Sam Harris has written a book attacking the concept of free will, and in so doing has already received wince-inducing slams from philosophers, notable among them Patricia Churchland's. Stung from this, Harris sought out another philosophical foe (although another of the Four Horsemen), one of the most famous living philosophers, Daniel Dennett. Where Churchland's comments only implied that she didn't think Harris's arguments were worth an extended response, Dennett's directly states as much. It's a fun read.
(By the way: reading this frankly brutal takedown of Harris by another of the Four Horsemen, it's hard to imagine another intellectual movement which openly and honestly exhibits its intellectual differences like this, and a lot of credit is due. That said, I hardly think this is about to cause a rift among the ardent philosophical naturalists of the world, which may say something about how important this discussion actually is.)
I'm not going to summarize the points made between Dennett and Harris, but rather point out some heuristic meta-arguments that might be informative. A fair question to begin any discussion of free will is: how will the answer affect our actions either way? Suppose that tomorrow, an air-tight incompatibilist argument emerges saying no, there is no such thing as free will, and even Dan Dennett throws up his hands: what will happen differently? How could this affect our decisions? After all, it was already all going to happen that way anyway, right? And we go about our business, as we were already going to. OR, a compatibilist argument emerges that says yes, we have free will, and here is proof of this concept - what would Sam Harris do differently after this revelation? So is this the 2014 version of trying to calculate how many angels can fit on the head of a pin? That is, are we debating a problem that only seems to exist because of other (bad) assumptions we're making? Some incompatibilists would likely say yes, that free will is a concept (like theism) that people think is coherent only because of the historical inertia of other assumptions or values we desperately want to preserve. This is all to say: if it's not clear how an answer to this question could ever affect anyone's decisions, then it's possible the concept itself is meaningless in the first place. (Never mind the practical value, which is not in question. It must certainly be zero.)
Nonetheless, it remains an interesting problem (I suspect because it's foundering on submerged bad assumptions), like the nature of consciousness, which is why I'm writing this blog post and you're reading it. So first, briefly, here are three points that no-free-will incompatibilists should better address or answer.
1. Our current understanding of morality and individual responsibility is destroyed by the removal of free will. As Dennett points out, this is not an argument for free will; if there's no free will, then we lose morality, and too bad for us. But to say that no-free-will incompatibilists like Harris do not give this point enough time given its importance would be too kind.
2. If there is no free will, then all of causality is an illusion as well. Why? Because every event has in some sense "already happened" (was set in motion at the Big Bang), or it's unknowable noise. That is to say, we're watching a movie, and what happens at 1 hour 12 minutes in was determined when the film was recorded, and it's not going to change, and the image of the man kicking the soccer ball doesn't cause the image of the soccer ball to move any more than anything else on the film. As with the observation about morality above, this also does not make an argument against no-free-will incompatibilism. But the problem with causality does follow directly from this position, and it's ignored by said incompatibilists, and has profound implications for epistemology and the scientific method.
3. If there is no free will, how can there be a "now"? If everything is caused and determined, then we're in a frozen block of space-time or a movie. A subjective sense of free will is certainly not an argument for free will. But it is very difficult to understand how there could be a sense of a present moment if there is no such thing as the present moment - that is, of a changing point in time that is asymmetric and special because it seems to be influencing other points in time, that cannot in turn influence it.
4. Libet's button-pushing experiment disproves only one fragile model of free will (though Dennett doesn't bring it up in his review). An easy solution, though one that would support a free will that most of us would not like, is epiphenomenalism, where the decision is being made by an entity with free will whose process our conscious selves do not have access to. Certainly if free will exists in any entity on Earth, it's humans, and humans are having this argument - but even proving that humans have not a shred of free will is different than proving that the universe we're in does not allow it.
Showing posts with label free will. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free will. Show all posts
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Monday, December 3, 2012
Is Pre-Determination a Problem For Causality?
If there is no free will, it could be argued that the history of the universe really is "just one damn thing after another", and there is no such thing as causality.
For purposes of this post, assume that free will does not exist. Assume also that causality means that one event affects another more than other events; never mind temporal assymetry for now. If there is no free will, this means that only two kinds of events happen.
a) Random events that cannot be predicted individually, i.e., are not at all dependent on previous states (e.g., nuclear decays).
b) Macroscopic events which are dependent in the classical sense on previous events.
You might say that b's are always just (an apparently) special case of a's; we'll come back to that later.
Assuming a universe entirely of b's, entirely of clock-work macroscopic events - e.g. people appearing to choose actions, things falling, balls rolling when you kick them - in a fully pre-determined universe, which is essentially just a film running, it is incoherent to refer to any of these events causing another. We're just watching a movie, or seeing a frozen block of space-time moving by. Things could never have been otherwise, and the whole concept of counterfactuals becomes incoherent. To extend the film analogy - you might watch a film of someone kicking a ball, but the image of the person's foot did not cause the image of the ball to move. It was always going to move that way, right from the start. It's one damn thing after another.
Assuming that we live in a universe with both a's and b's, or that everything is an a and sometimes in large groups looks like a b (which is a better description of the universe we're in) doesn't get us out of hot water either. Now, we do have a degree of freedom, but since each event (nuclear decay or what have you) cannot be predicted, it's just noise. There's freedom but no relationship between events. It's still one damn thing after another.
You might object that the event that created the film (the actual objects we filmed and that determined what would go on the film; in analogy, the moment of the Big Bang) caused the image of the ball on the film to roll, but you can say that about everything in the film, and there's no sense in talking about causality being mediated through intervening events in the film. When the Big Bang happened one way but not another, that meant that I would write this blog post. Yes, along the way the solar system congealed from a debris disc in such and such a way, an allosaur ate one proto-primate and not another (that was my grandma), and various Mennonites moved from Switzerland to Pennsylvania at a certain time. But that was already set from the start, it's just that the film hadn't run to that point yet, and there's no sense in which something that happened ten minutes or ten years ago made me write this post any more than conditions at the Big Bang. In terms of special relationships between events, there is none.
This is not to be taken as a refutation of the "no free will" position, but rather to point out that this position contains a direct implication to most people's model of the world that I haven't seen discussed and which I think most no free will proponents would find problematic.
For purposes of this post, assume that free will does not exist. Assume also that causality means that one event affects another more than other events; never mind temporal assymetry for now. If there is no free will, this means that only two kinds of events happen.
a) Random events that cannot be predicted individually, i.e., are not at all dependent on previous states (e.g., nuclear decays).
b) Macroscopic events which are dependent in the classical sense on previous events.
You might say that b's are always just (an apparently) special case of a's; we'll come back to that later.
Assuming a universe entirely of b's, entirely of clock-work macroscopic events - e.g. people appearing to choose actions, things falling, balls rolling when you kick them - in a fully pre-determined universe, which is essentially just a film running, it is incoherent to refer to any of these events causing another. We're just watching a movie, or seeing a frozen block of space-time moving by. Things could never have been otherwise, and the whole concept of counterfactuals becomes incoherent. To extend the film analogy - you might watch a film of someone kicking a ball, but the image of the person's foot did not cause the image of the ball to move. It was always going to move that way, right from the start. It's one damn thing after another.
Assuming that we live in a universe with both a's and b's, or that everything is an a and sometimes in large groups looks like a b (which is a better description of the universe we're in) doesn't get us out of hot water either. Now, we do have a degree of freedom, but since each event (nuclear decay or what have you) cannot be predicted, it's just noise. There's freedom but no relationship between events. It's still one damn thing after another.
You might object that the event that created the film (the actual objects we filmed and that determined what would go on the film; in analogy, the moment of the Big Bang) caused the image of the ball on the film to roll, but you can say that about everything in the film, and there's no sense in talking about causality being mediated through intervening events in the film. When the Big Bang happened one way but not another, that meant that I would write this blog post. Yes, along the way the solar system congealed from a debris disc in such and such a way, an allosaur ate one proto-primate and not another (that was my grandma), and various Mennonites moved from Switzerland to Pennsylvania at a certain time. But that was already set from the start, it's just that the film hadn't run to that point yet, and there's no sense in which something that happened ten minutes or ten years ago made me write this post any more than conditions at the Big Bang. In terms of special relationships between events, there is none.
This is not to be taken as a refutation of the "no free will" position, but rather to point out that this position contains a direct implication to most people's model of the world that I haven't seen discussed and which I think most no free will proponents would find problematic.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Subjective Experience and Memory
The strange properties of subjective experience are nowhere more evident than in the use of drugs which prevent long-term potentiation - or destroy the capacity for consciousness in the first place. Is there anything it is like to be under anesthesia, or do you just forget that you were tortured?
Note, Harris's focus here is about free will and morality - and to his detriment he completely neglects the robustness of epiphenomenal accounts to the neuroscience experiments he's citing, probably because few people would find an epiphenomenalist account of free will no less distasteful than a total absence of free will. But the question here sends him down an interesting road, and to my knowledge the first clinical test of the global workspace hypothesis of consciousness was in fact by a team of anesthesiologists.
Note, Harris's focus here is about free will and morality - and to his detriment he completely neglects the robustness of epiphenomenal accounts to the neuroscience experiments he's citing, probably because few people would find an epiphenomenalist account of free will no less distasteful than a total absence of free will. But the question here sends him down an interesting road, and to my knowledge the first clinical test of the global workspace hypothesis of consciousness was in fact by a team of anesthesiologists.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Button-Pushing Experiments Disprove Only One Fragile Model of Freewill
Experimental evidence continues accumulating which shows that human motor behavior, and conscious awareness of the decision to perform the behavior, are often preceded by neuronal activity. (Classic Libet experiment described here.) This has sometimes been taken as a disproof of free will. This reasoning is flawed. If we believe "if free will exists, then it applies to all human motor behavior, and all neuronal activity engaged with this motor behavior must be conscious". Therefore, for these experiments to be a disproof, at least two assumptions must be true: 1) the entire chain of events from deciding to act to performing the act must take place within consciousness to be called free will, and 2) this simple motor task model must be generalizeable to all decision-making and motor behavior taking place on all time scales.
To #1: it is possible that the decision is made, relative to the depolarization path of the motor act, "prior" to consciousness. If this is always the case, then epiphenomenalism is the correct description of consciousness, even though we could still have free will, because we can still affect future belief states and motor acts. Consequently it's worth asking if in these models, the "originating" neuron(s) is/are really the originating neuron. Acts of apparent free will merely passing through an unconscious pathway would be even less troublesome to the idea of free will than one originating in unconscious neurons.
Analogously, we cannot choose beliefs - we don't have free will about what we perceive and believe, because perception and belief follow necessarily from sense data and from the model of the universe that exists in our brains. When we encounter sense data, we interpret it immediately as representing something and as being causally related to other things in reality. For example, you cannot see someone smile, and DECIDE consciously whether or not to believe that they are smiling, and whether or not to believe that this means something about their emotional state. But this doesn't mean that we are prisoner to those beliefs and that we cannot influence future perceptions and beliefs. If you cross-check those beliefs, you can engage in behaviors the outcomes of which can differ in obvious
ways that then will allow you to update those beliefs.
At the very least, concluding that experimental results of this sort invalidate the idea of free will, you must carry other assumptions about the nature of consciousness and free will besides just "some objects' motions cannot be predicted from prior states, and those objects have conscious experience which in some way influences those motions". The separability of these two parts of free will - the idea of unpredictable output on the one hand and input from conscious experience on the other - is important. What are the requirements for non-conscious objects with unpredictable output? Are there conscious objects with completely predictable output? Another way of asking is whether things without nervous systems can have free will.
To #2, it's worth asking whether there are classes of decisions that are more or less subject to free will; i.e., how much can we generalize these results? Certainly there are cases where free will can be an illusion, but this falls short of disproving the possibility of free will in general. By all means experimenters should continue asking this question in more settings, although a button-push model wouldn't seem to give the nervous system a chance to shine. My suspicion is that if free will exists in any action it's in long-term executive planning.
It's worth mentioning that it seems strange very strange that our own lack of free will is not obvious to us, given that prediction of the behavior of conspecifics is evolutionarily extremely important. Why the inability to do so exactly, or why the strong appearance that we are the source of action? One speculation is game-theory oriented, that the input-output chain must necessarily be clouded by introducing randomness (which wouldn't really be free will), and our sense of free will falls out of that.
Another attack on the concept is Churchland-like, and questions whether free will isn't just a bad folk idea about human behavior (which I think many enthusiasts of these experiments which agree to). It's worth asking whether belief in something like free will is universal even among non-Western humans - do Solomon Islanders and pygmies have the same belief? - and if so, what it is that predisposes humans to believing this. Do humans with a different conception of agency have different beliefs about this (Aspergers spectrum people)? Finally, do nonhuman animals also believe in free will? I encourage inventive experimentalists to think of a way to support or discredit this hypothesis. If we know different kinds of nervous systems have the same belief we can start understanding what it is we have in common with them that makes us think this.
To #1: it is possible that the decision is made, relative to the depolarization path of the motor act, "prior" to consciousness. If this is always the case, then epiphenomenalism is the correct description of consciousness, even though we could still have free will, because we can still affect future belief states and motor acts. Consequently it's worth asking if in these models, the "originating" neuron(s) is/are really the originating neuron. Acts of apparent free will merely passing through an unconscious pathway would be even less troublesome to the idea of free will than one originating in unconscious neurons.
Analogously, we cannot choose beliefs - we don't have free will about what we perceive and believe, because perception and belief follow necessarily from sense data and from the model of the universe that exists in our brains. When we encounter sense data, we interpret it immediately as representing something and as being causally related to other things in reality. For example, you cannot see someone smile, and DECIDE consciously whether or not to believe that they are smiling, and whether or not to believe that this means something about their emotional state. But this doesn't mean that we are prisoner to those beliefs and that we cannot influence future perceptions and beliefs. If you cross-check those beliefs, you can engage in behaviors the outcomes of which can differ in obvious
ways that then will allow you to update those beliefs.
At the very least, concluding that experimental results of this sort invalidate the idea of free will, you must carry other assumptions about the nature of consciousness and free will besides just "some objects' motions cannot be predicted from prior states, and those objects have conscious experience which in some way influences those motions". The separability of these two parts of free will - the idea of unpredictable output on the one hand and input from conscious experience on the other - is important. What are the requirements for non-conscious objects with unpredictable output? Are there conscious objects with completely predictable output? Another way of asking is whether things without nervous systems can have free will.
To #2, it's worth asking whether there are classes of decisions that are more or less subject to free will; i.e., how much can we generalize these results? Certainly there are cases where free will can be an illusion, but this falls short of disproving the possibility of free will in general. By all means experimenters should continue asking this question in more settings, although a button-push model wouldn't seem to give the nervous system a chance to shine. My suspicion is that if free will exists in any action it's in long-term executive planning.
It's worth mentioning that it seems strange very strange that our own lack of free will is not obvious to us, given that prediction of the behavior of conspecifics is evolutionarily extremely important. Why the inability to do so exactly, or why the strong appearance that we are the source of action? One speculation is game-theory oriented, that the input-output chain must necessarily be clouded by introducing randomness (which wouldn't really be free will), and our sense of free will falls out of that.
Another attack on the concept is Churchland-like, and questions whether free will isn't just a bad folk idea about human behavior (which I think many enthusiasts of these experiments which agree to). It's worth asking whether belief in something like free will is universal even among non-Western humans - do Solomon Islanders and pygmies have the same belief? - and if so, what it is that predisposes humans to believing this. Do humans with a different conception of agency have different beliefs about this (Aspergers spectrum people)? Finally, do nonhuman animals also believe in free will? I encourage inventive experimentalists to think of a way to support or discredit this hypothesis. If we know different kinds of nervous systems have the same belief we can start understanding what it is we have in common with them that makes us think this.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Free Will and Chocolate
Kant talked about heteronomy, the condition of an individual's being at least partly under the control of influences other than his or her own reason, and therefore not truly exercising free will. Of course this early Enlightenment ideal strikes us as a bit naive today, and obviously we recognize that we are animals with a physical form.
But there's no need to put such extreme, stark requirements on free will for its exercise to be unclear. A perfect example is my own appetite for chocolate. At the moment, I have avoided all forms of chocolate for 16 days. As far as I can remember in my life, this is a record. In the past when I wasn't so lucky I would declare "no chocolate for one month", and then three days later at 7-11 I would break down and get a Hershey bar.
Now, clearly in those 3-day cases I was unable to follow my prior edict, but at that moment, chocolate is what I wanted. And I acted on the urge. How is this not free will? Because the urge came from a pre-conscious animal drive for sugar and fat, and/or conditioning from previous purchases at that same 7-11? If ultimately what we call reason, and our entire executive center, is a slave of the passions as Hume suggested and as seems to be the case, how could it matter whether I was acting directly on an animal urge or on some long-term plan that was dictated by animal urges?
But there's no need to put such extreme, stark requirements on free will for its exercise to be unclear. A perfect example is my own appetite for chocolate. At the moment, I have avoided all forms of chocolate for 16 days. As far as I can remember in my life, this is a record. In the past when I wasn't so lucky I would declare "no chocolate for one month", and then three days later at 7-11 I would break down and get a Hershey bar.
Now, clearly in those 3-day cases I was unable to follow my prior edict, but at that moment, chocolate is what I wanted. And I acted on the urge. How is this not free will? Because the urge came from a pre-conscious animal drive for sugar and fat, and/or conditioning from previous purchases at that same 7-11? If ultimately what we call reason, and our entire executive center, is a slave of the passions as Hume suggested and as seems to be the case, how could it matter whether I was acting directly on an animal urge or on some long-term plan that was dictated by animal urges?
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