20 April 2012
The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis VIII
Kane’s chapter 10 is called “Objections and Replies.” The
objections that he surveys here are from “astute and persistent critics of my
view” as expressed in earlier publications, “to whom I am indebted for waking
me from many a dogmatic slumber.”
I won’t go through the objections and his replies for you. They
expand but marginally on the argument I’ve already presented. I will note,
though, that one of the objections forces Kane to expand upon the
quantum-theoretical gist of his own argument on the way "down the mountain." Could
there be two people with exactly the same history, biochemistry, etc., whose
deliberations on exactly the same point come to contrary conclusions? In a
footnote, he explains:
“A natural objection here would be that the quantum-wave
functions of the brains of the two persons would be exactly the same …
combinations of the wave functions of their component particles. But these wave
functions are abstract descriptions of the real brains that do not tell us what
the exact positions and momenta of the component particles are. Rather they
yield various probabilities that the particles will have such-and-such
positions and momenta.” So, yes, so far as we know, this is possible. Just as it’s
possible that in one context Schrodinger’s cat is dead and in another exactly
identical context the cat is still alive when the lid is opened.
In his conclusion, chapter 11, Kane seeks to “situate the
debates about free will … within broader intellectual currents of the late
twentieth century and of the modern era in philosophy generally.”
Kane returns here to Walden Two, the B.F. Skinner utopia
that many readers (Kane amongst them) see as an unintended dystopia. In the
story, a philosopher named Castle asks some skeptical questions of the utopia’s
leader, Frazier. Frazer says that scientists now know what the good life is, so
it would be wrong to refuse to condition people into leading it. Castle asks,
then: what is the good life?
Skinner/Frazier answers: It is a lengthy answer, beginning
at p. 146 of the book and continuing into page 149. There are five points to
the good life: physical and psychological health, a minimum of unpleasant labor,
opportunities to exercise talents, satisfying personal contacts, and necessary
opportunities for relaxation. There need be no philosophical explanation behind
this list, in fact (Frazier says) efforts to get behind it philosophically are
misguided, like “a centipede trying to decide how to walk,” when the thing to
do is just walk.
“This response by Frazier temporarily silences poor Castle,”
as Kane observers. But Kane comes to Castle’s aid. Castle's question is unanswered,
and is unanswered for a reason that even the most practical of caterpillars should
not ignore. The good life, including each of those five attractive things,
might for all we know be satisfied in any of several or an “indefinite number”
of different ways. Further, those different ways might well conflict with one
another as Isaiah Berlin suggested in his writing about “value pluralism.” We
might lose one way of satisfying these requirements for the good life as we
grasp for another.
The idea of free will as Kane has expounded it, though, is
inherently a “value experimental” idea. It suggests that we can and do remake
ourselves, in ways that determine which values, in a world of competing
value/projects, we will pursue. It is a justified rebuke to Skinner’s value
monism.
With that rebuke we may fittingly and freely end.
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Knowledge is warranted belief -- it is the body of belief that we build up because, while living in this world, we've developed good reasons for believing it. What we know, then, is what works -- and it is, necessarily, what has worked for us, each of us individually, as a first approximation. For my other blog, on the struggles for control in the corporate suites, see www.proxypartisans.blogspot.com.
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