In our discussion on Jung, I brought up the issue of free will with respect to the existence of the unconscious, and I wanted to explore this a bit further:
Compatibilism is the doctrine that free will and determinism are in some way compatible, but since these terms were designed to contradict each other, any claim to be a compatibilist requires an account of how this is possible. There needs to be some level of analysis of the situation by which we're (either collectively, or you can look at individual cases) free and another by which we're not.
Kant's compatibilism was initially explained to me in school as such: It's like we're robots programmed to think we're free. Of course, since we're programmed, we're really not free, but feeling free is all that's required for moral responsibility.
Actually reading Kant myself, I saw that his position was closer to the reverse of what I've just stated: In the world of experience, science shows us (or more precisely, it bases itself on) the fact that everything is caused, so thus we are, according to this analysis of phenomenal reality, not really free. However, an underlying assumption behind the way we treat each other and ourselves is that we really are free, so even though we technically can't say anything about the world behind phenomena, we're forced by practical reason to assume that in reality (as noumena) we're free.
I'm not too concerned here with Kant scholarship. The point is that there's in both analyses a surface level of analysis whereby we're judged free in the first case but not in the second, and a deeper level whereby we're judged the opposite way. The second case is funny in that the surface level, the level that science acts at, is actually deeper than the level of experience itself, whereby we think we're free. So you might classify my second characterization of Kant here as having three levels:
1. The level of immediate experience (whereby we feel free normally, as opposed to when we're in chains and don't feel free, though in that case at least our thoughts and micro-movements still feel free; you can also imagine feeling possessed due to some neurological difficulty, with your body or even thoughts not obeying your commands)
2. The level of scientific analysis (science, by doing a systematic analysis of experience, is getting at something non-obvious to ordinary experience)
3. The level of the world-in-itself (which Kant thinks we can't know about directly but thinks that we need to make certain assumptions about due to practical reason; Schopenhauer then runs with this view to posit that the whole world has a Will)
One can add to this a possible level 1.5: The level of considered experience. Marx and Freud both pointed out instances where we feel free, but on (possibly lengthy) consideration of our motives, we realize that we were being influenced by factors that we do not consider ourselves allied with: we were not really free because we were being tricked in some way, either by ideology or by our own psyche.
Classical compatibilism is concerned largely with levels 1 & 2 (I can feel free, and that's enough, even though science says I'm really not), though if you take the problem of compatibilism to be fundamentally theological (God knows what I'm going to do, so how can I be free?), then you're really concerned with 1 & 3 (I feel free, but since God caused and knows everything, I'm really not).
You can agree about what the relevant levels are to consider but still disagree about which level matters for which purposes. William James (and Sartre, and Ayn Rand, among others) argues that level 1 is all that matters, that the claim of #2 is either factually incorrect or at least totally irrelevant to matters of ethics, guilt, punishment, self-motivation, and the like. One can just define #1 as determinate of whether or not an action is free.
Modern neuropsychologists who argue that free will is an illusion because, e.g. criminal brains have a certain structure that others don't, are arguing that #2 really does matter, and should affect how we treat others through praise/blame and public policy.
Likewise, Nietzsche took #2 to be the Enlightened view given what science has taught us, but his phenomenology of the will focused also on #1 and its relation to #1.5. You might see #2 as the ultimate unknowability of the self: our decisions are caused ultimately by factors in our psyche unknown to us, but we can at least become partially examined, as opposed to being an unreflective, #1-focused individual who gets a thrill out of, e.g. smoking as a way of rebelling against his parents without being aware that this is his motive.
The view of freedom shared, I think, by Frithjof Bergmann
I think this concept is equally applicable to the free will problem itself: we can self-explore and self-explore and so enable ourselves to make choices that are increasingly free, i.e. that wouldn't be overturned upon further reconsideration. However, there's never a final insight; we can never really be sure of our motives, and if Freud and co. are right, our ignorance is not just a matter of us not having sufficient knowledge of the facts of our desires. If that were the case, we could say "you made a free choice; it just wasn't a considered choice." No, according to Freud, it's not a matter of a conscious decision made on the basis of incomplete evidence but a decision made by a mechanism that we--in ways that could be crucial to a given decision--don't understand. You could characterize this (as Jung does) by saying that the agent, the self that makes the decisions, is a larger entity than the individual conscious ego, or you could just deny that there really is any agent: that decisions are a result of a mechanical process that is affected both by calculations based on data (i.e. our knowledge, conscious or not, of the circumstances of the case including our own desires, probable outcomes of our action, the environment in which we're performing the action, prior relevant occurrences, etc.) and other motive forces that either lack rationality entirely or at least involve a "decision-making" component that is foreign to our conscious decision-making.
So you might say that we are free to the extent that we are rational (where I'm taking rationality not only in the sense of explicit reasoning but in whatever else is going on when we self-discover), but can never know really how rational we're being, how partial our examination has been. For Sartre or Rand or anyone else to insist that you know that you had a choice and so were really free (and so deserving of guilt/culpability) is simply a gross oversimplification that denies the fundamental insights of Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Dan Dennett seems on the right track with his idea of freewill as a kind of moral competence/skill-set that is buggy (to borrow a bit of tech-talk) in terms the problems that come with cognitive-biases.
Does anyone have or know of one who has an answer to the following question:
What does the word “free” mean in the context of ‘Free Will’ when our own existence, i.e. our birth, is a decision we ourselves have absolutely no input in making?
basically is just asserting that we make conscious/reflective choices…
Another quick thought…
So, assuming we all have parents and that we were not emacculately conceived, there are three states of the World from which we came:
1. Our parents made a decision to have a child. Not ‘You’ but just a child in general.
2. You were not intended but were an ‘accident.’
3. ‘You’ have been cloned (or made traditionally in a test tube) and were the result of a third party’s intention.
What does all of this mean regarding your “Free Will?”
Fredbo your questions make me think about Heidegger’s notion of human beings…dasein…being thrown into the the world…which is certainly an experience we can all relate to, waking up in the midst of the flux of life and feeling “how the heck did I get here?” The question then could be posed, is “Free Will” possible given this existential position? I think Freud, Nietzche etc. as mentioned by Mark’s post point to a nuanced “yes” in answer to this…
Agreed. Last night I fell asleep re-listening to the Camus episode which brings up Ansurdity, the free will to commit suicide as a resolution to the problem and the subsequent moral implications that that decision presents… Talk about a deep rabbit hole!
Absurdity… Not the touchy topic of ‘Ansurdity.’ Damn auto-correct!
Well done Mark.
I was just plowing through Sartre’s “The Philosophy of Existentialism–Selected Essays” and at times he seems like the new Pope making you feel guilty for every decision you never made in your life, and that even your guilt is your magical free decision to avoid your free decision–a Pope with no weekly church fellowship, religious habits or a confessional to get reprieve.
Just as a brute assessment, I would say we would be well off if 10% of our decisions were conscious. However even then consciousness does not necessarily imply freedom.
Maybe we can begin to apply free will to that which we have “control” over. We can’t control our neurons directly,nor does that mean our neurons therefore control of us. So perhaps we have the highest “control” over that which we do consciously with awareness and reason (reason defined as combined multimodal responding to the rational, emotional, social, etc.)–and thus the greatest free will (I think freedom fits better here since will needs definition which can be solipsistic).
So we have freedom to the degree that we exert conscious reasonable decisions during that 10% of consciousness to which we have access (I think 10% is generous, at least in my case).
While that does not seem very extensive, it seems to fit the experience of my world, and I feel very successful if I rise to those occasions of decidability when needed, and bring improved habits to bear as needed to increase my decidability (I can’t decide to shoot a hole in one, but I can practice at hitting a hole in one) Do I have freedom? Enough for me.
Ultimate freedom would be to forget everything you ever learned before going to bed at night, including walking, talking, driving, education, etc. That way when you wake up, you could get credit for freely deciding everything. Kind of like if we used our entire brain all the time, that would be a grand mal seizure. Sometimes less is more.
I think that Sartre can be taken to say that even if our decisions are the product of our genes, our social class, our education, the stars, etc., they are ours and being authentic means that we have no excuses: if we blame who we are and what we do on our parents, our milieu, our biochemistry, we are in bad faith, not because of some facts about the psychology of choice, but because…….
That is, for my version of Sartre assuming responsibility for my decisions is the basic good, perhaps the only basic good. It is prior to the moral content of my decisions, prior to whether I
help the starving child or not.
It is a very strict puritanical morality, once again not based on the psychological science of choice, but on that one fiat: however your decisions come about, they are yours and it is good to assume responsibility for yourself.
Does that make sense?
That surely makes sense.
However, “the strict puritanical morality” (a great summary phrase of exactly my concern) is precisely the slave morality which Nietzsche, et. al., have identified as life denying.
I am glad to take full responsibility for my life, and if I wan’t to discern the value of my actions fine, but I do not need someone else to make inauthentic pronouncements about my actions as Sartre does. And he believes he is speaking truth. Well, he doesn’t get to speak my truth.
P.S. McCarthy’s Suttree is the best American existential novel of all time–a classic. He doesn’t preach, and he gets at what you are saying without the slave-master glitches.
Interestingly, this brings up the perennial question whether philosophy is best served by philosophy or art. Is the best presentation of the philosophical position of existentialism (defined by Sartre as existence preceeds essence) philosophical or artistic? I am having to give advantages to art here if we compare Suttree to Being and Nothingness, since the essence of Sartre’s existential position is better represented by McCarthy than Sartre, given the master-slave issue I noted above, but there are many more reasons as well. I think the same applies to Camus’s the Stranger as opposed to his philosophical expressing in The Rebel.
Sartre actually says as much when he states that the poet does not use language, but prose writers do. The non-utilitarian use of language by artists is what gives them the upper hand to the normal expository prose of philosophers.
Sartre is probably a better novelist than philosopher himself. I’d recommend The Age of Reason and Nausea. The Age of Reason is good if you’re interested in the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War and the beginnings of World War 2.
I’ll have to read Suttree. I read No Country for Old Men (and listened to the PEL podcast): great novel!
I’ve been thinking about McCarthy.
Have considered Suttree to be the Rosetta stone to interpret McCarthy as coming from the Sartrean position.
Which may well be true.
But, after reading Blood Meridian, which is even more amazing, and a clear elaboration of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, except on steroids, I am reconsidering.
Perhaps he represents every possible existential position down to its infinite conclusion, i.e., (Sunset Limited–take a friend).
Old Country is just sheer terror. What if your death is nothing but the outcome of the random, the coin flip. How existential is that?
Then for cheering up, “The Road” (nothing like a Father-Son time of bonding).
I think most over-think or over-worry about the problem of free will.
Yes, if Laplace’s demon actually existed, it could predict what we will do in the future. Yes, our actions are ultimately the results of unfathomably long causal chains. But this is how it always has been, and we’ve always known it; anxiety over this derives from misunderstanding.
It’s always been true that whatever happens––happens! It’s always been true that we’ve known we don’t have full control over our actions. When someone asks you, for example, why you drove left rather than right, you don’t say “Because ME.” No, you say, “because I saw a giant boulder blocking the path to the right.” External stimuli.
But we are free in the sense that it is ourselves making the choices without external restriction. We deliberate, however causally chained, and we make conscious choices on our deliberations and desires. We avoid undesirable paths, and that has allowed us to flourish. The fact that a moral human being is the result of cultural and genetic conditioning does not mean he or she deserves any less praise. That person is still a moral human being. And in the grand scheme of things, human civilization is a giant mechanical system of self-improvement. Yes it’s mechanical, but it’s also beautiful, and that’s good enough for me.
I agree that the free will issue is overblown in many ways… What I find interesting is the causal chain itself. It would seem we don’t have enough information to get to the root of it all because of the ‘first cause’ problem. So then, for the individual, it becomes a demarcation problem. At what point are we conscious enough to even have free will? Moral responsibility is, in an important way, applied to a person externally by another individual in the weak form and society at large in the strong form.
Fredbo, you’ve got it. Especially the part about demarcation.
Here’s one big place where I see the demarcation questions coming in: the idea of “levels” (level 1, 1.5, 2, 3 etc) at which we might consider experience is problematic. The implied hierarchy is misleading – there’s often an unwarranted assumption that the allegedly more basic levels are prior in a logical or explanatory sense. But, these levels are just alternative explanatory contexts / discourses / paradigms / whatever. All of them are good in their proper usage, and some of them are partly translatable into the terms preferred in the others, some of the time, maybe. But, there’s no logical or explanatory hierarchy going on.
The other reason I can’t get very interested in this or that version of compatibilism is that I don’t regard determinism itself as a serious position. It has way too many internal consistency problems. Some examples…
1. The impossibility of describing the starting position. I’m going to need the position & momentum of every basic particle in the universe. It’s hard to pin those guys down.
2. The sensitivity of the outcome – even in a very tightly controlled simple system – to the smallest variation (or mis-statement) in the initial conditions. Try breaking off 100 frames of snooker, and watch where reds end up. That’s just 15 balls to consider, and there’s already plenty of variability, even if you’re Ronnie O’Sullivan.
3. Lack of computing time. Take an interestingly diverse population of particles (start with a few trillion, of a couple of dozen different types – let’s say it’s enough to capture a cubic millimetre of the universe, although it’s probably nowhere near), and an arbitrarily large amount of computing power. I might in principle be able to predict where that system will be in one second’s time, but it’s going to take an awful lot longer than one second to compute the result. In fact, it will take quite a long time just to write down the initial position. So, not much use as a way of predicting the future. Now, scale up to a brain-sized system. The numbers are going to get a lot bigger.
4. Let’s say I have a single basic particle. We’ll call it P. It has position (x,y,z) and momentum m. How many basic particles am I going to need to create a means of representing the position & momentum of P? Are those particles, used in the means of representation, also part of system whose behaviour we’d like to predict? The map is going to be bigger than the territory. If the territory is the universe, where shall we put the map?
5. Systems smaller than the universe are subject to external interference, from factors that we’re not modelling. A stray neutrino arrives, and suddenly all bets are off.
6. Let’s say I have 1000 atoms of U-238. Which one will decay first? There’s no way to answer that question – it isn’t deterministic. See Schrödinger’s cat.
7. Please don’t invent a supernatural being to get around any of this. Laplace might say he can imagine a demon who can do this or that, but we don’t need to take him seriously.
So IMO, any strongly stated determinism is a straw man. Does that mean we always act with complete freedom, all the time? No. There are all manner of constraints that apply in all situations – per Freud, Marx, David Eagleman, tons of others. You can only choose amongst the options that you actually have. But, you still choose.
–R.
Alex Rosenberg isn’t a strawman, see his talk on:
Between Biology and Physics: Reduction, Emergence and Complexity
tl;dw
summarise it for me?
“any strongly stated determinism is a straw man”
None of your 7 points seem to be an argument against determinism per se. They merely state the difficulty of using it to gain insight.
1. From the difficulty of establishing a starting position it does not follow that there is no strating position
2. The fact that a small change in initial conditions can have a siginificant effect on final conditions is an argument of determinism, not one against it.
3. As with (1), the difficulty in computing doesn’t seem to give us any warrant to make conclusions about the truth or falsity of determinism – only that we can’t compute large systems.
4. the same as (1) and (3)
5. Introducing the effect of stray neutrino is still relies on the belief that events are determined, is (1), (2), (3), and (4).
6. Human description of the quantum world is probablistic. That does not mean that actions at this level are themselves probablistic.
This all seems to get back to a basic Nietzschean critique. It is a conceit to want think the world to conforms to the language we use to describe it. If it doesn’t make sense, we rarely think that it might be language that is the major problem.
“None of your 7 points seem to be an argument against determinism per se. They merely state the difficulty of using it to gain insight.”
Yes, that’s correct. On verificationist grounds, I’m deliberately conflating the truth or falsity of determinism “per se” with the ability to get any testable claims out of it. I don’t think determinism makes any claims that are testable. It’s just another faith position or aesthetic preference. Hence why I don’t feel the need to work very hard to make anything else compatible with it.
–R.
Ever since I heard Sam Harris on determinism, I’ve become super fascinated by free will. Not that I necessarily buy everything he’s selling, but more that I saw the profound consequences that the different positions on this point could make.
I’m now to a point that I can’t even fathom a world in which freedom like Sartre and Rand espouse could even exist. Something always has to ground that freedom, any decision you make has to be a result of some prior reason, impulse, need, whatever.
This sets up my question… its seems therefore logical to me that all our actions must be motivated by something. If we’re not “choosing” there must be something that is forcing action right? Something innate, that is driving us forward. To me, it seems like it would be something to the effect of “Our agent always chooses the best course of action in accordance with what it desires most at the time of choice” or something like that. This would mean that awareness and memory are the key to better “choices” and are the foundation of the “illusion”. We’re are so much so a product of our environment because the environment limits our awareness and therefore our “agent” is limited in its “best” course of action. (An animal is the same, it’s “agent” always chooses the best course of action, however the only difference is that we humans have better memory and an ego which provides awareness so it seems like we’re choosing).
I think I’m pulling from Plato or Aristotle here… but is there anything in modern philosophy or psychology that is similar to this or am I crazy?
Thanks!
Allanator–
You are totally crazy!
Not.
Not to distract you from PEL, but check out some of these Brain Science Podcasts (http://brainsciencepodcast.com):
Bruce Hood, The Self Illusion
Thomas Metzinger, Ego Tunnel (a philosopher)
Alva Noe, Out of Our Heads
Chris Firth, Making up the Mind
The area of these authors is embodied cognition, which you can google. Enjoy.
haha! Thanks for the recommendations. I’ll check them out.
Great essay, Mark. Thank you, I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time.
I guess my inclination is to be something of a compatibilist, though I’m new to philosophy so I’m not sure in what sense. I have always thought, for instance, that criminals are not to be judged severely for their crimes, particularly murderers, because what they do arises from some sort of illness, and is therefore not governed by conscious choices. Yet this would, at least in some cases, do away with the notion of “evil” – which is, as I might define it, a malicious intent which is rationally chosen, from a perfectly sane and free mind. And many sources seem to assert the existence of evil, as a component of human nature. Yet that definition seems to involve a contradiction, since rationality appears to intrinsically point towards actions which benefit others, rather than harm them. Though Nietzsche and others would surely refute that.
I feel like most of our choices are largely determined, by Jung’s unconscious, by neurological factors, by social pressures, and emotional reactions, etc. Yet I still feel like I have to take responsibility for my wrong actions, and try to correct them, and also that my wrong actions (which are many) condition me to do so in a deterministic way, by causing an aversion to their results. Is it Kantian to say I feel like we are not really free, but we must accept responsibility for our actions nevertheless? Like, “I didn’t mean to do it, but I did it, and now I must make amends?”
I like the way Mark has framed the issue. The problem really does seem to involve different levels of analysis, if not different levels of reality.
As I see it – a view informed mostly by Robert Pirsig and William James – the concept of causality is the pivot point of the whole problem. (Leaving aside the theological versions of determinism.) In physics the concept is beautifully simple and super handy. It’s so successful in its explanatory and predictive powers, in fact, that the concept has become way too effective and way too powerful. It has been reified, has been mistaken for the structure of reality itself, every last bit of it, including the sphere of human action. When this concept is reified, it’s hard to square “reality” with our everyday experience. When this concept is used to paint of portrait of a completely mechanical universe in which everything occurs in a perfect chain of causality. And of course this implies that humanity operates according to the same fixed laws and our so-called “choices” in life are thereby construed as meaningless illusions. But, as Geoff Edwards pointed out, is a mistake to think the world conforms to the language we use to describe it.
I guess this is why Pirsig, and James in a milder way, approaches the issue by taking on the concept of causality. He practically gets rid of it altogether. The reasoning usually goes from basic physical phenomena up to the domain of human action, so that causality is extrapolated from physics to psychology, so to speak. We are composed of atoms, atoms behave according the laws of causality, therefore we are subject to the same laws. But it’s just as easy to extrapolate in the other direction. Instead of starting with the highly determined behavior of physical realities, you start with the common sense observation that people make choices and decisions all day long, every day. If we have freedom of choice, then freedom of choice can exist for animals and maybe even atoms too. Their freedom is so limited that their behavior can be very well described as law-like or mechanical. The empirical data is the same either way. The difference is just one of description. If neither description is reified, then you just use which ever language is appropriate to the situation – atoms or humans – instead of trying to fight or resign yourself to the very structure of reality.
Constraints are real. Freedom is real. No problem.
I’d also point out that influences, tendencies, motives, urges and the like are not the same thing as law-like mechanical causality. The latter suggests that there is no way to resist these constraints and forces. It’s just not like that.
David,
I also believe ‘causality’ is a key issue in this debate, but I’m not so sure about your view of physics… Quantum Mechanics is not about the ‘”mechanical” in the vernacular sense. I think we would need Dylan’s (a physicist’s) views on this matter to suss out the nuance of your analogy. All kinds of weird stuff is happening all the time according to modern physics…
I know I’m late to the party, but here’s the intuition pump I use when anyone uses the term “free will.”
I simply ask what would my will be free from? Human beings exercise will, but it’s obviously not free. We are limited in a myriad of ways, we are bound to time, space, the laws of physics, social norms, etc.
However, that does not mean my actions are trivially determined. Rather, they are deterministic, but in such a complex way that it would take exactly all of the physical interactions that have created me, and all of the phenomenological experiences that I have had to predict what I would do next. Essentially you’d have to clone me and simulate all of my prior experiences to get to a Laplace’s demon point, and at that point all you’ve done is create an exact copy of me. It will analyze a situation and tell you what I would do, in exactly the same manner that I currently do it myself.
In other words, the being that I am at this point in time is a determined agent, but an irreducibly (practically irreducible if not in principle irreducible) complex agent. I’m not trivially determined, it takes 100% of my experience to arrive at the decisions I arrive at. That’s beautiful, and I don’t really care what label gets slapped on it.
I absolutely love this. Thanks for sharing!