Free Will

The admirable philosophical blog "Rationally Speaking" has taken on the issue of free will.

Jerry Coyne's recent op-ed piece for USA Today was the catalyst. Coyne said that although there is "no way to rewind the tape of our lives to see if we can really make different choices in completely identical circumstances," he considers the claim that we can, very dubious. Further, there is "not much downside to abandoning the notion of free will."

Massimo Pigliucci argues, in "Rationally Speaking," that Coyne is confused. He is working fromn a definition of free will (the possibility of inconsistent choices given identical circumstances) that by his own admission -- see the quote above -- can never be tested. Since (Pigliucci tells us) science is "about empirically testable hypotheses," science can not be about free will in the sense Coyne is discussing. So Coyne isn't entitled to draw upon arguments from neurobiology to try to make his case. That case is metaphysical, not neurological.

Pigliucci's column on the subject has in turn draw abundant comment from readers. One reader, Tom, cites a paper called, "The Pointsman: Maxwell's Demon, Victorian Free Will, and the Boundaries of Science" from the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Pigliucci's reply to his readers is largely concerned with those readers who have accused him of being a "crypto-dualist." The impression amongst much of the consuming public for philosophical arguments is that free will only makes sense if we first believe in a sort of Cartesian ghost in the machine.

To this Pigliucci replies, "that line of argument is somewhat question-begging: we are trying to find out how chunks of matter can behave in such drastically different ways from other chunks of matter, so to point out the obvious (that they are all chunks of matter) hardly helps move the debate forward."

Caring only about your work

The philosopher Nel Noddings once (in 1984) wrote: "Most of us commonly take as pejorative, 'He cares only about money'; but we have mixed feelings when we hear, 'He cares only about mathematics' or 'She cares only about music.' In part, we react this way because we feel that a person who cares only about money is likely to hurt others in pursuit of it, while one who cares only about mathematics is a harmless and, perhaps, admirable person who is denying himself the pleasures of life in his devotion to an esoteric object."

I do think this is a fair general statement of the usual connotations of such sentences. In the spirit of expanding Noddings' comment, we might observe: Someone who cares only about mathematics may be a harmless drudge, or may end up discovering a mathematical anomaly in radio waves that in turn improves worldwide communications for the good of us all. Someone who cares only about money may obtain it by violence or fraud, doing active harm to others.

More generally, we often extend respect, even if it is a grudging respect, to anyone who is "married to" his occupation, especially if it is an occupation which may derive some of its appeal from the intellectually challenging nature of the work.  "He cares only about his work" said of a lawyer or an engineer, is no bad thing.

Still, I think Noddings goes a bit too far when she writes about how such a person is "denying himself" pleasures of life outside the job: suggesting that this is a praise-worthy sacrifice. If our mathematician prefers the blackboard and the computer lab to the pleasures of, say, sexual relations, child-rearing, neighborly comaraderie, adopting the former over all of the latter is no sacrifice.

OTOH, if a mathematician believes that he has a duty to stay at the blackboard hour after hour, because the human race needs better exploitation of radio frequencies, then I can imagine that his doing so would be a praise-worthy sacrifice. But in such a case, we would not in any case express the situation by saying that he "cares only for" the mathematics.