The Significance of Free Will: Wrapping It Up

Let us go through Kane's book one more time, with appropriate links:

I bought the book because I had heard that Kane brought up to date the incompatibilist tradition of James and Isaiah Berlin.

Kane structures his own work in two parts: an ascent (showing why we have and value these strong intuitions about moral philosophy that are incompatible with determinism) and a descent (showing that indeterminism of the necessary sort may well be part of the natural physical world.)

Martin Luther was free even when, as he said, he could “do nothing else” than what he was doing. But this just means that his inability to do anything else at a given mature moment is the consequence of a long life of diverging paths at many points of which he could have done otherwise.

The issue of whether freedom and moral responsibility in strong sense of the terms are compatible with determinism necessarily brings us through some discussion of ordinary language, seeking help from that quarter. This has some interest, but is not dispositive.

The problem is brought to something of a head by B.F. Skinner’s portrayal of Walden Two, and its covert non-constraining controls on its happy campers.

We get to the top of our ascent, we understand the incompatibility of certain deep intuitions with determinism, when we come to understand our own development as individuals, from infancy onward, as ever-more-sophisticated attempts to accommodate a primordial desire.

But now, how do we get back down the mountain and find a place for this primordial desire in the real world? Consider certain critical willings as the subjective manifestation of genuine neurological uncertainties all the way down to the electron level. These are our self-forming willings (SFWs). I have presented my reasons for believing that Kane is overly elaborate  in his descriptions of the different types of SFW: that, following a cue from William James, we might better reduce them all to a single form, the sustaining of attention.

In his conclusion, Kane comes back to the writings of B.F. Skinner as a negative example, and argues that a belief in free will as a metaphysical and psychological matter may help contribute to a society that is free in the political sense.

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis VI

It probably won't come as too much of a surprise if I tell you at this point that in order to get us back down the mountain, in order to argue that this incompatibilist free will we've been defining might be a reality without the invocation of any supernatural or transcendental machinery, Kane invokes the indeterminacy of quantum physics.

That sounds like a bit of a cliche, and Kane acknowledges as much early in the book.

Nonetheless, he makes this move, and he does have something new (or new to me, at any rate) to contribute in the specificity with which he carries this forward in the later portions of the book.

From chapter 8: “Imagine that the indeterminate efforts of will [as we experience them] are complex chaotic processes in the brain, involving neural networks that are globally sensitive to quantum indeterminacies at the neuronal level. Persons experience these complex processes phenomenologically as ‘efforts of will’ they are making to resist temptation in moral and prudential situations.”

This sounds to me like it builds on a “dual aspect” theory of the relations of mind. There is what we subjectively (phenomenologically) experience and there is what is happening physically. Neither of these facts is unreal, nor is either the cause of the other. Each is an aspect of the same situation. Sometimes the subjective aspect of this situation is one of uncertainty and balance -- as when my desire for a smoke conflicts with my desire to finally kick the habit. At least sometimes, when that is the case subjectively, what is happening objectively is also a matter of uncertainty and balance. There is, let us say, a chaotic process underway in the brain and how it will resolve itself depends upon the way some quantum butterfly's wings will flap.

Either I pick up the cigarette or I throw away the pack. The consequences for my life thereafter may be great. And either course may well be an undetermined free willing, or a self-formed will (an SFW).

Remember the Martin Luther situation we discussed earlier? Sometimes one says, “Here I stand, I can do nothing else,” and the stand one takes then is a free act, not an unfree one. Luther was expressing the view that there was no torn will in him at that time, no conflict of purposes. Being who he was, he could not do anything else.

But it might well be that he became that Martin Luther because at earlier points in his life these critical moments of uncertainty – genuine uncertainty, all the way down to the electron level – had resolved themselves in one way rather than another. And such a proposition is necessary, Kane believes, in order for us to understand Luther as fully free thereafter despite all the web of determined effects of determined causes that his life and times no doubt spun.  

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis II

In his first chapter, Kane writes that he wants to keep the notion of the will as a human function, indeed as a faculty. This is itself a curious point.

Personally, I believe we can get rid of the idea of will, and that applying Ockham's razor to psychology rather demands that we do so. We call the actions on behalf of which we want to make this claim our willed or voluntary actions (as distinct from the beats of our heart, or the reflex jerk of a knee when it's tapped with the doctor's hammer). Still, the freedom of the actions of humans is the main thing, surely, and the "will" in the phrase "free will" is a convenient shortcut to denominating them, not the name of a subjective faculty.

James' admirers will remember that for James as a psychologist the will is, essentially, the act of paying attention. I get out of bed when I pay attention to my need to be out of bed, rather than to any tempting contrary thoughts about how nicely warm the blankets are.

It appears that Kane is contending otherwise, and here I suspect he errs. Furthermore, my initial guess -- without having read the whole of his book -- is that the material in which he advances his views on the nature of the "will" could come right out of the book without loss.

In his second chapter, "Responsibility," we get to the heart of the matter.  Kane discusses the "Alternative Possibilities" (AP) idea, once expressed (by Immanuel Kant) as the idea that "the act as well as its opposite must be within the power of the subject at the moment of its taking place."

Then, though, he quotes Daniel Dennett, a prominent compatibilist, making a point about Martin Luther. In connection with his break with Rome, Luther said: "Here I stand. I can do no other."
Dennett tells us that Luther wasn't denying that he was morally responsible for that break. He was saying, being Martin Luther, this is what he had to do. He was accepting and concentrating moral responsibility, not avoiding it.

Kane acknowledges the force of this point, and revises AP a bit, dropping one element of Kant's statement of it.  Kant, as you see from the quote above, said that "at the moment" of an act's taking place, the subject must have had the power to do other. Kane, agreeing with Dennett, agreeing then with Luther's self-knowledge, says that this may not be the case. We do think Luther was free when he was defying a papal commission or nailing protesting theses to a church door. But ... he was free there because at earlier moments in his life he had chosen among paths that genuinely diverged. He had voluntarily made himself the man who, at those moments, could no longer do anything else.

AP retains its plausibility in the face of such counter-examples, then, if it is applied to the whole of a life rather than separate moments, and: "Those who know something about Luther's biography know about the long period of inner turmoil and struggle he endured in the years leading up to that fateful 'Here I stand.'"

From Florence to Houston

Below is an outline for the second chapter as represented in the table of contents for my projected book.

I've already done the same for the first chapter. We will focus here on the institution of lending money for a fixed rate of interest: this is "usury" or "riba" to its foes.

I. Renaissance Florence
A. Theology, Damnation, and Evasion
B. The Rise of the Medici

II. The North of Europe
A. Luther on usury
B. Calvin
C. Calvinism in the Lowlands
D. London and the Classical Economists

III. Colonies and States
A. Debt in the Colonies
B. Debt and the Founders
C. The Post-Classical Economics of Henry George

Here I will make in essence the points I sought to make in this blog on November 19, 2010.

D. Leverage, the Business Cycle, and Enron

The difficulties that arise when finance becomes too disconnected from the physical world, when an excess of liquidity gives rise to dreams of infinite leverage, are well illustrated in the rise and fall of the now infamous energy-trading firm, and it is a cautionary tale we should heed even this early in our study.

We have addressed thus far the fundamental ideas of speculation and leverage (i.e. debt). We need to introduce the final key idea from our subtitle, regulation: and we will do that in the next chapter.

More on Cooper's biography of Woodrow Wilson

This will follow up, in a way, on the quotation from Cooper's book that I provided here last Sunday, about the religious convictions in which Thomas Woodrow Wilson was educated as a child, how they proved to have the effect of an "inoculation," etc.

On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war. His speech carried a sense of regret that such a duty should have been placed upon him by history. Near the end, he said: "It is a distressing and oppressive duty, Gentlemen of the Congress, which I have performed in thus addressing you. There are, it may be, many months of fiery trial .. ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance."

Cooper quotes this and comments. "Above all, this speech was not a call to a holy war. America was making an unsought, inescapable choice. The actions of others had rendered it necessary, he believed, to plunge into the most terrible war yet in human history."

The same speech ended with the phrase "God helping her, she [the United States] can do no other." This sounds Lutheran to Cooper, who says that Wilson was "casting America in the same role that Luther cast the Christian believer. For Luther, no one could know God's will .... Nor could the Christian avoid sin; he or she must, Luther declared, 'sin boldly.' This is what Wilson was asking his country to do."

Hume's History of England

"Luther, a man naturally inflexible, vehement, opinionative, was become incapable, either from promises of advancement or terrors of severity, to relinquish a sect of which he was himself the founder, and which brought him a glory superior to all others, the glory of dictating the religious faith and principles of multitudes."

Those are the words of David Hume, best known these days as a hyper-skeptical philosopher, was more successful in his own time (1711-1776) as a historian.

Hume was the author of a six volume work called, revealingly enough, "The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688." One measure of the success of these volumes is that despite his subsequent renown as one of the triumvirate of "great British empiricists," as the man who woke Kant from his "dogmatic slumber" and all that, the British Library, and the Cambridge University Library both still list Hume's works under the heading, "David Hume, historian."

I'm delighted to discover that "Project Gutenberg" has put the whole thing on line. It is now freely available to all the curious. And though I would imagine few of my readers will be able to invest the time necessary to read through the whole of it, the format makes it easy to take a dip here and there -- reading the table of contents of a volume, then going to the page or pages that interest you.

You'll find yourself addressed by a distinctive voice. At the beginning of Vol. III, for example, he introduces the subject of the Protestabt Reformation by discussing the clerical profession, and the reason any wise state must keep an eye on them.

"Each ghostly practitioner, in order to render himself more precious and sacred in the eyes of his retainers, will inspire them with the most violent abhorrence of all other sects, and continually endeavor, by some novelty, to excite the languid devotion of his audience. No regard will be paid to truth, morals, or decency, in the doctrines inculcated."

The creation of a state-supported Church helps the magistrates keep order, Hume continues. Without it there would be continual warring amongst the sects inspired by such "ghostly practitioners." But with state support for one Church, the clergy of that one lose the incentive to excite the devotion of their audience in such ways. Their audience is guaranteed them, and their salaries assigned.

"And in this manner ecclesiastical establishments, though commonly they arose at first from religious views, prove in the end advantageous to the political interests of society."

These general views being first clearly stated, we are unsurprised when we come to read what Hume has to say specifically -- in the passage I quoted above -- about the disturber of the official Church of all of western Europe to whom he soon turns his attention -- Martin Luther.