I hope this book by Dennett gets better...

Can we have free will in an evolutionary framework? More problems than answers so far.

... I mean, I really do hope it gets better. Daniel Dennett is one of the world's leading lights on evolution. I expect a hearty challenge from one like him. But Freedom Evolves, up to the third chapter, is really disappointing. (Use the search function on the right side of your browser window to find my previous references to Dennett.)

I'm not giving up on him yet. It's too early to say the book fails in its goal of explaining free will in an evolutionary framework. But he's making errors that he's going to have to come around to correcting before long.

He argues in Chapter 3 that it's problematical to know whether any given situation could possibly have happened differently than it did. (This matters, because free will exists only if it is true that when a person make a choice, he or she could possibly have chosen differently.)

"Many philosophers have assumed without specific argument that when we ask a question about what was possible, we are--and should be--interested in knowing whether, in exactly the same circumstances, the same event would recur. We have argued that in spite of its traditional endorsement by philosophers, this policy is never followed by serious investigators of possibility, and in any event, is unmotivated. It couldn't give you an answer that could satisfy your curiosity. The burden now rests with those who think otherwise to explain why 'real' possibility demands a narrow choice of X--or why we should be interested in such a concept of possibility, regardless of its 'reality.'" (Emphasis is in the original.)

"X" here is the universe of possible precursor worlds to an event. A wide X means that we could choose from any number of possible worlds leading up to a certain event, implying a wide range of possibilities ensuing from that moment. A narrow X means that we choose only among possible worlds that differ microscopically from one another, or in the narrowest case, that have "exactly the same circumstances."

The reason we have to choose a narrow X is because X, the universe of possible worlds from this moment forward is exactly one. There is exactly one set of conditions in which I now live and make my next choice. Dennett has correctly pointed out how difficult it is to explain what "possibility" means, but this is what we must live with. The difficulty of the question--that it cannot (in his opinion) lead to an answer that could satisfy our curiosity--is a challenge we must face.

And that explains "why we should be interested in such a concept of possibility." Dennett spoke of "reality" with quotation marks. Let's take the quotation marks off and deal with it for what it is.

So is there, then, any way to deal with this difficult question? Yes. But later...

Posted: Tue - June 7, 2005 at 08:08 PM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

I hope this book by Dennett gets better...

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson