Contemporary neuroscience is not a challenge to free will, according to Eddy Nahmias:
Most scientists who discuss free will say the story has an unhappy ending—that neuroscience shows free will to be an illusion. I call these scientists “willusionists.” ... Willusionists say that neuroscience demonstrates that we are not the authors of our own stories but more like puppets whose actions are determined by brain events beyond our control.
According to Nahmias, "willusionists" wrongly assume that free will requires some sort of dualism, or "an impossible ability to make choices beyond the influence of anything, including our own brains."
But contra Sam Harris and others, that there are neural correlates to our rational deliberative processes does not make them any less deliberative, or explain them out of existence:
Once we assume that all mental processes have neural correlates, then whether consciousness plays a role in our complex behavior turns on whether the neural correlates of conscious processes occur at the right time and place to influence behavior. It’s unlikely that the neural processes involved in complex deliberations, planning, and self-control play no role in behavior. Instead, there is evidence that conscious and rational thinking can play an important causal role in complex behavior. If we give up the mysterious picture of our conscious selves being offstage, then we can give up the threatening image of our brains pulling the strings while we helplessly watch.
[Insert Wes Alwan-esque rant on scientism and the philosophical ignorance of Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne].
-- Wes
I for one cheer every time Wes goes on a rant against scientism and the shocking ignorance of Sam Harris.
it might be useful to visit the Dreyfus vs Searle, Dreyfus/Kelly vs Dennett debates sometime down the road: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sdkelly/Papers/Heterophenomenology.pdf
“If we give up the mysterious picture of our conscious selves being offstage, then we can give up the threatening image of our brains pulling the strings while we helplessly watch.”
It’s only mysterious because this is a strawman reading of the importance of a newfound understanding about neuroscience, which should lead one to believe that there can be moments of willing but that the “conscious self” is truly nothing. There is nobody to feel helpless about this being the way that things are. Brains aren’t pulling the strings of ourselves so much as it is always something else other than a self that is pulling the strings of brains.
Obviously, the mere fact that mental states have neural correlates is going to be compatible with compatibalist accounts of free-will; Different mental states correlate with different brain states which produce different behaviours (when free from coercion). But what a lot of the willusionists miss is that some sort of (non-cartesian) dualism and libertarian free will is entirely compatible with the findings of neuroscience. It all depends on what one means by mental states having neural correlates. It is entirely possible that mental states correlate with brain states without being reducible to brain states because they have different properties. The most obvious example being the qualitative what-it-is-like-to-be of mental states. Things with different properties can have different causal powers, so, mental states possibly have different causal powers to the brain states with which they correlate. Which isn’t to say that these mental states are free from the causal laws which govern the the underlying brain states, but that the mental properties and associated causal powers are independent from the physical states that they correlate with.
I’m equally as repulsed as any other fair minded person by the ignorant, dogmatic babble of scientism, but can’t help but make a point here contrary to the criticism.
I think a philosopher has to be grossly dishonest or very confused to hold the belief that findings in the field of neuroscience are irrelevant to philosophical issues, or “not a challenge to free will”. To me, this kind of statement is no better than saying the theory of evolution is not a challenge to god.
A theory of evolution does not “disprove” god, or provide a ‘devastating challenge’ to god, on the whole. While god is a complex term, used in varying and complex way, the theory of evolution most certainly challenges SOME conceptions of god.
Similarly, neuroscience – and in my view, psychology more broadly – have similar philosophical implications in regards to agency, mental causation, and the likes. but science does not know how to disprove a term it hasn’t defined, so they take something like emotion and thought and try to define them as some neuro-state.. and then they take free will and give it an equally narrow definition.
This narrow definition is by no means satisfactory, but if a given philosophical doctrine does overlap and contradict that conception of free will, then the scientific work becomes incredibly relevant.
Against Harris, I’d say little of what he says will have any import to a serious philosopher, he is not much more than the Gladwell of philosophy. In Sam Harris’ defense, he gives a fairly decent (given the fact that he is writing pop science, not philosophy) account of what he means by free will. He also willingly addresses criticisms, usually be stating how his goal is to “show how the traditional notion is flawed, and to point out the consequences of our being taken in by it” … “In Free Will, I argue that people are mistaken in believing that they are free in the usual sense.”… “I have focused on the scope and consequences of popular confusion. Dan (Dennett) does not appear to see this confusion the way I do: Either he doesn’t agree about its scope or he doesn’t see the same consequences.”
Cue rant on the philosophical ignorance of Wes Alwan
I can’t see any philosophical value in this short post by Wes making his philosophical sound bite with only minuscle philosophical analysis.
Like Deelosofar says if you think neoroscience has nothing to say about human abilities like free-will you really have your head in the sand. Like most issues in science and philosophy it is not about proving one thing or another but gathering evidence that supports a position. Does science prove that God doesn’t exist. No, but it means you have to believe things against the grain of the evidence, likewise with free-will and neuroscience.
Nahmias isn’t some kind of Raymond Tallis. He thinks science is relevant to philosophical problems and is quite happy to dispense with our intuitive understanding of ourselves when conflict arises. More so Nahmias wants to have his cake and eat it. Free will doesn’t require dualism and this is a good thing because he thinks determinism and materialism of sorts is true, so like many philosophers he redefines free will to be compatible with the scientific picture of ourselves. This view is compatibilism which doesn’t require the ability to do otherwise. But that is a sop.
Coyne and Harris may not write sophisticated stuff (and that is fine) but they strike me as being more honest in what they espouse. With greater sophistication the important issues get hidden more easily.
1 out of 10
Of all I’ve heard on the topic of free will, I think Dan Dennett has the most coherent people of what it means to have free will. Who knows if this jives with what people actually believe or not. I like the interviews he’s done on Philosophy Bites (http://philosophybites.com/2012/08/daniel-dennett-on-free-will-worth-wanting.html) and the Philosopher’s Zone (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/daniel-dennett-on-human-consciousness-and-free-will/3686776).
Why is it that when we turn the magnifying glass of science upon ourselves people completely dispense with rationale and go purely off their gut (i dunno about you but my guts have shit for brains). There is no sensible argument to be made for the existence of “free-will” from Dennet to Plato. The more people try the more they start to sound like religious zealots (this book included). Our brains are not special people! The sooner you get it through your heads the better!
I’d just like to defend unscientific thinking a little bit. We all have intuitions, and we are all guided by them when we try to do philosophy (and science I might add). Even Dan Dennett. Intuitions about free will don’t just come from nowhere, and they are not uninformed by experience. Free will is hugely important to the way we conceive of ourselves and our society. It is embedded our everyday language, our culture and our institutions. We grow up to view ourselves as agents with causal powers and a will. Perhaps, as has been argued, we develop the notion of causation along with the notion of will, as we begin to percieve ourselves as causal agents. Maybe the world is just a series of discrete events and we should just drop our innate assumptions about causation. We surely have no empirical evidence for the existence of causation, we assume it every time we do science. But since it is so firmly built in to our conception of ourselves as agents in the world, our culture and our everyday language, maybe we shouldn’t be so keen to drop this unscientific intuition.
Could we then say the “free will” is a social fact, and that it has a phenomenal existence and consequences as such.
Of course the intuition might not be shared by all cultures, or even all individuals. Claude Levi-Strauss defended structuralism from charges of ignoring human agency by saying that it was his lived experience. He claimed he didn’t feel like the author of his own books, only a crossroads of sorts where different discourses came together in new ways.
I’m not familiar with the terminology (apart from 5 mins on wikipedia just now), but yeah it seems like it could be considered a kind of social fact.
I’m sure it is true that not every culture shares the same intuitions, although I would imagine there are a great deal of shared intuitions accross many cultures, free will may be one of those. But even if it isn’t, I’m not sure it matters too much. I can’t stop concieving of myself, or my world, through the lense of the particular culture of which I am a part. And if I could, I would be in a padded cell. Science can show us where our intuitions are wrong, no doubt, but with something which plays such a crucial role in our everyday life, I think our intuitions are on quite firm ground, and should indeed take a lot of shaking. Because it’s never really just the scientific data which is at issue. There are all sorts of controversial philosophical claims which go unnoticed in the background. Put it this way, to use a slightly different example: If neuroscientists prove that propositional attitudes or qualia do not exist, I am less likely to become an eliminative materialist than I am to become an anti-realist about science. Because I’m more sure that I heve beliefs, desires and qualia than I am that scientific explanations aim at more than empirical adequacy. And I think anyone who isn’t is just plain nuts.
As for the individual with radically different intuitions, well, I think Claude Levi-Strauss should have been in a padded cell. And that’s only a joke.
I agree with you, which is why I disagree with someone like Paul Churchland who finds it encouraging that people are starting to speak of mental states in terms of neuroscience. “I’m sad because of biochemical processes in my brain” is a poor substitute for “I’m sad because my mother died” in terms of our cultural discourse.
Though we can’t shake off our culture, since to shake it would be to shake off meaning in our lives, I think its important to relativize our cultural perspectives in certain contexts, or we risk intellectual arrogance which can turn into intellectual imperialism of a very oppressive kind (this is where Foucault comes in).Certain humbleness when it comes to the recognizing alternative ways of life is essential to global ethics, but this is another discussion altogether.