The dialogue on “Hitchens’s Second Question” has been continuing at a rapid pace for over a month now. It has now divided into two separate questions, and I’m opening up two new threads to deal with them separately.
This thread is on whether there is grounding for morality outside of theism. The best place to catch up on this question, if you haven’t been part of the dialogue, is probably here, followed by here.
Discussion on this thread will be limited to that topic. Another thread will be provided for the other question that’s come up on that other discussion, which is whether such grounding really matters.
Additional Explanation Added Tuesday Morning, per Charlie’s Advice:
The discussion here is not about moral behavior. Several of us worked hard in the earlier thread to keep that clear. It is also not about whether non-theists can live moral lives. That thread began (see the link above) with a strong affirmation that they can; in fact, some readers would consider it surprisingly strong. The discussion is about the grounding for moral duties and values, which I have defined loosely as
An answer to the question, “I don’t believe D moral duty or value applies to me, and I want you to tell me why I should. You might have some instrumental or pragmatic reasons for me to practice D, or you may tell me D is ‘what we customarily do in our culture,’ but I don’t know why D should be considered good in itself, or why I should take it on as a value or duty of my own.”
A proper ground for morals would be something that, if true and if understood by the subject (the questioner, in this case) to be true, would provide sufficient reason for the subject to change his or her mind about the goodness of the behavior, value, or duty in question. It would explain how said behavior, value or duty actually is good in itself; not merely instrumental, pragmatic, or customary.
It would do so by reference to some condition of reality that can bear the weight placed upon it. For example, if it is suggested that D is good because it contributes to reproductive fitness, then reproductive fitness’s goodness would have to be good in itself (or based on something else that is good in itself).
Hi Tom,
We all think we know what these terms mean but we saw on the other thread that, as always happens, a lot of arguing occurs where presumed definitions differ.
Would you be able to define again for this thread what you mean by both “morality” (as opposed to so-called “moral behaviour”) and “grounding”?
Thanks.
In all of these discussions, naturalists point to human beings as the grounding for all moral concepts and I don’t see how this is possible under naturalism. If nothing is ‘in and of itself’ good, but rather it is deemed good by human beings, that means humans created the concept of good via their own free will.
My understanding is naturalism doesn’t allow for the concept of free will. Can someone sort this out for me? If something outside the human caused (deterministic) the human mind to create the concept of morality then I think both side are using the term ‘grounding’ differently.
I could, if I’m allowed to post (?)
All right! I’m back 🙂 Sorry this is a bit long (I guess if there was a simple answer philosophers would be out of a job).
I assume that by naturalism you are really thinking about determinism, the idea that every effect has a cause, and that there therefore must be an unbroken causal chain from the Big Bang to later atomic events to the actions that we take in everyday life today, thereby robbing us of the freedom to make our own choices in life.
There have been plenty of attempts to reconcile free will with a deterministic universe, broadly separated into compatibilism theories which hold that free will is compatible with a deterministic universe, and incompatibilism which holds that they are not. The simplest incompatibilism theory that I know of is probably the simple observation that on the quantum level nature is actually probabilistic, and not deterministic at all. Exactly how this leads to a freedom of choice on the higher levels of ontological emergence is not immediately clear, but most people adopting this form of incompatibilism do not care much about that detail; the basic problem of determinism is solved, the rest is for philosophers to figure out.
But we can say a bit more than that. Quantum indeterminacy tells us that events within the universe are not predestined, even if everything above the quantum is deterministic. If we ran the film from the beginning and watched the Big Bang happen again, we would not get the same universe at all; random quantum fluctuations in the early universe become amplified by deterministic chaos (the “butterfly effect”) leading to very different large scale structures (quantum fluctuations may have had an effect on spontaneous symmetry breakings in the laws of physics that happened in the early universe, but exactly what that implies I do not know). We should note that at any point in time, any event does still have an unbroken chain of causal events all the way back, but quantum indeterminacy tells us that it is not a deterministic chain: it was not predestined to happen that way, and the future of the chain is not predetermined either.
But even if this physical view of quantum indeterminacy gives us elbow room for free will, it offers no real explanation for how it comes about, it never goes up to the level of cognition to explain decision making or any of that sort (well some have attempted, but not very successfully, I think). Some compatibilism theories have gone much further towards understanding this point. My favorite version of a compatibilism theory is the one by Dennett in his book “Freedom Evolves.” It’s a fairly lengthy argument, but we can try to understand it by some simple analogies; there’s the bottom-up and the top-down approach.
In the bottom-up approach we start at the level of simple organisms, like a single cell (we could start at the molecular level, but it doesn’t matter since we’re not going to invoke quantum effects anyway). This is the level of “situation-action machines,” basically IF A THEN B, or IF C THEN D. If food comes near the cell membrane, it gets sucked in and eaten; if light comes in, it gets converted into energy to drive the metabolism, etc. No choice in the matter; each action taken is determined entirely by the situation, or the environment. As we progress up towards more complex organisms at higher levels of ontological emergence, there is a gradual transition from situation-action machines to “choice-machines.” These are machines of the type IF A THEN B OR C OR D, where the alternative choices B, C and D are selected statistically based on their relative weights, and most importantly: the choice-machine is able to generate its own reasons for whether to bias the selection towards B or C or D, based on the history of the organism and its internal voting system. For instance, if the event A is that a knife comes flying towards your head, do you:
B: duck
C: catch the knife with my hand
D: do nothing
In a normal world, a normal person would do B, while Bruce Lee might go for C. But in an alternative world where knives flying towards people’s heads always stopped (magically) at the last moment, D would be a perfectly normal choice. Once an action is taken, a feedback mechanism adjusts the weights of the choices depending on the outcome (if we went for C and failed, we’ll probably never do that again: weight=0). Now imagine that instead of just three options, there are hundreds, or alternatively maybe only a few dozen basic choices but you can combine them to generate thousands of real outcomes. Determinism notwithstanding, this combinatorial richness is sufficient to give us all the freedom of choice (or “evitability” as Dennett calls it) that we wanted to demonstrate.
Some people who don’t find the bottom-up approach convincing, seem to be more convinced by the top-down approach. The top-down approach starts out with the notion of a very complex deterministic choice-machine, and asks the question: could we, at least in principle, make this machine so capable of generating life-like choices that we could not tell it apart from the “genuine” free will of a real person? This is basically the Turing test retooled for free will, and the choice-machine in question is a program run on a universal Turing machine. So the question is basically, could we, at least in principle, write a program to simulate free will that would pass the Turing test? Dennett would answer “yes” to this question (although he did not formulate it this way, this is my version of it), and so would I, and probably many others.
Some theists (probably most) don’t accept this as “genuine” free will, and usually call it an “illusion.” But the point is that there’s no way (that I’m aware of, at least) to distinguish between this and the kind of free will that would result from a supernatural sort of freedom from causality on the microscopic level. In a blind test you wouldn’t be able to tell apart two people following these two different kinds of laws of free will, so the question of whether the naturalistic kind is not “genuine” while the theistic kind is, is rather moot in my opinion; the theist wouldn’t be able to spot the “illusion.”
And anyway, arguing for free will via compatibilism is actually overstating the case, since we already knew that quantum indeterminacy breaks determinism at the atomic level, so if we want the best of both worlds we can just combine the two theories.
Adonais,
Thank you for that detailed explanation. I am familiar with these explanations – not to the degree that you are – and as you said above Some theists (probably most) don’t accept this as “genuine” free will, and usually call it an “illusion.”. The reason being, there is nothing probabalistic, nor determined about my freedom to choose what I do next.
My free will (whatever that is) can reason in a methodical, non-probabalistic manner. My free will can start the causal chain of events at any time in accordance with any mathematical pattern that the choices allow. Not only that, but I can do this at most any time interval and under most any physical circumstance. What kind of probabalistic event-maker is that?
I agree, there isn’t a way to know by looking at quantum events or studying probability theory. This is nothing new. You can’t know the content of your thoughts or the method of proper reasoning by studying quantum events or any other scientific data either. You can, however, know all of these by introspection.
The fly in the ointment here is that any such system wouldn’t actually *know* anything. See Searle’s Chinese Room argument and all the rebuttals. This system is merely a mechanism that takes symbols as input and produces symbols as output. The system itself knows *nothing* about what those symbols mean and the context in which they are used. From this we know the system lacks the ability to reason it’s way to a decision, because reasoning requires knowledge. You have these abilities and your free will is demonstrated through these.
Even if I were to accept your explanation I don’t see how morality can be said to be grounded in human beings when the human being is a Turing-like system. In your Turing example, the output isn’t grounded in the system, it is grounded in the originator of the system. For the naturalist, that grounding would be nature itself.
one more thing…
Coming to this conclusion based on observation alone is something few people would actually do (because of understanding and reason which I’ll get to in a second) You are looking for empirical/visible evidence of a mental reality. That’s like looking for glaciers in the Gulf of Mexico. Reason, understanding, knowledge, the will of self – all of these are mental realities.
If a system (or a human) can’t demonstrate its mental reality through the process of passing an empirical test, that is a fault of the TEST – not the object being tested! Turing’s test is the absolute wrong test to use when looking for evidence of a mental reality. The test to conduct here would be to test the ability to *understand, reason and know* something about the symbols they are processing. We know this by experience. This is the test you and I use to conclude humans have minds and free agency, whereas the most complex machines/systems do not.
SteveK:
You are? Then why did you ask….(I hope you’re going to tell me I wasted my time writing all that!)
I don’t follow this. Is this what you’re arguing for, or against? In either case, the language you use is somehow strange, in that you refer to free will as an agent in own right. If the side of a mountain comes off during a heavy rain and causes a landslide, was it the free will of the mountain that started this causal chain? Maybe you are trying to distinguish between “happenings” and “doings” in some language that I don’t understand.
This probably describes the human brain as well, replace “symbols” by neuronal firing patterns. You’re inching towards the question of what consciousness and self-awareness is, which is not a discussion I’m going to have right now 🙂 I’m not sure where it is relevant to the question of free will.
No I’m not, that was you who brought up that topic. As far as I’m aware, the reality of mental states is that they are neurons firing in patterns in the brain.
You award a special place for human cognition, but in my view there’s nothing special about it; it’s just one kind of information processing system among many others that exist or that we can imagine. Understanding, reason and knowledge are relational and computational aspects of information processing.
I did not ask you to consider “the most complex machines/systems” – that makes the argument dependent upon current technology, which is a fragile basis for argument. I asked you to consider a universal Turing machine, which is a theoretical concept not limited to what happens to be the capacity of modern computers.
adonais
I’ve heard all kinds of responses to the question of free will, and so, not being a naturalist myself I wasn’t sure which one is more mainstream, or if perhaps I haven’t heard the latest response. I appreciate your comments.
My wordy response ends with question that is meant to challenge the naturalist to think about what this so-called probabalistic mechanism can do.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. I would like to see the Chinese room experiment carried out with real people to see if it’s possible to know the semantic content of a made-up language devoid of similarities to our anthropomorphic ways as much as possible. It may not be possible to conduct such an experiment.
It’s extremely relevent I think. If you weren’t aware that you made decisions we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
If this were true then we could learn the semantic content of the mental states by studying them and/or the firing patterns. A mind comes to know the semantic content of it’s mental states by introspection.
I don’t know what to make of this. Are you saying the ability to reason is nothing special? Special in what way?
Well don’t take what I wrote as an indication of what is the mainstream thinking, I’m not sure if there is such a thing; I just wrote down my own view of things. Also there was a “not” missing from the first paragraph, lost in translation somewhere between my brain and the keyboard..
Well, that’s the actual question, isn’t it? Is “awareness” a special quality, or just the quality of associative information processing in a massive quantity? You could set up two computer bots to chat with each other or two chess computers to play against each other and they will happily chat/play away without us assigning them any sort of “awareness.” I agree these are interesting issues from a philosophical viewpoint, but I’m not convinced that we need to invoke “awareness” or consciousness (or “agency”) as a special quality in order to understand what I think of as free will, cause and effect, determinism etc. Perhaps I’m wrong, but you saw the original argument that I made for free will without invoking any of those concepts.
Neuroscientists are studying exactly those things right now, or at least getting down to understand the details of cognition and abstraction, but the main problems at the present are the practical limitations in these investigations. The instruments and methods (EEG, PET, fMRI, DTI – etc) are not yet sensitive enough to query what goes on in individual neurons or identify specific loops (like thalamo-cortical feedback loops) when people are subjected to various experiments in cognition. The time/space resolution of these instruments is not yet high enough to do those things, so currently we only get approximate information about average neuronal activity.
A fascinating recent book is “Big Brain” by Lynch & Granger, talking about these things from a cognitive science and computational theory point of view (though if you read the book, you must take everything they say about the “Boskops” with a pinch of salt!)
Pretty much. Our cognition is a method of information processing and control, and compared to other animals we just happen to have it in spades, and tend to think that this makes us special. Of course, as the only species on this planet with this level of cognition we are certainly unique in our biosphere, but I prefer to think that we are unique only by implementation (our chemistry, physiology, evolutionary history etc) and not by principle. In principle, evolution could have evolved a very different creature possessing similar or even greater cognitive capacities, and it may well have on some other planet elsewhere in the universe.
For me that’s just an extension of the Copernican principle, that we are probably not special in any regard.
My long-promised and delayed answer to Adonais, writing on 9/7 at 9:08 pm:
I’m not really thinking about determinism primarily. SteveK raised a question about it, I know, but it wasn’t the main thing on my mind.
But since you raised the issue I’ll respond. Naturalism is the belief that nothing exists except for matter and energy, interacting according to law and chance. This leads to a number of implications. One of them is that persons are fully describable, in principle if not yet in fact, as systems of matter and energy that interacts according to law and chance. This includes all of our behaviors including mentation/cognition/decision making etc.
The general view of natural law is that it is equivalent to necessity. What happens according to natural law, happens necessarily. Given identical initial conditions, the same outcome would result every single time forever into infinity.
There are really two meanings for “chance.” The question is whether there is anything that can cause a break in the causal necessity described by natural law. On a Newtonian level the answer is no; there is no causally efficient thing that we could cause chance. We may say, “I ran into him at the store by chance,” but my being in the store was not by chance, and neither was his. “Chance” here just means that two fully caused events intersected in an unpredicted way.
On a quantum level, something else appears to be going on. We don’t have a clue what causes a given particle to decay when it does rather than at some other time. There appears to be nothing going on to cause it. Statistically it happens in such a way that “chance” is a perfectly good description of the events. But does chance cause it? Nobody knows; nobody can even think of what that would mean if it were true.
So with that as background we come back to the question of whether persons can have free will. Adonais’s statement about incompatibilism is,
That sounds a lot like “insert miracle here.” I don’t have a problem with miracles myself, but I doubt it would be accepted as part of a naturalistic solution for free will.
I’ve studied Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, which Adonais prefers as an answer. He summarizes it:
The choice-machine operates according to a feedback mechanism, and then,
I think this is saying that because we have lots of options to select from, our choices are somehow qualitatively different than if we had only a few. But the way the choice is made is exactly the same. Even if a mathematical model of the computation is more complex, it’s still an algorithm. The algorithm is fed by the same things, whether there are two parameters or thousands:
1. Initial physical conditions
2. Law or necessity
3. Quantum indeterminacy
Something is missing there. Your actions are either totally determined (by law or necessity), or else absolutely random and uncaused (by quantum indeterminacy) or some combination thereof. Ultimately my typing these words is a combination of that over which I have absolutely no control (law or necessity) and that over which I have absolutely no control (quantum indeterminacy). This flies in the face of what we all know to be true, which is that we actually do make decisions about what we think about, what we value, what we do; and it seems contradictory to free will.
On an empirical level this is true. I don’t think the empirical level is the only relevant level for testing, especially since this third-person form of inquiry sets aside the most basic datum of experience, our own self-awareness. And there are other serious problems with this approach besides, but I’ve gone on long enough.
I want to hold you up here for a moment. It is a question for metaphysics whether such a cause is necessary or even a realistic concept. You are in a way raising the same issue as the cosmological first-cause argument, but for quantum events instead: something must cause it. But naturalists responding to the cosmological argument make the point that we don’t know if it even means anything to ask about “cause” outside of time, since we define cause as what temporally precedes the effect. Without a temporal dimension this question, and the cosmological argument, appears to be a category error.
It may be a similar thing with probabilistic quantum events, in that we don’t even know if it is meaningful to ask whether there must be a cause behind, for instance, virtual photons popping in and out of existence even in the hard vacuum of space (as demonstrated by the Casimir effect). When you ask about a cause behind probabilistic quantum events you are essentially trying to erase the uncertainty, because if we knew of a cause then it would be expressed in a law, and thus quantum mechanics made deterministic. People have done this before, and proposed hidden-variable theories, but it has been shown in many different ways that this uncertainty is not just apparent, but inherent: there can exist no local hidden-variable theory (cf. Bell’s theorem, the Aspect experiments, and more recently this study).
I think that asking for the cause of a virtual photon pair appearing right then and there is probably a category error of the same kind as the cosmological argument: there needs to be no such cause defined.
If you have read Dennett’s book you should have recognized my statement as a paraphrase of his description of libertarianism in chapter 4 (page 98 in the Penguin paperback). In other words, I was not describing my own opinion, but merely relating one of the mainstream conceptions that I found worthy of mentioning in the context.
On Steve’s request I took it upon myself to present alternative views, all of which may contain seeds of truth worth thinking about, without for that reason needing to hold up a single one of them as the ultimate truth. I thought I made that clear in my last paragraph, where I wrote:
Anyway. You say:
This is irrelevant. The point made by Dennett, and which is demonstrated by the toy examples in his book and the Universal Turing Machine, is that even in deterministic universes, entities can evolve up from the physical level to the design level by steps of ontological emergence, and on this level possess the capacity to avoid harm and to replicate. As he put it, and I quote: “This demonstrates that the traditional link between determinism and inevitability is a mistake, and that the concept of inevitability belongs at the design level, not the physical level.”
Now, if you continue with Dennet’s argument, you will end up at the position where I left off in my first post, namely that this gives us all the evitability and freedom of choice to lead our lives as we choose, even in a completely deterministic universe. Personally, I would be perfectly happy with this, although I know theists would be terribly unhappy—but the argument is not finished yet! Much as this may be a nice explanatory framework (in my opinion anyway), we know that this is not the end of the story since we have not yet invoked that fragment of libertarianism offered by quantum indeterminacy; we must continue to refine the picture by including this piece of information.
This is another cognitive illusion, and I think you have not really understood Dennett’s argument. You have evolved to become a very sophisticated choice-machine designed to respond to your environment, and in this response you have ample control over your own actions, within some physical and mental limits of course. It is absolutely true that you do not have control over yourself or your environment on the quantum level or the lower physical levels of statistical physics. But the whole point is that you do not need to have control or some magical sort of freedom from causality on the physical level in order to enjoy evitability and freedom of choice on the design level, which is the level where you live your life.
Adonais, it still sounds like Insert miracle here. The problem is not determinism per se, because quantum indeterminacy has settled that. The problem is agency. You said,
I don’t see how complexifying an algorithmic system removes its algorithmic nature. It’s not irrelevant at all. The position you left off with on your first post, restated by you here, was,
You have said “you have ample control,” and “we choose.” Those are only true if the “you” and the “we” in those statements are understood to have only the kind of control that comes as being totally and absolutely subject to the necessity of natural law, and totally and absolutely out of control of what happens on the quantum level.
Unless you can introduce another kind of causation besides those driven by necessity or quantum indeterminacy, all you have in naturalism is necessity and randomness. Maybe it’s not deterministic, but where is personal agency in this?