Thinking Christian

It never ceases to amaze me how some people will blithely burst forth with incoherent convictions of determinism. I acknowledge that Anthony R. Cashmore is an accomplished biologist holding an endowed chair at Penn. But that doesn’t mean he makes sense speaking of free will. The following comes from his January 2010 paper, The Lucretian Swerve: The biological basis of human behavior and the criminal justice system.

Cashmore is a full-blown free-will denier:

The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar. The laws of nature are uniform throughout, and these laws do not accommodate the concept of free will.

How has he come to that conclusion? The glib answer would be, “not by any choice of his own.” It’s not just glib; if Cashmore’s thesis is correct, then it’s also exactly true. It’s the short form of one of the most basic objections to hard determinism: if determinism is true, then there is no rational choice involved in accepting it. (The same applies to determinism coupled with randomness, which is Cashmore’s position.)

I’ll come back to the bowl of sugar shortly, but first I want to give somewhat more respect to Cashmore’s process of (ahem) deciding that free will does not exist. As much respect as I think it deserves, at least. The word “mechanism” appears fifteen times in this article, revealing Cashmore’s fundamental view of reality:

It is my belief that, as more attention is given to the mechanisms that govern human behavior, it will increasingly be seen that the concept of free will is an illusion….

This information is translated into action via the motor neurons, joined to the muscles and the glands of the body, using a mechanism of both electrical and chemical transmission….

Whereas this so-called Cartesian duality, at least superficially, provides a nice mechanism whereby one could entertain the concept of free will, belief in this mechanism among scientific circles has ostensibly disappeared….

However, as admirably appreciated by Epicurus and Lucretius, in the absence of any hint of a mechanism that affects the activities of atoms in a manner that is not a direct and unavoidable consequence of the forces of GES [genes, environment, and stochasticism], this line of thinking is not informative in reference to the question of free will….

There must be a mechanism by which consciousness does influence behavior.

The mechanistic details of these conscious processes are unknown, and remain the major unsolved problem in biology

This focus on mechanism may have blinded him to the fallacy contained in one of his central refutations of free will:

However, if we no longer entertain the luxury of a belief in the “magic of the soul,” then there is little else to offer in support of the concept of free will. Whereas much is written claiming to provide an explanation for free will, such writings are invariably lacking any hint of molecular details concerning mechanisms.

Obviously I don’t deny there are mechanisms in nature. If there is free will, though, it won’t be found there. Mechanisms don’t choose. If biologists haven’t found free will in molecular mechanisms, that means either (a) there is no free will, or (b) there is free will—which by definition cannot be found by looking for it in mechanisms. (Nice to have options, isn’t it?) You can’t prove something doesn’t exist, if the only place you look for it is where everybody knows it couldn’t exist. He could as cleverly have concluded there is no photosynthesis in nature because he’s looked all over the animal kingdom and can’t find it there.

This is a severe stumbling point for many with a scientific frame of mind. Science is so successful in unveiling mechanisms (also describable as objects, organisms, etc. operating by natural laws or regularities), some people think mechanisms comprise the only sort of causal process there could possibly be. If science doesn’t find mechanisms for free will, then poof! there is no free will; never mind that the whole idea of looking for free will by scientific means is incoherent to start with.

Cashmore’s scientistic assumptions glare like klieg lights from phrases like,

the sparsity of evidence or credible models in support of free will

“Sparsity of evidence”?! How about the evidence that you and I each demonstrate whenever we decide A rather than B? But for Cashmore, that’s not the right kind of evidence, since it can’t be modeled biologically.

He ought to recognize that if free will exists, it will not be known by scientific means. Ergo, if scientific means do not discover free will, that says nothing at all about whether free will exists.

A. Hypothesis: Free will exists
B. Method of testing: Scientific
C. Result of scientific testing: Negative (free will disconfirmed)
D. Relevance of testing method: Nil
E. Validity of testing result: Nil

Cashmore devotes considerable space to research on consciousness, and on the biological correlates of decision-making. He probably knows correlation does not demonstrate causation; but then, he doesn’t use the word “correlation” in this article but just one time. He uses “causation” and its cognates 33 times. Maybe he doesn’t recognize that what he’s talking about actually are correlations, and that his leap to causation is just that, a leap.

Is it possible that something other than mechanisms could cause human decisions and behaviors? How would it do that? Watch out: this so-called interaction problem misdirects the question. Stage and street magicians (my son is one, working his second day at Busch Gardens today) employ misdirection to foster an illusion. The same thing is happening here. Hidden within the “interaction problem” is this tasty philosophical morsel, “If you suggest something other than mechanisms might have an effect on human decisions and behaviors, by what mechanisms do you propose they operate?” Do you see what’s happening there? The questioner is trying to direct you back toward his own beliefs, asking us to accept their truth as steps toward demonstrating their falsehood. Another name for this trick is begging the question.

My answer to the interaction problem is quick and easy: non-mechanical causes affect human behavior non-mechanically, so there is no mechanical explanation. “What kind of explanation is that?” you ask. I’ll answer that if you’ll own up first to the fact that the interaction question implies (demands, actually) a mechanistic answer and thus begs the question. (No pretending, now. You need to really accept that scientistic, mechanistic assumptions and demands are illegitimate in this context.)

Speaking of tasty morsels (two paragraphs up, in case you’ve forgotten already), I’m about to come back to that bowl of sugar. First, though, I need to bring in two further quotes from Cashmore:

From this simple analysis, surely it follows that individuals cannot logically be held responsible for their behavior. Yet a basic tenet of the judicial system and the way that we govern society is that we hold individuals accountable (we consider them at fault) on the assumption that people can make choices that do not simply reflect a summation of their genetic and environmental history.

and…

Many believe that the consequences of a society lacking free will would be disastrous. In contrast, I argue that we do not necessarily need to be pessimistic about confronting a world lacking free will. Indeed, it is quite possible that progress in some of the more vexing sociological problems may be better achieved once we clarify our thinking concerning the concepts of free will and fault.

I think he’s suggesting that we ought to decide to think of ourselves as unable to make free decisions, because it’s more logical, and because then things might get better for us. Three problems there:

1. The aforementioned difficulty of deciding anything if we can’t decide anything.

2. The difficulty of making sense of “ought,” if “individuals cannot logically be held responsible for their behavior.”

3. If we’re just a bowl of sugar, what on earth does “better” mean for us?

Number three is quite a big deal. Don’t rush past it too quickly. If our human ability to choose what we do, what we value, how we treat one another, how we live and die, all turns out to be a meaningless illusion, then why would not the word “better” also turn out to be a meaningless illusion?

The real illusion lies in scientism’s misdirection. Don’t fall for it.

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From a Scientific American piece on free will:

Perhaps you missed it on your first reading too, but the authors are making an extraordinary suggestion. They seem to be claiming that the public “can’t handle the truth,” and that we should somehow be protecting them (lying to them?) about the true causes of human social behaviors. Perhaps they’re right.

Perhaps their initial research assumptions are all mixed up.

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I was listening to Reasonable Doubts on the way to work this morning. Reasonable Doubts is a strictly atheistic blog with an associated weekly podcast it, and this episode was to have Tom Clark, of the Center for Naturalism, as a special guest. Tom and I have our strong disagreements, yet I would regard him as a kind of Internet friend in view of the cordial way we’ve been able to exchange opinions.

I’ve only heard about 25 minutes of the show so far (find the mp3 link for “Judgement Day” here). Tom has not appeared yet, so nothing I have to say reflects on him (not that would hesitate to respond to him if he says something that I think calls for it). The topic was determinism, which the show’s three hosts all strongly endorse. It is their joint opinion that no person has free will with respect to anything we do whatsoever; we have only the illusion of free will. We don’t choose anything we do; we only think we do.

Confusions and straw men pop up frequently in those first 25 minutes, but my favorite was this one, right at the ten-minute mark. The topic was moral responsibility: if we don’t have the slightest ability to choose what we do or don’t do, then can we be held morally responsible for anything at all? The discussion at that point went like this:

[First speaker] Steven Pinker … distinguishes between a type of justice that’s punitive in a free will system, like “That’ll teach you! I’m gonna give you five lashes for everything,” versus a justice system that simply is protective of people, like, “Yes if somebody kills somebody, let’s lock them up and remove them so they don’t do it again;” or that there’s a punishment, almost like a Skinnerian system, like, “If I kill somebody they’re going to lock me up.” But that’s distinct from saying, “You bad person! You’re to blame for that. Shame on you!” which is, from a deterministic system, meaningless.

[Second speaker] Yeah, but corrective imprisonment, corrective punishment makes perfect sense, right? If someone commits a crime, rather than being shoved into jail where they learn how to do better crime, which is usually the case, if it’s actually a correctional facility, and they help them learn different things that they can do to get money, and learn new skills, and learn “why this is wrong,” that sort of thing–if we’re actually correcting the behavior, then we’re adding these deterministic influences to them, so that when they’re released back out into the world they’ve gotten this corrective work.

It was when that second person spoke that I began to chuckle to myself, and I continued to do so through the rest of that section. What about you? Considering the context, do you find anything ironic in what he said? What do you think he said that a person like me might have found amusing?

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Ideas have consequences!

One such was recently shown through an experiment described in Scientific American.

[R]esearchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected [the philosophical notion of] free will….

The correlation was positive: those who rejected free will tended to cheat more. The 22-page original research paper, written by Kathleen D. Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan W. Schooler of the University of British Columbia, opens with a provocative quote from Sartre:

We are always ready to take refuge in a belief in determinism if this freedom weighs upon us or if we need an excuse.

The paper goes on to note the increasing public attention being given to scientists who claim to have disproved the existence of free will. (See below for several relevant links.) These “scientific” conclusions are anything but scientific, however; and more often than, not the researchers who make these claims seem simply unaware of the philosophical discussion surrounding their topics. At any rate, Vohs and Schooler raise an important practical question:

What would happen if people came to believe that their behavior is the inexorable product of a causal chain set into motion without their own volition? Would people carry on, selves and behavior unperturbed, or might, as Sarte (above) suggests, the adoption of a deterministic worldview serves as an excuse for untoward behaviors[?]

We need not have comments pointing out that this does not affect whether free will exists or not. That was obviously not the point of this study (see the related links below for discussions on the reality of free will). The point is the idea’s consequences, not its proof or disproof.

A rich set of research preceding this study shows that those who believe they have the personal capability and responsibility to affect their lives’ outcomes generally have better outcomes than those who think it’s all based on inborn characteristics, fate, or other circumstances beyond their control. This study focused on moral behavior as an outcome measure. In the first of two experiments, a small one involving 30 subjects,

a strong negative relationship was found, r(30)=-.53, indicating that rejection of the idea that personal behavior is determined by one’s own will was associated with more instances of cheating.

(One of the variables here was stated opposite to the way Scientific American stated it: it was acceptance, rather than rejection, of free will. That’s why it’s reported here as a negative relationship, whereas Scientific American reported a positive relationship. Both mean the same thing in the end.)

A correlation in the .5 range is considered rather strong in psychological research, indicating an effect of significant size. If the results from these 30 subjects could be generalized to the rest of us—if the rest of us are like those 30—then belief in determinism could lead to serious negative effects on society. But this was only 30 subjects, a very small sample. The researchers ran a second experiment with 122 participants and stronger controls over possible confounding variables. The result:

In two experiments we found that weakening free will beliefs reliably increased cheating…. The present findings raise the genuine concern that widespread encouragement of a deterministic worldview may have the inadvertent consequence of encouraging cheating behavior.

Their final conclusion was:

If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative. Ultimately, negating the unfavorable consequences of deterministic sentiments will require a deeper understanding of why a dismissal of free will leads to amoral behavior. Does the belief that forces outside the self determine one’s behavior drain the motivation to resist the temptation to cheat, thereby inducing a “why bother?” mentality (cf. Baumeister & Vohs, in press)? Much as thoughts of death and meaninglessness can induce existential angst that can lead to ignoble behaviors (e.g. Arndt et al. 1997; Heine et al., 2006), doubting one’s free will may undermine the sense of self as agent. Or, perhaps, denying free will simply provides the ultimate excuse to behave as one likes.

These are tendencies. They do not indicate that if you pair up a believer in free will with a believer in determinism, the believer in determinism will be a less honorable person than the other. It also doesn’t mean (please hear me well) that if you, the reader, believe in determinism, I’m calling you dishonest. I have no reason to believe that about you, and I’m not jumping to any conclusions.

Besides that, we haven’t landed this one yet anyway. Scientific American rightly points out that this study was limited to a very short time frame. Would the same participants cheat the same way a week or two later? We don’t know. Do people who believe in determinism generally cheat more, in the real world, than those who don’t? Well, once again we don’t know; but if they do, it’s at least not obvious that they do. The whole thing raises as many questions as it answers, as Scientific American concludes:

Many philosophers and scientists reject free will and, while there has been no systematic study of the matter, there’s currently little reason to think that the philosophers and scientists who reject free will are generally less morally upright than those who believe in it. But this raises yet another puzzling question about the belief in free will. People who explicitly deny free will often continue to hold themselves responsible for their actions and feel guilty for doing wrong. Have such people managed to accommodate the rest of their attitudes to their rejection of free will? Have they adjusted their notion of guilt and responsibility so that it really doesn’t depend on the existence of free will? Or is it that when they are in the thick of things, trying to decide what to do, trying to do the right thing, they just fall back into the belief that they do have free will after all?

We could spend a lot of time discussing those last three questions. Have at it!

Related:

• Same day posting, 1:30 pm: Ideas have nothing to do with reality?

Previous:

• Can Someone Tell Me What I’m Missing Here?
• Can we have free will in an evolutionary framework?
• Freedom Evolves, by Dennett: Final Chapters
• “If It Feels Good To Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural”
• Dawkins and Determinism
• At Last: Responsible Brain-Research Reporting
• New York Times Tries To Understand Free Will
• “Hopeless Hypotheses”
• Unconscious Decisions In the Brain

Update 9/6/08: I have turned off threaded comments, as explained here. This will unfortunately jumble up the sequence of the comments on this post, for which I offer my apologies.

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A new study just reported from Germany concludes that “Already several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain…. The decision could not be predicted perfectly, but prediction was clearly above chance. This suggests that the decision is unconsciously prepared ahead of time but the final decision might still be reversible.”

This echoes a previous study by Benjamin Libet, which had similar results though with a shorter time interval. Many interpreted Libet’s study as refuting free will, since in some sense the brain apparently decided before the conscious mind did. The current study’s authors are more cautious:

Haynes and colleagues now show that brain activity predicts even up to 7 seconds ahead of time how a person is going to decide. But they also warn that the study does not finally rule out free will: “Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. We need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed.”

[From Unconscious decisions in the brain]

Regardless of whether those “prepared” decisions can be reversed, however, free will may still exist. First, there are still massive philosophical absurdities associated with its denial. Bill Dembski just blogged on one of those yesterday. Second, is there any requirement that free choices be entirely conscious choices? Why would that be so? Third, it’s unclear from this report in just what way the unconscious aspects of the decision are fed and influenced by conscious thinking. Fourth, if free will is not operating in the decisions this team studied, just how are decisions made? Do they have any explanation for that at all?

Such an explanation would have to jump a significant hurdle. The one providing it would have to show that he or she believes it not because of deterministic necessity, but because there are good reasons to believe it. The distance between the two is enormous.

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