Maverick Philosopher

And you know with certainty that you could have made a different decision, under exactly the same conditions (and that the different choice, were there one, would not have just been due to a quantum coinflip)? Mightn't it just seem that way?

I feel a big thread coming on...

I think the reader is right about the difficulty, which seems to arise from the notion of cause as a sort of mechanical sequence. Ball 1 hits ball 2 and compels ball 2 to move. Conditions were such as to inevitibly bring about the motion of ball 2. That is the scientific, mechanical model of causation that we were all taught in school --not in so many words, but implicitly-- that a cause is an event that mechanically and inevitably leads to the effect. Any lesser sort of cause would leave the effect partially unexplained. If the cause doesn't explain why ball 2 moved exactly like this, then why didn't it move a bit differently? We are taught that everything that happens has a reason that can be discovered with sufficient analysis, but if this is true, then everything is deterministic because anything nondeterministic has no reason (this is the overall philosophy of science even if there are places where science explicitly posits nondeterminism).

Applying the same mechanical model of causation to behavior, we are left with a conflict between mental causes and free will. If there was something (an external event) that caused me to write this comment, then there is no room left for liberty, because once I know the entire cause of my writing this, there is nothing left to explain. If the mechanical notion of causality applies, then my actions are entirely determined by external causes (which may be physical or mental) --if the cause did not create a situation in which it was inevitable for me to act in a certain way, then I don't know the entire cause. There is a mechanical-style cuase that made my behavior inevitable. But if my actions were inevitable, then I had no free will.

If I didn't already reject the notion of mechanical causes for other reasons, then this would be a good reason to do so.

That is, if I am the cause of my actions and I am free to act otherwise, what reason could we give for performing an action? Sure, we could say that we are motivated by certain factors to act one way, but if these factors have no causal power this seems like a meaningless suggestion.

I've perused to works of Clark, Kane, Reid, Rowe and a number of others, but no one seems to really confront this issue.

Freedom has always been a troublesome concept for modern thought because we moderns often reject the fundamental reality of formal and final causation. We tend to think only efficient and material causes are "real causes", to which formal and final causes will likely ultimately be reduced (even if we can't do so now.)

If material and efficient causes are the only real ones, then there is either no such thing as freedom or freedom means something along the lines of an uncaused cause, that is, a foundation from which we act in pure spontaneity.

The correspondent has put his finger on a problem with this understanding of freedom. Even if we grant the existence of such a freedom, it is a freedom that is necessarily unintelligible. Any reason I might give for acting one way rather than another can't be the real reason I so acted, since we have banished rational causation. Either my action is determined by material causation and therefore not free, or my action is free but unintelligible.

The only way out of the dilemma, I think, is to restore formal and final causation as true causes in their own right. I believe 2+2=4 because it is true. The link between truth and freedom might then be restored, and we can stop mistaking ourselves for God (the only one who really has any claim to the title of Uncaused Cause.)

Malcolm,

Knowing with certainty--the certainty you seem to have been asking for--is only possible in mathematics and logic (and some may even contest that). You can't know for certain that I exist and thus you can't for certain rule out solipsism. But that doesn't make it unreasonable. You can't for certain rule out Berkeleyan idealism either. You can't for certain rule out a number of things without taking your common sense and everyday experiences seriously. Personally, I think ruling out the existence of free will is less reasonable than holding to solipsism. At least we have personal experience that verifies the possibility of solipsism--namely, our dreams.

Jonathan,
The physicalist would respond that indeed we respond, in an important sense, to "reasons", but that is because the web of cognitive processing that we do in our heads is set up so that the physical causes correspond to what we consider "reasons" in the first place. A trivial example would be a chess computer advancing a rook pawn to avoid the risk of a back-rank mate. This could of course lead us right back to the old "derived vs. intrinsic intentionality" tussle, an argument I hope we can set to one side for now.

Don,
Right. "Certainty" is too much to ask for. Perhaps a better question would have been: "What makes you so sure that it all doesn't just seem that way?"

Dave,
You wrote:

But if my actions were inevitable, then I had no free will.
If I didn't already reject the notion of mechanical causes for other reasons, then this would be a good reason to do so.

To me that sounds like: "Well, that would be just awful, so it mustn't be true."

All,

Thanks for jumping in. This should be useful to the correspondent.

Spur,

Your excellent comment addresses what I thought the reader had in mind, but since he did not come out and say it, I wasn't sure what he was getting at. I agree that there is a serious problem here. Schopenhauer set it forth with great clarity in his classic, On the Freedom of the Will, which everyone who is interested in this topic should read.

Don,

Not much time for a proper response right now, but I would point out regarding Chesterton's remark that he is overlooking a crucial point: the opinions of others - in other words, the social context in which we must live (and struggle to reproduce) - are themselves an essential part of the human environment.

Malcolm, in regards to your accusation that I was making a "bad therefore false" argument, this was not my intention. My argument would be more along the lines of "if causality were the way I described, then we would have no free will. Clearly we do have free will, so causality is not the way I described." I freely admit that I haven't proven the second premise, but that would be a different argument.

I do agree with you that Don's two attempts at reductio were unsuccessful. The "adsurdum" in "reductio ad adsurdum" means a contradiction, not merely something that we consider absurd in the colloquial sense. I don't think either of the conclusions he derives from determinism is contradictory, although the second one is a sort of pragmatic reductio in the sense that one cannot consistently claim to have rational reasons for believing something that implies that one believes everything for non-rational reasons. Hence, if determinism implies that we are not rational, then anyone who is a determinist must conclude that he is only correct by happy circumstance; he can't claim to have arrived at this position by rational thought.

Malcolm,

Your main objection is because it's easy to imagine otherwise? I didn't understand the relevance of your first paragraph. I could imagine myself being a brain in a vat too. That seems to be a simpler explanation of things. But I honestly don't see the importance in that fact.

Here, briefly, I make another reference to G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. In the second chapter ("The Maniac"), he discusses how the madman's logic is perfect but also narrow; that is, it explains a little, and explains it well, but leaves out a lot. So the madman will say that he is a brain in a vat and will be able to explain all his experience but he will not be able to explain why he is in vat (my example, not Chesterton's; he gives better ones). Determinism, in my opinion, is like that. It explains causation (in some sense) but it leaves out everything else.

You ask why it should really make any difference. The fact that you asked that question indicates that you either didn't understand the whole point of my second to last post (timestamp: 9.9.2006 11:47am) or you didn't agree with it. If you didn't agree with it could you please explain why?

You say, "Even if our actions are the result of a physical causal process, they still emerge from our own decision-making apparatus . . ." You can't reject free will and still have decisions, much less a "decision-making apparatus" (unless, of course, you want to redefine what a decision is).

That's fine if you don't want to refer to this world when lacking moral accountability as absurd. My point was that our conception of the world would be fundamentally flawed and many things we think necessary to existence would be precluded without the reality of free will. Rational inference was another example. An honest person wouldn't reject free will and continue living in and viewing the world as she did before but simply having the knowledge that free will doesn't exist. One could no longer rightfully discipline others for their actions since their actions wouldn't be a result of their choices; it would be useless to try to convince anyone of something since rational inference would be impossible; science would be undermined, as would philosophical discourse; and so on. I don't have the space here to argue all this out convincingly (this post is long enough as it is) so I apologize for glossing over some things.

Hi Don,

My comment was not simply that I could imagine that our actions are not "free" in the sense you argue for (and I agree with Spur that it seems we are no freer if our actions are determined by "reasons" rather than "causes", and that if they aren't determined by either, then they must simply be arbitrary). My point was that it seems more parsimonious to assume that the same sort of causation is repsonsible for our behavior as is responsible for all the behavior of all the other physical systems we see.

I can reject free will and still have decision-making, because our own brains are the nexus where the decision are made.

I ask: What sort of freedom is it that we really want, and most importantly, why? I'd say that we want is to be able to take in all the information relevant to our future course of action, consider it in light of all the things we deem important (moral and cultural values, achieving our goals, how various actions will affect those around us, and so forth), arrive at a plan of action that is appropriately responsive to all those factors, and act accordingly. And that is exactly what we do. What more do we need?

As for blame: we are still obliged to hold people responsible for their acts, because by doing so we create the conditions that will cause them to act responsibly. We draw a (perhaps arbitrary, but justifiable) boundary around individuals, and barring extraordinary circumstances of biology or coercion, hold them responsible. Where and how this boundary is drawn is a hotly debated issue; if you make the individual "really small", then you can make everything externally causal, which seems to be popular among both the political Left (who seem often to want to blame all criminal and antisocial acts on bad parenting, bad schooling, racial prejudice, poor nutrition, etc.) and aggressive defense attorneys. But regardless of the microdetails of causation, the drawing of this boundary - within which we say "we hold you are responsible for what you do, whatever the slippery metaphysical truth may be" - is necessary. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "the State must keep its promises."

You wrote:

An honest person wouldn't reject free will and continue living in and viewing the world as she did before but simply having the knowledge that free will doesn't exist.

But I do exactly that, and I don't think I am being dishonest at all. Rational inference, as I remarked above, is far from impossible; it is something we have been fine-tuned to do well, and we do it all day long. What is out of whack are some common assumptions about its perfection, infallibility, and causal underpinnings. Science carries on as usual, as does philosophical discourse - just without some of the guarantees we have come, I think unjustifiably, to imagine as implicit. I simply don't see any of this as making the Great Big Difference that you and many others seem to. We can decide, cogitators that we are, that the matter simply need not affect us at all, and carry on making decisions, choosing our actions, assigning blame as we think serves us best, and making rational arguments just the same as always. I feel every bit as free as I need to be, and my choices are still, in any usefully important sense, my own.

Here's the corrected quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes:

"If I were having a philosophical talk with a man I was going to have hanged, I should say, 'I don't doubt that your act was inevitable for you, but to make it more avoidable by others we propose to sacrifice you to the common good. You may regard yourself as a soldier dying for your country if you like. But the law must keep its promises.'"

Malcolm,

I gather from your remarks here that you believe free will is an illusion. I think our views are not that far apart, but I think you do yourself a disservice by saying that you think there is no freedom. Instead you should say that we are free, but that freedom is not what some people have thought it is.

I am reminded of what Leibniz wrote in his copy of Berkeley's Principles:

There is much here that is correct and close to my own view. But it is expressed paradoxically. For it is not necessary to say that matter is nothing; it is sufficient to say that it is a phenomenon, like the rainbow, and that it is not a substance, but the resultant of substances.... (AG 307). [I.e., it is not necessary to deny that matter exists, only that it is what people have often thought it to be.]

Malcolm,

You say,

I can reject free will and still have decision-making, because our own brains are the nexus where the decision are made.

This misunderstands the LFW-ist's argument. The LFW-ist says that decisions are only capable if LFW is granted. Thus, if the LFW-ist is correct, your statement would read

I can reject the ability to make decisions and still have decision-making, because our own brains are the nexus where the decision are made.

Everything after the comma is irrelevant. If anything it just shows why one has an inconsistent point of view (because the view presented is obviously inconsistent) rather than why the view is not inconsistent. I'm not saying that you have such a view. I'm merely saying that your statement was no refutation to the LFW-ist's argument. Rather, you would have to show that rejecting LFW doesn't preclude the ability to make decisions. That is the only thing that matters. It is odd because I have read many authors who do the same thing you have done. They appeal to the existence of the brain or evolution or some such thing to save their determinism (which rejects free will) from also rejecting rational inference, decision-making, etc. But this is not the correct way to argue. One would have to show that determinism itself doesn't preclude these things, not that one can conceptualize a way in which these things may arise. If at rock bottom determinism precludes, say, rational inference then no matter what one has to say about the human brain and it's complexity, it (nor anything else), at rock bottom, is not capable of rational inference.

Spur,

When I used the term "free will" I was meaning libertarian free will. I thought that was the type of free will under discussion. I should have specified though, for clarity. LFW, as I understand it, does require the ability to do otherwise.

Malcolm,

What do you mean by "pure rational inference"? I stated this in the other thread, but it seems to me that either rational inference is possible or it is not (that is, it either exists or it doesn't).

I never denied that you engage in decision-making, Malcolm. If in addition to knowing that you can engage in decision making, your're merely assuming that this world is entirely deteministic (and devoid of LFW) and thus that decision-making is possible in such a world then you're just begging the question.

Malcolm,

Someone our conversations in both threads merged (which is odd). If you want we can just carry what we're discussing here into the other thread, since we're pretty much on the same subject there. I wouldn't want us to have to constantly submit identical (or at least similar) posts twice.

Hi Don,

That's fine. See you over there.