistakes.
On the other hand, it does seem to do me some good when considering the past. My Bachelors is in Accounting. One of the first lessons we learn is the fallacy of making decisions based on sunk costs. Decisions should only ever be made on future costs. Sunk costs could affect those future costs, but they themselves are irrelevant (at least other than judging and learning from past decisions). Is there anything in what you’re describing that would alter that recommended strategy?
What am I missing?
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I’m using “fixed” to mean what it means in the philosophical literature on free will, namely “independent of what you do”. The past isn’t fixed because it’s (inter)dependent on what you do now. (Likewise the future.) Literally everything done now, even by insentient objects, has this relationship to the past, so examples aren’t very helpful, sorry.
“Mutable” is interesting because, like most of our concepts, it applies to things that extend over time. A lump of fresh clay is mutable, a brick less so. But “the past” or “the future” in philosophical literature often refers to one particular time, e.g. a year before your birth, or the murder of Mr. Jones. No instantaneous state of affairs is mutable, but the question is whether it happens or it doesn’t, and how/whether you contribute to that fact.
Sunk costs is very interesting, because Arif Ahmed has a philosophical thought experiment that answers your question:
Betting on the Past: In my pocket (says Bob) I have a slip of paper on which is written a proposition P. You must choose between two bets. Bet 1 is a bet on P at 10:1 for a stake of one dollar. Bet 2 is a bet on P at 1:10 for a stake of ten dollars. So your pay-offs are as in [Figure 1]. Before you choose whether to take Bet 1 or Bet 2 I should tell you what P is. It is the proposition that the past state of the world was such as to cause you now to take Bet 2. [Ahmed 2014, p. 120]
I suggest we read “cause” not as “causation proper” but something weaker, say, interaction plus a merely verbal stipulation that “cause” shall refer to the earlier event of an interacting pair. Note that the past state of the world is a sunk cost! Now suppose you (and Bob) are highly convinced that physical laws specify a 1:1 mapping across times. Then you should take Bet 2, and net yourself a free dollar. Now before you object that you’re not really betting on the past, you’re just betting on Bob’s interpretation of the past and of physics: I’m assuming that you’re an honest bettor. You want to win a dollar, but only in a fair manner.
How is it possible that the “sunk cost fallacy” is not a fallacy? Because we’ve set up a very weird situation where the past, down to microscopic details, is described only by its relation to a macroscopic event in the present (and implicitly, to the laws of physics). It is precisely because you don’t need to know those microscopic details nor details of how they relate, that you have a choice about them. The reference to those details has been handed to you on a silver platter.
Hmm, I was wrong. There is an example that helps.
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Ok, thanks again. I’m afraid that example isn’t helping me either. Sorry. Maybe I just need to mull this over more.
What I will agree on, is that there is a structural relationship between present events and past events, just as there is between present and future ones. The asymmetrical relationship between cause and effect doesn’t exist at the level of fundamental physics, only interactions. That asymmetry is an emergent phenomenon that arises due to the second law of thermodynamics.
Where maybe we’re diverging is I can’t see the fundamental symmetry trumping the emergent asymmetry for us emergent macroscopic beings. The asymmetry is emergent, but still real.
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I’m not claiming that the fundamental symmetry “trumps” the asymmetries in human life. The asymmetries have huge practical importance. But the philosophical argument for incompatibilism needs asymmetry that goes all the way down (support for this point on request, though you can put it together from what I’ve already said), and it does not go all the way down.
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Right, this is the point I’m struggling with, so I fear I am failing to put it together. Why does philosophical incompatibilism need it to go all the way down? (As a compatibilist, it’s possible I’m just not the intended audience for this argument.)
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Thanks for the opportunity to clarify, because I really need to work on my elevator pitch for this.
The time-and-causality argument for incompatibilism needs asymmetry to go all the way down because “fixity of the past” is one of its premises. This fixity is then supposed to be transmitted down to the present through the physical laws. As the Betting On The Past scenario demonstrates, symmetric physical laws violate fixity of the past. In the peculiar situations where the elements of the past in question are exactly those that correspond to your action, you can get whichever set of those elements you prefer just by choosing an option[*]. And all of the relevant parts of the past are exactly this type – the ones that connect to your present action, by fundamental physical laws.
[*] Now talk of “options” may look like begging the question, but we need to remember the dialectic. The Consequence Argument, the rewind argument, and the like are supposed to be arguments, not mere assertions. We should therefore when assessing them presume that freedom-related concepts are innocent until we are given reasons to think them guilty.
But couldn’t macroscopic states force us, unidirectionally, to do something? No, because chaotic processes are everywhere, making it impossible to trace a chain of macroscopic causes back to before you were an agent, where that chain is sufficient to guarantee that action.
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Ok thanks again for trying. I guess I’m going to have to go read the background material referenced in the Betting on the Past thought experiment, because I’m still not getting it.
On chaotic processes, my understanding is that they don’t actually lead to indeterminism, they just prevent us from being able to predict it. Although quantum randomness would, to the extent it bleeds into macroscopic processes. But again we’re back to my point that indeterminism, in and of itself, doesn’t give any of the freedom we’re actually looking for. It provides freedom from prediction, but that doesn’t seem adequate for responsibility.
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Chaotic processes don’t lead to indeterminism, correct. They lead to the necessity of a micro-level of analysis to understand the mapping between past and present, and therefore the symmetrical physical laws come back into play. Sorry for forgetting to make this connection above.
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I think Paul is asking us to think about how the time-symmetry of mathematical physics might take priority over the non-symmetry of cause and effect, rendering the latter an illusion. A book I’m currently reading may cast some light. It’s called The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, and it deals in a very interesting way with the paradoxes of time and space associated with Zeno and Parmenides. On page 85, the author William Egginton is explaining Einstein’s dispute with Bohr over whether we can “know” by inference the state of an entangled particle by measuring its counterpart, even when they are separated by distances outside the bounds of relativistic locality. He writes:
“What we can know about the world around us is limited by the velocity of light. I simply cannot know what is happening ‘now’ at any distance from me, because information takes a certain minimum of time to cross any spatial distance, and it cannot do so faster. Period. If it does,then all bets are off. Not only can an observation affect other points in space-time simultaneously; worse yet, an observation could retroactively determine what path a particle took to get to that observation. This made no sense at all.” (italics added)
It’s true that a local observer cannot relay the inference to a non-local observer faster than the speed of light. Nevertheless the relationship between the entangled particles itself appears to defy the principle of relativity; it amounts to “spooky action at a distance.” If I understand him, Egginton invites us to consider as real the retroactive relationship he describes, however incomprehensible that seems from within a local time frame. In other words, both the “past” and the “future,” as we understand them, are connected to the “present” in such a way that what happens “now” has effects in both directions. Eggington has so far not spelled it out, but it seems to me this would affect our memories of what “happened” in the past; they would change dynamically depending on the events we understand as “in the present.” However, we would have no way to tell that our memories were altered. In the terms of the present debate, this could preserve as an ultimate reality the immediate freedom of being (or becoming), while making “causality” a local illusion.
I’m not sure if this is what Paul means, or if it would help his case or his explanation.Anyway I think you’d both find the book interesting.
(I had a little trouble posting this in WordPress. If it shows up in the wrong place, I apologize.)
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I’ll let Paul speak to whether you’ve captured his view here.
Thanks for the book recommendation. It does sound interesting, although the Amazon description has an emphasis on what we can’t know that I find a bit off putting. Certainly there may well be limits to our knowledge, but the people who seem to make progress, like John Bell, are the ones who try anyway.
I personally wouldn’t mind if actual non-local dynamics were ever demonstrated. Conceivably it could someday enable faster than light travel, or at least communications. But QM non-locality is interpretation dependent, and seems pretty limited.
(Sorry you had trouble. But I think you put it in a good place. WordPress’ new commenting system is an improvement in a lot of ways. The notifications are more focused. But it does mean people may not see your response if you don’t respond to their comment, or in the sub-thread under it, which you did do here.)
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AJ Owens, I think you get my idea, but the way you put it uses some words that I wouldn’t use. I don’t think cause and effect are “illusions”, they’re just not good concepts to apply in the (many) circumstances where microscopic details matter greatly.
I’d also point out that you can’t act to erase a memory of some bad event, at least if the bad event is your reason for trying.
Here’s a more-than-verbal claim on which I think we disagree: I don’t believe that any particular time (say, t1 = one day ago) is dynamic. It’s not that t1 was first one way, but then at t2 you acted and t1 was another way. Rather, you can explain the event E1 at t1 by virtue of your act at t2 and all the other t2 events (down to the microscopic) in t1’s future light-cone. Or equally well, you can explain E1 by virtue of any spacelike surface in its past light-cone.
Mike,
Huw Price explains why zig-zags of “retrocausation” and normal “causation” don’t allow FTL communication, but do explain violations of Bell inequalities. Along the way he asks “Is the openness ‘out there in the world’, or is it a matter of our own viewpoint as agents, making up our minds how to act?” It’s neither (or the first, under a very loose reading of “out there”): it’s a relation between an agent and a set of options.
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Thanks for that additional clarification Paul. I think we’re on the same page ontologically here. Any difference seems to come down to language preferences. At least that’s how it seems at this point.
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Not just language preferences, there’s also a practical claim – means-end reasoning – that I’m making, that you have been noncommittal about. That in certain (admittedly odd) circumstances, it makes sense to leverage your “influence” (or interaction) on the past.
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Have to admit I still don’t understand this point. You clarified above that it doesn’t involve actually changing anything in the past. (Or at least that was my interpretation, which may be wrong.) I’m having trouble seeing the difference between that and what you’re saying here. If that influence can’t change past events, then what kind of influence are we talking about?
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Ah thanks – I see the problem (or one, at least). I have failed to confront head-on one of your intuitive thought-patterns. “Changing the past” and “changing the future” are trick questions.
Strictly speaking, you can’t change the future either. Each time happens only once. Instead, you can influence it. Some events are changes – e.g. an ice cube melts – but the event doesn’t change, the substance does. If an event in the future or the past is related to your actions by physical laws, and you understand some important aspects of that relation (roughly: you know what you are doing*), you can influence it, in the aspect of “influence” that matters for practical purposes. This aspect: there is a chain of physical law-patterned interaction, thus you can be part of a true explanation of why that event happened. In the Betting On The Past case, you can outright select the past you want regarding the proposition at stake. In some quantum experiments Huw Price discusses, the experimenter only has partial influence on the photon’s past polarization.
Now if “changing the past” (or future) only means making a difference to how the events otherwise would have gone, then yes, you can “change the past”. But for goodness’s sake, don’t use that phrase; it sounds like you are talking about time travel.
[*] The knowledge condition is crucial, and this is why we usually need proper causality to have any control over outcomes. It’s typically only in increasing-entropy processes that we know what we are doing.
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Still confused. But I’m pretty sure I disagree with something here, either with the way the word “influence” is being used, or something more ontological. It feels like it’s ontological, but still not sure. Ok, thanks again for trying!
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I suggest as a parting thought that what’s bothering you is probably not ontological, but practical. That is, which parts of the (agreed) ontology properly play certain roles in means-end reasoning.
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Mike, I assume you have read Dennett’s “Elbow Room” in which he rather enjoyed himself dismantling “free will” in its usual meaning. But you might also be interested in my humble contribution, which tackles the issue form (as far as I am aware) a somewhat unusual direction: https://mipmip.org/polemics/Reasons.html
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I actually have never read Elbow Room. I’m not sure I was even aware of it until recently. (Maybe you clued me into it?) But I have read his views in other places, and seen it expressed in interviews and talks. He also elaborated on it in From Bacteria to Bach and Back, a discussion the NY Times obituary writer apparently only bothered to read snippets of.
That’s an interesting contribution. The discussion it’s in response to must have been an interesting one.
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Alas, the discussion was not very interesting. To summarise… “Cecil” congratulated me on defining my terms (with which he agreed) and presenting a well structured argument, then pointed out what he felt was the major flaw: some reasons may contradict each other and resolving such contradictions was what free will was all about. When I responding that resolving contradictions between conflicting reasons was also decision making and the same argument applied (it being”turtles all the way down”:-)), Cecil decided he did not like my premises after all. After which the debate slipped into the usual mutual incomprehension.
Since then I have found it to be an effective tactic: planting your tanks squarely on the opposition’s lawn. Don’t bother to explain that there is nothing beyond causation and randomness, because incompatibilists will reasonably enough refuse to read this across into the mental sphere. Point out instead that they have exactly the same problem in the mental sphere: one can act for compelling reasons and/or one can act arbitrarily. There is nowhere else for “free will” to hide between those alternatives. So the only way one “could have done otherwise” is by acting for no reason — i.e. arbitrarily. If that’s “free will”, what are we arguing about?
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Exactly.
I occasionally use that plant myself on the opposition’s lawn tactic myself. Sometimes they need to see the problems with their own view before they’ll consider alternatives. Of course, it pays to remember that persuasion is a long game, and people virtually never change their minds within a single conversation, at least on anything they’ve given substantial thought to.
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I think the freewill debate is the result of a philosophical inability to reduce the question into something basic enough to just be either causal or not. But then as I was just saying at Staggering Implications, philosophy seems to be more about “the journey” rather than “the destination”. https://staggeringimplications.wordpress.com/2024/05/12/wittgenstein-and-articulated-grunting/comment-page-1/#comment-971 So I can see how endless freewill debate would be celebrated by true philosophers (which I’m certainly not regardless of my chosen name for this platform). I’m more concerned about “destinations” and so reduce the question back to a fundamental choice (which of course I mean in the abbreviated context presented here).
The theme is essentially that the metaphysics of causal function mandates a perfectly determined future founded upon the dynamics of the past. Therefore “freewill” cannot exist given a natural rather than supernatural reality. The position is ontological rather than epistemological however since epistemologically none of us should have anything close to a perfect perspective of how things are. From this vantage we can effectively say that we do have a freedom of choice which resides as a function of our ignorance — the more ignorance we have of a given situation, the more that we can say that associated choices are “free”. While it may seem ironic for ignorance to facilitate freedom, it does seem to make sense when we consider that causalists do not consider freedom to ultimately exist. In practice we can say that someone is “good” or “evil” to the extent that we grasp the freedom by which the person makes their choices. So here only an otherworldly god could thus truly be good or evil. Indeed, given blameless suffering I’d consider any god that magically created our world, to be ridiculously evil.
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I’m generally reluctant to weigh in on the free will debate, because you’re right that it’s endless, often with people just talking past each other with different definitions. Of course, the same thing applies for many philosophical debates, like consciousness. But free will even more so. Still, the occasional thought about it does come up, and I’ve put a caveat too often on a post hoping it would be my last on it. Now I don’t bother.
My struggle is I don’t know what it even means to talk about “freedom ultimately existing”. I’ve noted before that many descriptions of libertarian free will seem incoherent. The mind, even if non-physical, has to work according to some kind of principles. You talk about ignorance, and there’s something to that for the libertarian view, in the sense that magical notions always seem to involve ignorance of something’s principles.
But I don’t think my compatibilism requires it. All that matters to me is whether it makes sense to hold someone accountable. For that, I just need them to be capable of foresight, including anticipating that they may be held accountable. It’s why we don’t normally consider children, animals, or equipment accountable, or at least not to the same degree.
Yeah, the problems with an all powerful, all knowing, all loving god have been pointed out since at least Epicurus.
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So Mike, you position is that even pure magic wouldn’t be sufficient to create ultimate freedom? Hmm… well maybe. In that case however then just degrade the “ultimate” stipulation here enough to make it work. Can you conceptualize an otherworldly mind which is able to magically do things in our world and yet not be causally affected by our world when it independently chooses not to be so affected? In this regard such an entity could at least be referred to as “free” in a way that we presumably aren’t. Here it should at least be able to choose on the basis of its otherworldly magic. If that seems conceptually sound to you, then Cartesian dualism ought to be conceptually sound given the otherworldly soul perspective.
Regardless my point is that ignorance based freedom ought to make general sense to both people who do and don’t believe in magic. But I don’t know of any prominent philosophers who have observed this specific reduction. Does anyone here know of such a person, and prominent or not? Concisely the statement is that perceived freedom and thus responsibility, exist merely as a function of observer ignorance regarding a given situation. Thus in a hypothetical situation where there is no ignorance, no agent responsibility should be observed as well — just “falling dominoes”. Here rather than “good/evil” things merely become “good/bad”. In practice however we have extreme ignorance about what causes people to do what they do, and thus far more reason to hold them responsible for their perceived choices.
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Eric,
My position, well actually my suspicion, is that the concept of “ultimate freedom” isn’t really coherent. Sure, I can imagine something magical. But even magic typically operates by its own rules, just ones separate from scientific laws, even if it ends up just being the whims of a deity, demon, or simulation owner. But then by what rules do they operate by? We can deny the rules based view by declaring something like the magic “fundamental”, but then it seems like we’re just mandating the ignorance principle you’re discussing.
Definitely Laplace’s demon wouldn’t really perceive any agents, or higher level concepts at all, just quantum fields, or whatever’s fundamental, interacting and evolving. But us more limited entities have to take the design or intentional stance (to use Dennett’s framework) for more complex systems to lighten the load.
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Let me try this again Mike, and first by formally conceding that as you suspect, even supernatural dynamics shouldn’t coherently give rise to “ultimate freedom”. My now further reduced point is that freewill and thus responsibility should be considered to exist as a hypothetical function of observer ignorance of the causal dynamics behind a given situation. For example if someone hurts you, though you realize that this was inadvertent and they shouldn’t have foreseen this end, then it makes no sense to be angry. Here your understanding absolves the person’s guilt. If they did mean to hurt you however and you can’t grasp the cause, then it does make sense to be angry and perhaps to act in kind. Here their guilt will exist as a function of your ignorance of the dynamics which caused them to desire and act to harm you.
Consider this situation. South of me near Lake Hodges I recall hearing about a guy who would abduct female joggers for sexual purposes and then hide the bodies. So I just looked this up to see if appropriate, and I guess it is. Apparently I’m referring to John Albert Gardner III. The first clear sign of public danger came from sexual acts against a 13 year old neighbor in 2000, and thus he was imprisoned for 5 years. Then in 2010, four months after being freed of his GPS monitoring, he abducted 14 year old Amber Dubois. Then in 2011 he abducted 17 year old Chelsey King. (Apparently in 2009 Candice Moncayo was able to fight him off and escape — a learning experience for him.)
You and I say that John was not ultimately free to choose his behavior, and thus should only be referred to as “bad” in this sense rather than “evil”. Ultimately we just consider it highly unfortunate that such causal dynamics exist. But I think it makes sense to judge him to have “chosen” to do what he did, and thus hold him accountable for his actions, to the extent of our ignorance of the specifics which drove him to do such things. Does that make sense to you? And beyond myself, do you know of anyone else who has made such a reduction of merely perceived freewill back to accountability?
I suppose that one potential objection would be that this seems to render judgement to arbitrarily exist as a function of how strongly an observer is in a position to understand the causal dynamics behind a given situation. Thus more explanatory resources ought to skew a given person’s judgement to reduced accountability. But I think this also reflects how things are. More complete details regarding the causal dynamics associated with someone’s life should tend to explain away that person’s ability to choose and thus the “true guilt” that you and I don’t believe in.
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Eric,
It seems like there are two issues here, one about responsibility and the other about my emotional reaction to being wronged.
In terms of anger, I’m not sure how productive it is to reason about how I should feel. The fact is my evolutionary programming is going to result in me feeling a certain way about being harmed. Most of us can foresee when something might lead to an angry reaction, and possible consequences, and take it into account when deciding what to do. To the extent it acts as a deterrent, it’s adaptive at a social level. Telling me about the offender’s medical issues or other extenuating circumstances might cause me to not act on my anger, but I’m not sure it would stop me from feeling it. And of course, like all evolved reactions, it won’t always fire appropriately, particularly in modern circumstances.
Responsibility, in the way I’m using the word, is how a society chooses to handle these situations. Most (today) forbid revenge scenarios and the endless family feuds that result. Early on, society just took on the revenge role itself (“Vengeance is mine saith the Lord”). Today, when someone is judged a danger, or irresponsible in some way, their freedom is taken away. What happens afterward might be hospitalization, just time away from society, or at worst the death penalty (which I oppose). But the cost is recognized as an important component, taking the place of the old revenge reactions. Again, most of us can foresee what actions might land us in that situation and avoid them.
So I don’t know whether John Albert Gardner III had any ability to control his actions or act with forethought. But I’m sure he shouldn’t be free. I judge him on a pragmatic basis. Of course, if he had killed someone I loved, I’m sure I’d hate him. And I don’t know that that hate itself would be subject to logical reasoning.
Your ignorance principle seems to apply to whether he’s ultimately responsible for what he did. My thinking is that ultimate responsibility has the same problem as ultimate freedom. For a society deciding what to do, it doesn’t seem like a productive concern. But it’s always possible I’m missing something.
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My ignorance principle does not imply that John Albert Gardener III is ultimately responsible for his actions, any more than a domino would be responsible for its actions. The principle mandates that choice does not ultimately exist. In academia today however, unfortunately such perfect naturalism grounds the ship. As in “If everything is predestined to occur exactly as it does, then punishing people for wronging us makes no sense!” To escape this constraint many naturalists simply call themselves “compatiblists”. But these people also lack theory from which to justify the position. My simple ignorance principle provides such theory.
Notice that if each of us had the perspective of a “Laplace’s Demon”, then we’d actually grasp all of the causality behind everything that happens and so nothing would surprise us. Here there should merely be “good and bad” behavior rather than “good and evil” behavior. But of course we don’t have anything close to that. Thus it can make perfect sense to seek punishment for those who we perceive wronging us. This is because freedom and thus blame exist as a function of ignorance. So Jews and Muslims, continue on with your fighting — your perpetual ignorance will always justify your hatred!
It’s interesting to me that people in academia seem not to grasp such an Occam worthy reduction. With the opportunity however, that would probably be the least of the ways that I’d enlighten modern academic thinkers.
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I understand compatibilism to hold that, while the universe is deterministic and therefore free will is theoretically impossible, for all practical purposes free will is nevertheless in effect. There are various clever ways of explaining this, but while they may ease our discomfort, the underlying problem doesn’t go away. Hard determinists need to bite the bullet. But if the only alternative is “indeterminism”, that’s no better as an explanation of free will; possibly it’s worse. We are trapped by the terms of the debate. The way we are framing things is wrong. Therefore we need to think of some other frame.
Paul Torek seems to be suggesting, along Kantian lines, that the frame of space and time limits our intuitive understanding, and we need to think outside this frame. But while we might grasp this in a mathematical sort of way, our intuitions can never follow. Quantum physics seems to be a demonstration of Kantian ideas.
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On framing, right. My view is that as long as we’re thinking in metaphysical terms, I’m not even sure the concept of libertarian free will is coherent. My post was an attempt to add a possible coherent path for it. But in practical terms, I think things are much easier. Do we have the capacity to make decisions with forethought? If we do, then I think we’re good in terms of legal philosophy.
The Copenhagen and neo-Copenhagen interpretations of quantum mechanics do seem Kantian in nature. I’ve seen people assert that Niels Bohrs was a Kantian, or maybe a neo-Kantian. Although the progress since Bohr has largely been from people who don’t hold that conviction, rather that we can know the world, to ever increasingly close approximations.
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Kant’s “synthetic a priori” propositions about space and time were supposed to be limits beyond which we could not think – or as he would put it, necessary conditions of thought. I’d say that physicists’ embrace of General Relativity shows that Kant erred. Which is not to say that it’s easy to set aside the intuitive ways of thinking, even for a moment, much less keep them from creeping back in.
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If I can blame the deterministic laws of physics for my actions, why can’t I just as well blame the indeterministic laws?
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Whoa! This was not my comment. Somehow it got deleted. I copied it before posting, but that, too, got deleted. Damn.
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Well, essentially what I said was, I agree that throwing a ‘swerve’ into the universe doesn’t solve the problem. The real problem dovetails with the mind-body problem in that it forces us to address the subjective. Since Dennett dismisses philosophical intuition, he should dismiss all subjective intuition too, and that would include free will and morality. I think he’s being inconsistent; wanting to have his cake and eat it too.
I think the better stance is to say free will really does pose a problem if you think science is the end-all of human knowledge.
(Sorry if this sounds blunt. I’m annoyed that my comment got deleted and I’m trying to bash out what I remember of it.)
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Sorry your comment got eaten. Hope it wasn’t WordPress’ new commenting system. It’s an improvement in a lot of ways, but it has growing pains. And people still seem to be getting used to it.
I wouldn’t say that Dennett dismisses intuition. He just doesn’t see it by itself as justification for conclusions. Intuitions can be a useful starting point for reasoning, but not to arrive at or judge a conclusion. I think it’s why he prefers to call philosophical thought experiments “intuition pumps.”
His attitude in most writing I’ve seen on free will seems pretty pragmatic. He acknowledges we don’t have libertarian counter-causal free will, but dismisses that as a meaningful notion. As I noted in the post, I actually tend to agree.
One area where he is a bit inconsistent, is his justification for compatibilism is concern about how society would react if we tell everyone they don’t have free will. It’s a concern he largely dismisses for other notions people raise that concern over, like religious belief. Myself, I don’t think society would fall apart if we stopped using the phrase “free will”. Although it might if we jettison responsibility entirely as some of the strongest free will skeptics like Robert Sapolsky seem to advocate.
(I didn’t find you overly blunt. I know you dislike Dennett’s views, but that’s pretty common.)
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What happened with the comment was, I wasn’t logged in when I started typing it up and then I realized something might go wrong so I copied what I had written, logged in, pasted it, then sent it off. For some reason only the first line was sent, which is very weird. Maybe I accidentally deleted most of the comment somehow in that process? Anyway, I think whatever happened was probably my fault.
Anyway, I can’t find the snippet of the video where I thought Dennett was saying philosophical intuitions shouldn’t be taken seriously. Maybe he called it something else like “the intuitions of philosophers” or something like that. He does seem to be saying all knowledge of consciousness must be scientific, 3rd person, and that 1st person subjectivity doesn’t count.
I’ve never heard of Robert Sapolsky. Sounds like a real lunatic. Luckily, people have strong intuitions about having free will, probably more on that issue than on whether consciousness has anything to do with the first person experience of “what it’s like to be…”. I think it would take a lot of work to get people to believe they don’t have free will.
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I do something similar for longish comments (or ones that just take a long time to write for any reason). Often I compose them in a Google doc and then copy and paste them to the WordPress comment field. That way I can work on them as I have time. I used to just leave a tab open on the WordPress comment box, but discovered that there’s some kind of timeout, at least with the old system. But I have had a few copy / pastes go bad, so I know how you feel.
I’m sure Dennett has inveighed against intuitions in interviews or talks, and it’s probably easy to get the idea that he just outright dismisses them. But if you read him at length, his position is more nuanced. An example is an approach he calls heterophenomenology, which doesn’t dismiss the first person account, but also doesn’t consider it authoritative. Something like it is heavily used in scientific studies of consciousness, techniques which allowed the field to move beyond the old behaviorist methods.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression about Sapolsky. If you ever listen to or watch him in an interview, you’ll discover he seems like a really nice guy. I think he sees the world as a much worse place because we insist on allotting praise and blame. I’m just not sure we could have a functioning society without it. And to your point, there are evolutionary reasons for our social intuitions, which make them very hard to dismiss, and it’s probably counter-productive to try.
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Sounds like you’re doing commenting the smart way. I just type directly into the box and hope for the best.
It’s a bit peculiar for Dennett to use the term ‘phenomenology’, given the description of what he means by it, since it’s the exact opposite of phenomenology. At least Dennett admits that it’s basically just the scientific collection of subjective reports, nothing new.
Good to know about Sapolsky. I agree with you, I don’t think we could have a functioning society without it. Imagine telling someone whose family member has been murdered that the murderer isn’t to blame and so shouldn’t be punished.
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The problem of free will arises from the fact that, on the one hand, we see ourselves as self-determined agents and therefore as the cause of our actions, while, on the other hand, the results of natural science tell us that all (non-random) events are caused by a previous event according to the laws of nature.
Compatibilists argue that decisions are free if they result from processes that can be influenced by rational argument and deliberation. Such decisions are arrived at through processes of reasoning and deliberation, even if we are not fully aware of these processes. However, neuroscience suggests that such processes of reasoning and deliberation are no less determined than spontaneous ones, arising from our immediate desires and needs and the circumstances of the moment; we just experience them differently.
After all, whatever comes to my mind is already predetermined by my nature and character. Whether we allow our reason or our spontaneous impulses to prevail in difficult situations, and to what extent we engage in rational deliberation before making a decision, depends first and foremost on our temperament, our personality, our upbringing and our past experiences.
However, it can be argued that the dependence of our behaviour on one’s character does not mean that we are unfree beings. We feel free when we can choose and act as we wanted to do before. Acting as you are, given how you are, underlies human autonomy, not an actual ability to act otherwise.
In the end, though, it may be more a question of definition, whether decisions based on weighing possible and probable consequences are considered free, even if they necessarily arise from my character as a result of heredity and early experience.
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All excellent points!
I think one of the chief difficulties, even among many skeptics of free will, is accepting that the self it a physical system, and its implications. Saying it’s not “free” in its decisions is to imagine that the physics are somehow constraining it, but if it’s a physical system, what exactly is that supposed to mean? It’s like saying a non-physical mind isn’t free because it evolves according to non-physical dynamics.
Like many of the debates about consciousness, remnant dualist intuitions get in the way, leading people to go down a lot of unproductive rabbit holes.
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