Posts Tagged ‘Free Will’
Saturday, June 26th, 2010
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.
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
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.
Monday, November 16th, 2009
This from Scientific American raises interesting questions regarding knowledge: The Will to Power–Is “Free Will” All in Your Head?
The author, Christof Koch, apparently wants to balance philosophical questions with scientific ones. I appreciate his trying—but he doesn’t succeed. Not even if we ignore the oddly inappropriate allusion to Nietzsche in the title (for which Koch may not be responsible, as titles are often written by editors instead).
His topic is the perceptual effects experience by patients during brain surgery. Neurosurgeons have long used electrical stimulation to test what is going on in regions of the brain near where they are working. Patients, who are under local anesthetic, report various perceptual experiences during these surgeries, or their limbs may move without any intention on their part. The current article touches on both perception and motion. It describes a sensation scientists have termed “intention,” described by patients as “an urge to move a limb,” or the feeling of “a need to move the leg, elbow, or arm.” Or, as stated in one French study,
Patients made comments (in French) such as “It felt like I wanted to move my foot. Not sure how to explain,” “I had a desire to move my right hand,” or “I had a desire to roll my tongue in my mouth.” In none of these cases did they actually carry out the movement to which they referred. But the external stimulation caused an unambiguous conscious feeling of wanting to move. And this feeling arose from within, without any prompting by the examiner and not during sham stimulation.
The question this raises, as indicated in the article’s title, is whether this means intentionality is just a neural process; and if it is, whether that means that deciding to do what we do is just a neural (physical/chemical) process, too, and if our sensation of intentional decision-making is misleading. If so, that implies that human free will is an illusion.
One one level Koch seems quite appropriately cautious. His closing sentence reads,
In the debate concerning the meaning of personal freedom, these discoveries represent true progress, beyond the eternal metaphysical question of free will that will never be answered.
Scientists have made progress, he says, but there never will be an answer. Now, I’m thankful he did not jump to the materialist conclusion that the mind is necessarily a purely physical entity, subject to the same physical necessities as any other physical system. That would be a typical naturalistic/materialistic response. I applaud him for his restraint on that. He was not quite so even-handed, however, near the beginning of his article:
Surely there must have been times in high school or college when you laid in bed, late at night, and wondered where your “free will” came from? What part of the brain—if it is the brain—is responsible for deciding to act one way or another? One traditional answer is that this is not the job of the brain at all but rather of the soul. Hovering above the brain like Casper the Friendly Ghost, the soul freely perturbs the networks of the brain, thereby triggering the neural activity that will ultimately lead to behavior.
Although such dualistic accounts are emotionally reassuring and intuitively satisfying, they break down as soon as one digs a bit deeper. How can this ghost, made out of some kind of metaphysical ectoplasm, influence brain matter without being detected? What sort of laws does Casper follow? Science has abandoned strong dualistic explanations in favor of natural accounts that assign causes and responsibility to specific actors and mechanisms that can be further studied. And so it is with the notion of the will.
The “Casper” caricature is not very “Friendly” to serious discourse on the topic. The language of “emotionally reassuring and intuitively satisfying” is rather patronizing. And “metaphysical ectoplasm“? Really, now.
What’s especially telling, however, is the question, “What sort of laws does Casper follow?” It reminds me of Steven Schafersman’s absurdly stated willingness to accept the spiritual if only we discover the “mechanism” by which it operates. Here’s what Koch is saying: Some people believe Casper provides humans with free will, but science can’t accept that possibility because (among other things) it doesn’t know what laws govern Casper’s action. But what does this mean? Scientists cannot accept the reality of free will unless we can discover the laws that rule it!
It’s an absurd thing to say: free will can only make sense if it’s ruled by law, which in the world of natural science, is fairly well synonymous with necessity. Free will is doing what you must do by necessity.
The confusion appears to be that of the scientistic mindset, that cannot break free of natural-law-rules-all thinking long enough to recognize what an absurdity it is.
What’s also on display here is the assumption that there is no knowledge but that which can be gained by science. Now, it’s perfectly appropriate for science to “abandon” a search for “strong dualistic explanations,” for that’s not the kind of thing that science is competent to search for. Here’s what I mean by that: if there are strong dualistic explanations out there, and if they are true ones, they may or may not be discoverable, but they will certainly not be discoverable by means of science, any more than you could discover a sliver of hay in a needle-stack by searching with a magnet. It’s the wrong way to go about looking for it. You might find all kinds of other things, but not what you’re really after.
Koch might recognize that science isn’t the only way to study matters like free will, but if so, he surely didn’t say so. He apparently assumes the soul can be studied only if its effects can be detected somehow (apparently its interaction with the brain doesn’t count). He assumes the soul can be studied only if the laws governing its action can be sorted out. He knows that neither of these will ever happen. And so he concludes free will is an “eternal metaphysical question … that will never be answered.”
It will never be answered by science; that’s true enough. Does that mean it will never be answered? For my part, I’m quite sure that science isn’t our only way to know true things about the world. And I’m quite sure this “eternal metaphysical question” already has been answered. If you think I’m wrong on that, then please feel free to choose to disagree.
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
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:
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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.
Monday, April 14th, 2008
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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