Free will is always a sticky wicket. On the one hand, we make decisions every day that point to our having a say in what we do. Accountability, in general, relies on this notion. On the other hand, whatever our will is, it is clearly constrained: we can't will away gravity.
Free will is a hot topic in neuroscience these days, especially with experiments leveraging new fMRI imaging techniques in which we can "watch" the brain do its thing. One of those the neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga, interviewed briefly in Scientific American to "explain the new science behind an ancient philosophical question." Though he wants to claim "the demise of free-will," he does seem less carelessly strident than some, characterizing the study of free-will as the study of "the nature of action."
Philosophers, of course, continue to be in on this conversation. Recently in NYTimes' The Stone, Eddy Nahmias asks, "Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?" The article does a nice job of pointing out common oversimplifications of the problem of free-will, particularly as a dichotomy with determinism.
Many philosophers, including me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires. We act of our own free will to the extent that we have the opportunity to exercise these capacities, without unreasonable external or internal pressure. We are responsible for our actions roughly to the extent that we possess these capacities and we have opportunities to exercise them.
Not too surprisingly, the way out of this all-or-nothing style free-will/determinism discussion relies on being in the messy middle where we have constraints that don't determine. (Emergence anyone?)
-Dylan
Hey Dylan, I’m with you on emergence. 🙂
In particular, where do you stand on the “Do electrons have free will?” question?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem
Whether or not this is true, I find it mirrors my own experience of consciousness: my brain presents a range of choices analogous to a probability distribution, from which I feel like I choose one a-causally. Usually from the median, but occasionally from a tunneled-out extreme…
Perhaps someday we could do an episode on “The Emperor’s New Mind”…
I read Conway and Kochen’s paper a long time ago, but not the revised “Strong Free-will Theorem”. My reaction is two-fold. On the one hand, I think they’re getting at something by highlighting the level of indeterminacy in physical systems. It’s not a new observation (just look at the size of the shelf about QM interpretation), but their attempt is, generously, an attempt to think about what these things “are” and look for consistency between the implications of the physical world and our psychic world. That said, the use of the term “free-will” is the provocative part. Let’s bracket the possibly that it’s primarily playful. If I take them seriously on the use of the term, they either ascribe consciousness to electrons or they’re simply philosophically naive. I imagine many critics would simply call them naive (I haven’t kept up with the response, so I don’t know myself.) For myself, I think it’s wrong-headed to ascribe consciousness “all the way down”. It does seem right that consciousness must arise out of the activities of the smaller/lower level things in the world, hence my pointing toward emergence. Emergence would be different, however, than saying electrons have free-will. In an emergence argument, the beings themselves would change as a function of scale (maybe complexity) — thus, free-will could be a characteristic of “higher-order” entities (like animals) and not required for “lower-order” entities (like electrons).
I would underline that a notion of free-will doesn’t need to be the foil to determinism. It’s not either/or. Free-will could (and I think does) live in the ground where the proper activities of living entities aren’t pushed up against their limits. For instance, saying that you can shoot a person up with some drug and “make” them do something doesn’t prove anything against free-will at all. It just shows you that you pushed them up against one of the boundaries of their being. It’s like saying that just because I can kill a fish by cutting off its head doesn’t mean that the fish never was alive. Rather, cutting off its head crosses a condition for its living.
Seth’s post on Nazis brings some of this notion up. I agree with him that presenting a mother with the choice of which of her children to kill may look like a “moral choice,” but it really isn’t. There may be “choice” involved, but it’s certainly not moral anymore — it’s outside the boundary of such possible choices that qualify as moral.
As an alternative to “free-will”, what about the term “acausal”, which I think you used a couple episodes ago? If it is true that electrons act acausally, then (if Penrose is right) much of the philosophical (scientific naturalistic?) problem of “how does an acausal mind emerge from causally-determined matter” goes away, right?
There needs to be a spiritual and theological component to any discussion about free will. Neuroscience will never understand the human mind without an appreciation that God, who is imminent and permeates the entire cosmos, is in control of everything. When I lift up my arm, it is God acting through me. God is the cosmic director and the cosmic puppeteer. You can’t understand my entire body by looking at my fingernail, and you can’t understand the human mind by looking at the brain.
wait. what?
You might enjoy reading some Leibniz and his Monadology, Steven. Alternatively, you could get a bite-size portion by listening to a podcast from the archives:
Leibniz Monadology on PEL
While being sympathetic with the notion that your lifting your arm is God acting through you, he would disagree that your last sentence. Indeed, for Leibniz you can see the whole universe in your fingernail.
>When I lift up my arm, it is God acting through me.
And thereby rendering any notion of free will a mere illusion brought about by a sadistic being.
My question to all is why can’t we just drop the Free from free will?
If that which emerges through our consciousness of consciousness, our reflecting on our own reflections, our qualia, is all still OUR conscious experience of Being while being predetermined and/or random, then we do not need our will being “free”. The ‘free’, ultimately has to transcend our experience – so it can exist, say, on the level of our “soul”, but then that soul which we are talking about can’t really be seen as part of our Will.
If I admit my Will is not a free will, as I am starting to hypothesize as of the last year or so, it really doesn’t change a whole lot for me, other than in a few positive ways. Once you define free will, negating it really doesn’t take anything essential away; people just appose the idea because they assume that it is somehow an affront on their ability to be creative, for example, when really all it means is that when you ARE being creative, that part of you which you identify as YOU, the “willing” you, is experiencing the SPONTANEITY of an entire system, a whole interconnected web of people and ideas, manifesting something that wasn’t there before.
There are lots of reasons people want to hold on the free will, and a brief, crass comment here won’t change your mind necessarily. Hopefully it’s enough to plant the seed for an idea to grow, but if not I won’t get mad – because just as Robin repeated over and over to Matt in a film titled quite appropriate for the discussion, “It’s not your fault”
p.s. Crazy science guys can control the brains of flies. And they can know when you “choose” to get out of your seat before you do. And crazy math guys are taking databases of historical book records and showing how our past (and maybe future) behavior can be shown in simple mathematic formulas. So consider yourself the lucky electron unobserved: you appear free enough for now, but it won’t be long before your identity Becomes eternal in a set of formulae – thus Being becomes eternal through your nothingness.
This is what I feel Compatibalism boils down to. You aren’t free but the determination happens on such a level that it has no meaningful impact on your life. Because you don’t live in the meta-calculation it has no actual existential import. Like arguing whether there are things-in-themselves. The outcome of the discussion is moot for any practical purposes.
I hardly find that a moot point, two hundred years of philosophers have accepted that we do not have access to the things in themselves, and can only make determinations based on our subjective relation to them. This has grossly affected the way that philosophy is now performed as a pseudo-spiritual, relativist, pathetic middling footnote to the sciences. In the same sense, compatibilists believe that a truly FREE will can be wholly reconciled with determinism, whereas you both have settled for the human will not at all being free. There is an observable will, but the outcome of all its inevitable intentions have already been decided. That is a ghastly world to be living in.