For Sylvia Jane III

Yet if free will in the sense under discussion  is bound up with the notion of the autonomous individual soul we ought to consider the argument of Averroes (Ibn Rushd).

The Moors of the 12th century had access to the writings of Aristotle -- the Christian world didn't rediscover Aristotle until they started winning back large parts of Spain, and ended up in the possession of some of the (formerly Moorish) libraries.

Anyway, Averroes wrote a learned commentary on the works of Aristotle, and the part of his commentary that most concerns us right now involves the idea of the human soul. Simplifying the matter considerably, one may say that Averroes --
invoking Aristotle's authority -- believed that there is only one true immortal human intellect, or soul. Our individual selves, our personalities, come about because this one common soul is mixed with a lot of different individual bodies.

Perhaps our bodies are so many stained-glass windows in a Church. The underlying mind, the “active intellect,” is the same –the light of the sun outside the Church. But the streams of light are differentiated as the various “passive intellects” once they have passed through the material of the windows.

If anything like this is so, where will we locate our notions of freedom? In the passive or in the active intellect? Or perhaps in the stained glass itself?

For Sylvia Jane II

Continuing the consideration of free will, and of Sam Harris’ recent book on the subject, from last week.  

As I indicated there, I’m not persuaded that Libet’s experiments have the broad significance sometimes attributed to them. Accordingly, I find unpersuasive Harris’ reliance on those experiments in his discussin of the factual question.

Beyond that, there is the value question. Harris wants us to abandon the idea of free will because it is part of the further idea of an autonomous self, and he wants us to give up that. The idea of a separate self is (as Buddhism teaches) the cause of all suffering and the abandonment of that illusion is enlightenment.

I recognize this idea as part of a noble philosophical heritage. For myself, though, I’m sticking with … my Self. The idea of the self, as a locus of responsibility and originality, has given us the politics of rights, of social mobility, the struggle for companionate over arranged marriage, and much else. How much “else” quickly becomes a matter of attribution and interpretation, but it seems likely for example that the idea of the lonely creative genius which was so much a part of romanticism was itself a factor in creating some of the works of art with which we associate the period.

Selfhood, whatever else we may say of it, is not only about suffering. And it is my humble prejudice that we should keep selfhood (and such notions of freedom as are intermingled with that) until we have better reasons for abandoning it than anything yet presented.

I'll have a final comment on this line of thought tomorrow.

For Sylvia Jane

On April  10, while I was working my way through a multi-post exegesis of philosopher Robert Kane’s book, The Significance of Free Will, reader Sylvia Jane asked why I hadn’t commented on Sam Harris’ more recent book on the subject.

I had to admit that I hadn’t even known of its existence until three days before receiving her question.  

But I’ll return to the subject now, just to say that I don’t think Harris brings anything new or interesting to the table.

Harris makes two points: (1) free will is an illusion, and (2) that is a good thing, too: we’ll all be better off when we rid ourselves of it.

As to (1), Harris relies upon Libet’s experiments. So let’s talk about them. Benjamin Libet is a physiologist who, in the 1980s, ran experiments in which he instructed his human subjects to make a certain simple movement , like pressing one or another button. He had their brains wired up for his machines while they were deliberating and when they finally did press one or the other button. His conclusion was that there was information available from their brain hemispheres that disclosed which button they were going to push several seconds before they pushed either of them.

This certainly sounds dramatic. I have the introspective awareness that I am deciding now to do something as a result of my conscious thought processes, but my hemispheres had gone into the appropriate mode for that decision seconds before?  Free will wrong! Determinism right!  Right?  So Harris would have us think.  It even inspired him to start putting quotation marks around the word “decision.” “You then become conscious of this ‘decision’ and believe that you are in the process of making it.”

My problem with this is that I don’t believe we can infer that all decisions are alike, or that all intentional acts are inherently conscious.  Consider the last time you were out driving. You likely did a lot of things without ever having the conscious experience of doing or willing to do them. Consider hitting the lever that puts the left signal turn on. This is an action of which you may never have had any conscious awareness at all, yet we might fairly still speak of it as a conscious intention. I doubt it really matters in which second before you hit the level a machine would show the relevant hemispheric activity.

But now consider the sort of life-changing experience Kane is talking about. Suppose you have sworn off cigarettes. Yet you’ve just had a big meal of a sort that has often in the past been a prelude to cigarettes. You reach for a pack for a moment – then remember your vow and, we will say, pull your hand back. Do Libet’s experiments give us any reason to believe that was set before you were struggling over it? No. The rare and critical decisions that count always seem to happen when one is not hooked up to a physiologists’ machine, and there is no obvious non-question-begging case for generalization.   

Harris’ second point is somewhat more interesting. Maybe free will is a bad idea (even if it does accurately describe some events in our lives) and we’re better off without it.  This is related (as Harris tells us) to the Buddhist notion that the self is a bad idea.  

I’ll come back to that next week.

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.

The Significance of Free Will, Exegesis VII

After presenting a view of self-forming willings (SFWs) that involves "chaos, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and neural networks," Kane presents a typology of such SFWs.

There are SFWs: of moral deliberation, where the indeterminacy lies between duty on the one hand and self interest on the other; of prudential deliberation; where it lies between long-term goals and present satisfaction; and the sustaining of attention, where it lies between the performance of an arduous task on the one hand and various “fears, inhibitions, aversions, and other countervailing inclinations” on the other.

I have to say I don’t see the point of this typology. From a psychological point of view, it may well be that the third type is the fundamental one, and the other two are only manifestations thereof. And why should the psychological point of view not also be that of the philosopher in such a matter? 

Take one of James’ examples: “The exhausted sailor on a wreck has a will which is obstructed. One of his ideas is that of his sore hands, of the nameless exhaustion of his whole frame which the act of farther pumping involves, and of the deliciousness of sinking into sleep. The other is that of the hungry sea ingulfing him. ‘Rather the aching toil!’ he says; and it becomes reality then, in spite of the inhibiting influence of the relatively luxurious sensations which he gets from lying still.”  

This example fits all the items that Kane wants kept distinct. The sailor is doing his duty to his fellow crew members, to the captain, to any passengers on board, etc. It would be selfish for him to fall asleep while he could continue to pump out water during this crisis – it would mean that if he lived it would be by the exertions of others, made more burdensome by his default. Thus, it fits Kane’s definition of an SFW of moral deliberation. Yet from the point of view of prudential deliberation, our sailor cannot be confident he would survive if he did not keep up his own efforts –he improves his own chances by doing so, however taxing it is. Thus, it fits Kane’s definition of prudential deliberation. Yet it was introduced by James into his great work on psychology specifically to illustrate the act of sustaining attention, which Kane lists as a third type of SFW.  Our sailor sustains his attention upon the “hungry sea,” and thus he keeps on with his pumping.

Assuming Kane is right about everything else (and I am at least sympathetic with him on everything else) why not just regard that matter of sustaining attention as the Ur-SFW? And others not as other types but as expressions or consequences thereof?  

We have nearly completed our project of summarizing Kane’s book, one that has required a more sustained focusing of attention on our part than is the custom for blogs, so far as I know the customs of this tribe.

Tomorrow, we shall complete this survey, with a view of Kane’s last two chapters. On Sunday, (after a Saturday diversion) we shall wrap it all up, summarizing our summary if you will.

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 V

Here's the final question we have to answer in order to establish the mutual incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism, on Kane's understanding: "Why do we, or should we, want to possess a kind of freedom ... that requires UR (as well as AP-for-some-free-actions) .... What is so important about ultimate responsibility that should make a freedom requiring it 'worth wanting'?"

Kane responds by rehearsing somewhat familiar arguments to the effect that this UR + AP freedom "is necessary for the possession of many other goods such as genuine creativity, autonomy, desert and the like." But he acknowledges that compatibilists can usually redefine creativity, autonomy, etc. in their own favored ways, ways that don't require this UR/AP combination. So, Kane asks: how break the deadlock?

He answers in a passage that reminds me a bit of Jean Piaget, a passage making recourse to the development of human ideas of selfhood, human self-understanding, from infancy to adulthood. Infants begin to perceive the difference of self and not-self. As humans grow, we develop ever more sophisticated versions of that distinction, at each stage preserving "a remnant of the idea that we are independent sources of activity or motion in the world."

An incompatibilist view of freedom in full metaphysical Magilla sense, then, is the natural culmination of that struggle that began in the cradle. It is what the toddler means to say when her body language tells Mom, "Unhand me, I want to do this walking thing on my own!"

What determinism in either hard or soft form can never do is accomodate our primordial desire to be a somebody whose contribution to the world is one' s own, which in turn is connected to "higher aspirations in human beings toward a worth for their existence that transcends transitory satisfactions."

Welcome to the top of the mountain.  Now: can Kane get us down?

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis IV

Last week we had reached the point of Kane's argument at which he had decided that the issue of the presence of alternative possibilities (AP) is not sufficient in explaining incompatibilism. He needed to invoke another intuition: that of ultimate responsibility (UR).

In what sense, if any, is the willer of an act the one ultimately responsible for that act?

As to moral responsibility, a classical statement of what amounts to a compatibilist position comes from the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, and Kane plays against Frankfurt through much of Kane's chapter 5. Frankfurt, in a 1971 essay, observed that compulsive behavior is a threat to some accounts of free will. If I am addicted to nicotine it certainly doesn't seem to me that my reaching for a cigarette is a free act.

Such reflections led Frankfurt to distinguish between first-order and second-order desires. My first-order desire is to get a quick smoke, to satisfy my immediate need for a fix. Beyond that, I may reflect about such compulsions, and I may be either content with my first-order desires or in rebellion against them. An addict who is unhappy about the situation doesn't "have the will he wants to have."

From this, we get a certain conception of freedom. A person will be said to "act freely" in the sense pertinent to moral responsibility, when that person's second-order volitions -- and third or fourth oreder if you like -- are all in accord with the first-order desires and the actual actions based thereon.

Kane's words here: "Though Frankfurt is reluctant to call himself a compatibilist or incompatibilist, it is clear that one of his motives was to offer a demystified account of freedom of will that would not commit one to the excesses of traditional libertarian views....As a consequence, theories of hierarchical motivation like his have been developed by ... others to defend compatibilist views of freedom and autonomy."

Yet Kane finds such arguments for compatibilism unsatisfactory. There is plenty of room, he says, for covert non-constraining controls (CNC) that would leave the objects of control in the full confidence that their whole hierarchy of wills or volitions was lined up properly -- yet which would leave ultimate responsibility in the hands of the controller, like a cult leader, or the psychologists in charge of Walden Two.

"At the very highest level of sophistication one might imagine God doing the controlling, since the problems posed by [subtle] control have their theological counterparts in problems of devine predestnation or foreordination."

We have ultimate responsibility for our own actions, he concludes, if and only if we have, at least now and then, self-creating or self-forming actions.

So, are we at the top of incompatibilist mountain yet, and can we start downward, worrying about how this self-formation actually happens, if it does? No ... there is one more point to cover before we get to the summit. I'll hold this off until tomorrow.

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis III

Chapter 4 continues our discussion of the notion of alternative possibilities (AP) as critical to freedom and, thus, moral responsibility.

Kane cites a discussion by Peter van Inwagen, who wrote, "If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born....Therefore the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us." The point is that we would then have no power to do anything deserving praise or blame.

This is called the "consequence" argument. Against such arguments, compatibilists often contend that we are free in any circumstance in which we "could have done" X had we wanted to do X. I'm using quote marks because this is headed in an ordinary-language direction. It doesn't matter that the fact that we didn't want to do X is a consequence of other facts back to the Big Bang  -- what matters is simply that in a range of cases we do what we want, for good or ill.  Thus, we have the "power" to do right or wrong after all.

Kane thinks that Inwagen's argument is a good one, although not decisive, and the counters to it depend upon unpersuasive non-intuitive usage of ordinary-language words like "could have" or "power." Following a suggestion in an essay by quintessential ordinary-langauge philosopher J.L. Austin, Kane asks us to think a golfer on the green lining up a three-foot putt.

This golfer has made three-foot putts before. He has also missed from that distance. Indeed, you can get elaborate here: he has made putts at three feet with slants of the ground comparable to this, wind conditions etc., comparable to this, etc. -- and, in his long golfing career, he has also sometimes missed them. This is a level fo difficulty beyond a predictable gimme but well short of hopelessness for him.

Now, in ordinary language, we would happily say that our golfer has the power to make the putt. But if he misses, we will not treat this as proof that he didn't want to make the putt. Thus, the significance of terms like "power" are not very closely tied to the "could have done X if he wanted to" conditionals employed by Inwagen's adversaries. Arguments that rely on their synonymity, then, fail, and Inwagen's case for incompatibilism looks plausible again.

Plausible but, in Kane's eyes, not dispositive. To get beyond the impasse between compatibilist intuitions and incompatibilist intuitions, we have to get beyond the notion of AP. There is another intuitive characteristic of freedom we have to bring in as a supplement at this point: the idea that in some sense I am the one with Ultimate Responsibility (UR) for my actions.

Free will consists not just in AP, nor just in UR, but in AP + UR. Arguments like Inwagen's fail to persuade because UR is left implicit, tucked inside words like "power." Hereafter, Kane vows to be explicit about it.

And here I will leave things until next week.  Happy Easter.

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.'"

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis I

Prof. Kane was kind enough to email and tell me that I was wrong in one detail of my earlier post about his book. I gave its date of publication as 1998. I should have said 1996. The paperback edition, which is the one I own, appeared in '98.

At any rate, for today I'll simply single out one sentence from the work. Kane uses the following striking figure of speech in his introduction: "The air is cold and thin up there on Incompatibilist Mountain, and if one stays up there for any length of time without going down the other side, one's mind becomes clouded in mist and is visited by visions of noumenal selves, nonoccurent causes, transempirical egos, and other fantasies."

He is making a couple of points here. First, he is saying that a free-will incompatbilist has to make a two-part case. First, that we have deep moral intuitions with which determinism is incompatible (that is the way up the mountain). Second, that we can -- in a secular scientific manner -- construct a vision of ourselves that does justice to facts and that accomodates those moral intuitions better. That second step gets up back down the mountain to the thicker air.

The reference to "noumenal selves" of course is an allusion to Immanuel Kant. The other two references are less obviously identifiable, at least to a philosophy amateur such as myself. A little web surfing yields the secret. Non-occurent causation is an idea within the stockpile of Roderick Chisholm . The idea is this: we normally think of one event as causing another event -- the striped ball moves along the pool table until it hits the solid ball. Then the striped ball stops and the solid ball starts to move. The movement of the first caused the movement of the second. Both movements were events, i.e. they occurred.

But with human volition: do we have to say this? Can't a free-willist simply say that my action is caused by who I am? not by anything that has occurred?  And, if so, isn't this non-occurent causation, causation by a who rather than a what-happened-earlier, the essence of free will?  So Chisholm would argue. Kane is obviously signalling here that he is not making this point, that non-occurent causation ranks up there with the noumenal self as one of those ideas by which we will be afflicted if we get up the mountain but never make our way back down again.

Trans-empirical ego? That is, as you might by now have cottoned, sort of the bastard offspring of noumenal self and non-occurent cause. It is a phrase associated with John Eccles, an Australian physiologist-turned philosopher, author of How the Self Controls Its Brain (1994).  We needn't go into detail about how Eccles thinks the trans-empirical self controls the empirical brain. The point is simply that this is part of what Kane rejects. He wants to get up the mountain to an incompatibilist conception of freedom, then down the mountain again, into naturalistic explanations of psychology and choice.

The Significance of Free Will

I've recently purchased The Significance of Free Will, by Robert Kane (1998).

I had heard that Kane is one of the few remaining free-willist/incompatibilists among contemporary academic philosophers. As to his academic credentials: he is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and editor of a widely respected collection of essays on the broad subject, The Oxford Handbook of Free Will.

Compatibilism in philosophy is the view that freedom in any important sense of the word is perfectly compatible with the deterministic character of human thoughts, will, and actions. This is, of late, the view for example of Daniel Dennett.

Those who reject that, then, are incompatibilists. Among incompatibilists, there are those who say that since the ideas of freedom and determinism are incompatible -- since determinism is true -- we'll have to learn to live without outdated notions of freedom. That seems to be B.F. Skinner's view in Walden Two for example. On the other hand, there are incompatibilists who agree that the two are incompatible but contend that it is determinism we have to learn to live without.

Regular readers will know that I am of the view that William James got these matters more-or-less right.

James was a compatibilist in one sense. He did believe that determinism is compatible with notions of moral worth or blame: "instinct and utility between them can safely be entrusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" in any event, he wrote.

But he was an incompatibilist in another, and to him a more important, sense. He believed determinism incompatible with a deep human desire for a world with a plurality of forces, and one in which novelties come about through the relations and contentions of those forces.  Furthermore, his reaction to that incompatibility was the free-willist one: we aren't so determined, after all.

"The indeterminism with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the native absolutism of my intellect, -- an absolutism which, after all, perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check. But the determinsim with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral reality through and through."

Isaiah Berlin adopted a position much like James' in his Four Essays on Liberty (1969). Indeed, Berlin was if anything a more thorough incompatibilist than James. He wrote that if he were convinced that acts of human choice "were themselves wholly determined by factors not within the individual's control ... I should certainly not regard him as morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. In such circumstances the concept of worth and desert, as these terms are now used, would become empty for me."  

Most philosophers who have written about the subject recently take a compatibilist stance. The dissenters adopt the determinist sort of incompatibilism. Free-willist incompatibilists -- outside the ranks of those working from a specific theological/ecclesiological program -- are quite few.  So I was happy to discover that Robert Kane exists.  I will have to see if the particulars of his argument warrant my happiness.

Theodicy

I'll try to work through my own problem with the free will defense by presenting this as a formal series of propositions leading to the desired QED.

1. As long as the numbers are large enough, any possible result of a random process will take place. [This is essentially what we mean by randomness, isn't it?]

2. The number of human decisions is large enough. [Even with only one (or two?) humans, there are a large number of decisions that will be made over time -- trim this bush or plant those seeds in our garden...head toward the spring or toward the forbidden tree ...]

3. Thus, any possible result of human decision making will take place.

4. Even an omnipotent Being cannot make logical contraries coicide -- thus, it is not a limit on His Omnipotence that He does not determine the results of a random process.

5. At this stage of our reasoning, we can conclude that God could prevent murder, deception, tyranny etc. only by removing the random element from human decision making.

6. [Here is the tricky one. This is what lies behind talk of how God wouldn't want to create robots/zombies/etc. We have to postulate that...] the random element of human behavior and the self-awareness of humans are inextricably linked, so that the one cannot happen without the other.

7. Thus, combining 5 and 6, we infer that God could prevent murder, deception and tyranny only by removing the self-awareness of humans.

8. Self-awareness is such a good thing that it merits the existence of murder, deception, and tyranny. [Perhaps because the same self-awareness is what gives significance to heroic rescues, integrity, and political freedom.]

9. Thus, it is not a limitation on God's goodness that he permits murder, deception, and tyranny. QED

There! as nicely presented as I can do it, although there are points where my amateurishness probably makes itself felt.

Without (6), the end of that rope is somewhat frayed, because the only way we can do it wothout (6) is to attribute great importance of randomness itself. Yet it isn't clear to me that if we were fated to do the right thing all the time this would extinguish self-awareness. So for me this argument (if I am right that this is the argument from free will) doesn't quite go through, and the situation justifies the move to process theology.

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."

That Jamesian Expression

I often quote William James as saying “to think is the only moral act.”  I’d like to try to explain what it meant to James, and abstract for now from the additional question of the resonance it has for me.  The fuller context is: “to sustain a representation, to think, in short, is the only moral act, for the impulsive and the obstructed, for sane and lunatics alike.”

What does it mean to sustain a representation? It means to remain attentive to some specific fact or possibility, to refuse to allow myself to be diverted therefrom. If I have a boring project due at work, I must nonetheless continue to focus on it in order to get it done -- or, I could just let my attention drift and wind up writing on a blog.

Of course that is my example, not one of his.

This matter of sustaining representation (the key form of thought in this sentence, and in James' psychology of the will generally) plays into the dichotomy, also present in the above quotation, between the "impulsive" and the "obstructed." The impulsive fellow acts too quickly, plucking the tempting apple without wondering whose tree this is and what might be the consequences. There are various representations that he might be well advised to keep in his mind -- of arrest for trespassing, of an angry orchard-owner chasing him with a shotgun, of the extra pounds he may add to his waist by such impulsive eating.  The obstructed fellow on the other hand can only see the reasons that block action, and cannot keep his attention on those that require it.

Thus, to think, by which we mean here to focus one's attention, to choose among the consequences of an act the key ones and to keep one's focus there, is the moral act. "The whole drama is a mental drama."

The apple orchard example is mine, too.  Let's consider a couple of James at last. One involves an exhausted sailor on a ship, working the pumps to get the water safely off the ship and keep her afloat. The physiology of exhaustion weighs down upon the sailor and obstructs him in his work. What keeps him going?  Thought!  -- alertness, enforced perhaps by the image of the “hungry sea engulfing him.” Thus, thought overcomes the obstruction in his activity.

Another of James’ examples here is of a man or woman lying in bed. Perhaps it is a freezing morning, and the comfort of one’s position under the covers, combined with the thought of the aggravation that will be involved in getting up, gathering wood (this the late 19^th century) starting the fire, etc.  – all this keeps us in bed.  Until perhaps a “fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs,” you stop thinking of the warmth of the blanket etc. and your mind turns instead to something important that must be done or is expected that day.   At some “lucky instant” the idea of getting up and getting on with the day will “awaken no contradictory or paralyzing suggesting,” and will produce automatically the “appropriate motor effects.”

In the case of the alertness of the sailor, and the arising of the lazy-bones, we see the connection between thought and morality.  Thought is that which makes us moral agents at all, both when through focused attention we stick to a task and when through a different sort of focus we change the course of our (in)activity.

"The idea to be consented to must be kept from flickering and going out."

Random William James Quotation

"'Will you or won't you have it so?' is the most probing question we are ever asked; we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical, things. We answer by consents or non-consents and not by words. What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things!"

From The Principles of Psychology (1890).

A text for today

A text to contemplate this Sunday is the 18th chapter of the book of Jeremiah, in which God explains that there is no inevitability in history -- what He has foretold, He can change His mind on.

In the King James Version, the crucial verses of that chapter read thus:


7 At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it;

8 if that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.

9 And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it;

10 if it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I said I would benefit them.

William James' diary entry, April 29, 1870

Inserting only translations of German, French, Latin as needed.

"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second "Essais" and see no reason why his definition of Free Will -- 'the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts' -- need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present -- until next year -- that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. For the remainder of the year, I will abstain from the mere speculation and contemplative Grübelei [scratching around] in which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favorable to it, as well as by acting. After the first of January, my callow skin being somewhat fledged, I may perhaps return to metaphysical study and skepticism without danger to my powers of action. For the present then remember: care little about speculation; much for the form of my action, recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action -- and consequently accumulate grain on grain of willful choice like a very miser; never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number. Pricipiis obsta [Resist from the beginning]-- To-day has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. I will see to the sequel, not in maxims. Not in Anschauungen [viewings], but in accumulated acts of thought lies salvation. Passer outre. [Bypass.] Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determnine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now, I will go a step further with my will, not only to act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. My belief, to be sure, can't be optimistic -- but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall be doing and suffering and creating."