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 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.  

ECMH, A Tidy Theory

Some notes toward what will eventually become chapter 9 of my book, "ECMH, A Tidy Theory."

The efficient capital markets hypothesis is the view that, given minimally liquid and transparent markets, publicly listed securities will trade at prices that fully reflect all available information.

Comes in three varieties: weak; semi-strong; strong. Discuss each. Here is a helpful link for an analytical take.

I. Some consequences:

A) even the weak version indicates that stock price movements are random. This is counter-intuitive. If markets are rational, shouldn't they be predictable, i.e. non-random? Isn't a "random walk" what a drunk does?

B) if you believe either the strong or the semi-strong version, you will conclude that an investor without material non-public information can never beat the market. It is impossible to beat the market unless you are a crook!

C) Thus, the type of advice that legions of well-paid Wall Streeters are paid to give is worthless. Active asset management in general is worthless. Hedge funds are a star system that preys on the gullible, etc.

Those are the consequences. Let's clear up a couple of misconceptions about the theory:

II. Misconceptions

A) That giving credence to ECMH requires the view that all traders are rational. Consider micro and macro cosms, brain cells, etc.

B) That you can give credence to ECMH and still beat the market by taking a contrarian position.

III. Arguments

But why should we believe the theory in any of those forms?

I won't make this presentation a historical one. This chapter needs to be analytic. Still, near the end I can introduce a historical fact, that though it has its roots in classical economics, the clear formulation of ECMH had to wait for 1965, and publications by Eugene Fama and Paul Samuelson.

Just a Guess

A young friend of mine recently told me that about 90% of the people he meets in his "Journalism and Mass Communication" major in college are liberal, and asked me whether that was the case back in the prehistoric days when I attended college.

I didn't have intimate knowledge of our Communications Dept. at Marist, since I was a poli-sci major with a pre-law focus. But I did know some of them, and I had to tell my young friend that, yes, they were probably to the left of the campus average, however exactly one would go about measuring or defining the scale.

He asked whether I had any thoughts on why this is so. The best I could do was this:

I suspect that the characteristics that go by the label "liberal" in the US are, largely, characteristics psychologically associated with the love of words, word-play, compositional skill, etc.

I also suspect that "conservatism" tends to be psychologically associated with the love of numbers, calculation, and and keen sense of spatial relations.

I have no real good evidence for any of that, its just a hunch based on personal experience.

If there's anything to it, one would expect budding journalists to be "liberals," except possibly those who wanted to specialize in financial and/or science journalism, who might be numbers-people, and thus "conservatives."

This sort of psychological (neurological) clustering may, indeed, be at the bottom of what the words mean.

"It's Not a Picture, Daddy."

This will likely be my last post here for a few days. I hope its a good one.

On my Vermont travels this weekend, my friend and I stopped at a gorge, where the Black River cuts deep through the mountainside just down the road from Woodstock.

We weren't the only ones with cameras to have stopped there. It was a beautiful day for sight-seeing (site-seeing? -- either homonym works) and the bridge over this gorge was crowded.

I saw a father trying to encourage the inner sighte-seer in his daughter. He asked her, "Isn't this a wonderful picture? The colorful trees and the water...."

She interrupted his exposition to say: "It's not a picture, Daddy."

That's an insightful little girl. She has a great career in philosophy ahead of her. Dad was using the term "picture" non-literally of course, but the child's mind grasped the difference between being 'really here' and the mediation of somebody else's photo, painting, etc.

She is the connection between my post Monday on the Vermont trip and my post yesterday on the philosophical question: What is reality? The reality/picture distinction is that between the artificially framed view someone else has chosen for me, and the unframed view -- or, more strictly, the naturally framed view my nervous system provides.

Hollywood can imagine a "matrix" for her in which she only thinks she's standing at a gorge, and Descartes can imagine an evil demon who tricks her into thinking she's at the gorge. But even within those artfully constructed worlds, the reality/representation distinction reasserts itself. Within the matrix, there would still be a here-now experience of the gorge on the one hand and various partial representations of it on the other, so such hypotheses don't shed the sort of doubt upon that valuable distinction that their creators sometimes think they do.

If you had a home at that scene, you'd have realty near the reality, which would put your "i" in the middle of it.