What Are the Implications of the Free Will Debate for Individuals and Society?

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Does free will exist? Current interest in that question is fueled by news reports suggesting that neuroscientists have proved it doesn’t. In the last few years, I’ve been on a mission to explain why scientific discoveries haven’t closed the door on free will. To readers interested in a rigorous explanation, I recommend my 2009 book, Effective Intentions. For a quicker read, you might wait for my Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will, to be published this fall.

One major plank in a well-known neuroscientific argument for the nonexistence of free will is the claim that participants in various experiments make their decisions unconsciously. In some studies, this claim is based partly on EEG readings (electrical readings taken from the scalp). In others, fMRI data (about changes in blood oxygen levels in the brain) are used instead. In yet others, with people whose skulls are open for medical purposes, readings are taken directly from the brain. The other part of the evidence comes from participants’ reports on when they first became aware of their decisions. If the reports are accurate (which is disputed), the typical sequence of events is as follows: first, there is the brain activity the scientists focus on, then the participants become aware of decisions (or intentions or urges) to act, and then they act, flexing a wrist or pushing a button, for example.

A second plank in the argument is the theoretical premise that in order for free will to be involved in decision making, the decision needs to be made consciously. Unconscious decisions aren’t up to us and therefore don’t display free will. So far, then, we have the following two propositions:

1. In various experiments, participants decide unconsciously.

2. Only consciously made decisions can be freely made.

How do we get from here to the conclusion that free will doesn’t exist? A common response is a third proposition:

3. The way participants decide in these experiments is the way people always decide.

If 1 and 3 are both true, and if the way the participants decide is unconsciously, we have the result that people always decide unconsciously.

There are several problems with the argument. I’ll discuss just two of them. Participants in these experiments are instructed to perform a simple action whenever they want and then report on when they first became aware of an urge, intention, or decision to perform it. In some studies, they are told to flex their right wrist – or click a key on a keyboard – whenever they want. In others, they have the option of pressing either of two buttons whenever they want. Nothing hangs on when they flex or click or which button they press. Any decisions participants make about these simple actions are arbitrary. In fact, participants are instructed to be spontaneous rather than think about what to do.

The discerning reader will have noticed something interesting already. The instructions participants receive place conscious reasoning about what to do out of bounds. The experimental setting is very different from a situation in which you’re carefully weighing pros and cons before making a difficult decision – a decision about whether to change careers, for example, or about whether to ask for a divorce. It would not be at all surprising if your conscious reasoning made it highly probable that you would consciously make any decision you made. At any rate, in light of salient differences between an arbitrary unreflective selection of a moment to act or a button to press, on the one hand, and a choice about a momentous matter made after painstaking conscious reflection, on the other, we can’t be confident that all decisions are made in the same way.

The problem just described pertains to proposition 3. Here’s a problem for proposition 1. The data are consistent with – that is, do not contradict – the following hypothesis: the brain activity that experimenters are measuring several hundred milliseconds or several seconds in advance of the action gives rise to additional brain activity that is a conscious decision, and that conscious decision plays a part in producing the action – the flexing, clicking, or pressing. There is no good reason to believe that the early brain activity (measured in seconds with fMRI and in milliseconds in the other studies) is correlated with a decision that is made – unconsciously – at that time. The data leave it open that any actual decision is made much closer to the time of action; indeed, they leave it open that decisions are made around the time participants say they are conscious of making them, often around 200 milliseconds (two tenths of a second) before muscle motion.

Why do you care about free will? I doubt that the ability to make spontaneous, unreasoned choices in experiments of the kind I’ve been discussing has a prominent place in your answer. Whatever answer you give will tell me something about what you mean by “free will.”

In my own research and writing, I’ve worked with two different but overlapping ways of understanding what “free will” means. One is more modest than the other, and I keep them both on the table; I don’t choose between them. As I see it, both encompass the ability to learn from our successes and mistakes and the ability to improve our behavior in light of what we learn. These abilities are important not only for personal development but also for social cohesiveness. Success and failure often depend on how other people respond to our actions.

According to a modest conception of free will, as long as you’re able to make rational, informed, decisions when you’re not being subjected to undue force and also are capable of acting on the basis of some of those decisions, you have free will – at least at those times. (Being threatened with a loaded gun is a good example of undue force.) According to a more ambitious view, something crucial must be added to these abilities: If you have free will, then alternative decisions are open to you in a way requiring that the natural laws that govern your brain activity sometimes give you at most a probability of deciding one way and a probability of deciding another way. Imagine someone who is seriously considering cheating on his taxes while filling out his 1040. The ambitious view says that he can’t make a free decision about this unless there is a real chance – left open by the combination of everything that has already happened and the laws of nature – that he will decide to cheat and a real chance that he will decide to be honest.

People tend to find ambitious free will more exciting than its modest counterpart. So I focus on it here. Most people assume that the future is open in a certain way. As they see it, not only don’t we know now exactly what we will do next week, but it also is not determined now exactly what we will do then. What will happen is partly up to us in a way that it could not be if all our actions were already in the cards, as it were.

The existence of ambitious free will depends on the truth of this assumption. Have neuroscientists shown that the assumption is false? Absolutely not. In the fMRI study I mentioned, scientists were able to predict with 60% accuracy, about seven seconds in advance, which button a participant would press next. Obviously, this does not suggest that it was determined which button would be pressed seven seconds before the action. After all, the evidence leaves a 40% chance that the participant would press the other button. In the study using direct readings from the brain, experimenters were able to predict with 80% accuracy, within a window of a few hundred milliseconds, what time participants would identify as the moment at which they first became aware of their intention to click. The scientists were able to do this about 700 milliseconds in advance of the “awareness” moment participants identified and about 900 milliseconds before the click. These findings do not support determinism. In fact, they are consistent with the idea that even less than a second before participants click a key it still isn’t settled when they will click next. Believers in ambitious free will thrive on probabilities of action, and that’s exactly what we find in these studies.

That we have ambitious free will – at least some of the time – is a definite possibility. One of the morals of the two books of mine that I mentioned is that neuroscientific studies of decision making leave this possibility wide open, in addition to leaving modest free will intact. This is good news, both for individuals and for society. There is evidence that lowering people’s confidence in the existence of free will increases bad behavior – cheating, stealing, and aggressive behavior. And there is evidence that belief in free will promotes personal well-being. If free will is real, beneficial beliefs in it have the virtue of being true, and it’s always nice when goodness and truth are on the same side.

An important implication of the free will debate – that is, the actual debate taking place in scientific and scholarly books and articles and in books and articles for the general public – is that we can easily be misled by scientific findings if we don’t interpret them carefully. When we pay attention to details, we see that the neuroscientific challenge to free will is misguided.

Discussion Questions

1. What does “free will” mean?

2. Why is free will important?

3. What are the most powerful arguments for the nonexistence of free will?

Discussion Summary

 

In my essay or initial post, “What are the implications of the free will debate for individuals and society?”, I approached the topic of free will from a scientific angle, closing with the following remark: “An important implication of the free will debate – that is, the actual debate taking place in scientific and scholarly books and articles and in books and articles for the general public – is that we can easily be misled by scientific findings if we don’t interpret them carefully. When we pay attention to details, we see that the neuroscientific challenge to free will is misguided.” The subsequent discussion was lively and wide-ranging.

Our conversation about neuroscientific challenges to the existence of free will raised such questions as the following: When do we become aware of our decisions and why does that matter? How is consciousness related to free will? What is a decision? What place does conscious reasoning have in decision making? Can we make free decisions unconsciously?

We discussed other scientific challenges to free will, as well – especially challenges having to do with automaticity and with the action-causing power of the situations in which we find ourselves. An intriguing question that arose in this connection is how well we have to understand what’s moving us to act in order to act freely. More briefly: How much self-understanding does free will require? We discussed some classic “situationist” studies, including a study of the behavior of bystanders and a study of obedience.

Much of our discussion was theoretical. A question that occupied us for quite some time was what “free will” means. The question took various forms, and different aspects of the question came in for scrutiny at different times. Here are some examples. Where should the bar be set for free will? Does free will depend on non-physical souls or minds? Is free compatible or incompatible with determinism (as physicists and most philosophers who write about free will understand determinism)? Is free will the kind of thing that can come in degrees, or is it an all-or-nothing matter? How is free will related to moral responsibility?

In my initial post, I offered two different but overlapping ways of understanding what “free will” means. According to a modest way of understanding this expression, as long as you’re able to make rational, informed, decisions when you’re not being subjected to undue force and also are capable of acting on the basis of some of those decisions, you have free will – at least at those times. According to a more ambitious view, something crucial must be added to these abilities: If you have free will, then alternative decisions are open to you in a way requiring that the natural laws that govern your brain activity sometimes give you at most a probability of deciding one way and a probability of deciding another way. Some discussants wanted to require more for free will than the ambitious view does, and some additional options were explored.

Some of the interesting questions that arose cannot be neatly categorized. They include the following: Can philosophers and scientists productively study free will in an interdisciplinary way? What are the effects on our lives of our belief – or disbelief – in free will? Is it rational or irrational to want to have free will? What is the bearing of physics on free will? How might the falsity of determinism contribute to free will? How much control do we have over our behavior? Is it possible, in principle, for science to prove that free will is an illusion?

As you can see, we tackled lots of very big questions about free will. I’ll close with two further big questions:

  1. What is the best approach to studying free will?
  2. Why is there so much disagreement about what “free will” means or about what having free will requires?

90 Responses

  1. kathleenvohs says:

    I often think about Searle’s great point from his 2001 book, that there is zero purpose in having rationality if it isn’t accompanied by the capacity to change one’s behaviors. Why have the expensive mental machinery that enables humans to figure out the best course of action when there is no potential for influencing the outcome? 

    Kathleen Vohs

  2. George Gantz says:

    Dr. Mele – Thank you for your essay.  I thoroughly enjoyed “Effective Intentions” – I read it about the same time as Marilynne Robinson’s “Absence of Mind” and feel they made an excellent pair – I look forward to your new book with great interest.  I also wrote a blogpost last fall on the subject of neuroscience and freel will keying off of Eddy Nahmias BQO post of August 13, 2013 (see: http://swedenborgcenterconcord.org/resolving-a-self-contradiction-in-neuroscience/) that may be of interest to readers.  I continue to find the freely willed arguments against free will to be paradoxically incomprehensible.  Cheers!

  3. James Laird says:

    As neuroscience continues to make advancements over time, I believe they’ll discover more evidence supporting their theory that decision making processes occur in a person’s physical brain before the person is conscious of those processes. With that being said, I don’t believe those discoveries will have long-term negative implications regarding the existence of ambitious free will. Instead, what mankind will eventually discover is that our consciousness isn’t what “drives” our free will. Instead, we’re simply conscious *of* our free will.

    I believe the source of our ambitious free will is from new emergent forces that are caused by our neurons, but not predetermined by our neurons. In other words, our neurons cause our thoughts (i.e., complex waves of billions of neurons firing in a coordinated manner) to emerge, but our neurons don’t determine the intelligent forces exerted *by* our thoughts. I believe that our thoughts interact with one another at the neural wave level, thereby creating ambitious free will, while at the same time, we aren’t conscious of said interaction until milliseconds after it has occurred. I don’t think there’s any problem with claiming that ambitious free will is part of “me” in real time even though there’s a slight propagation delay until I’m conscious of what I’m thinking, just as there isn’t any problem with claiming my fingertip is part of me in real time even though there’s a short propagation delay from the time that I touch something, until when I’m conscious of the feeling.

    I believe that ambitious free will exists, and in order to convince me otherwise, science will need to show me how the intelligence associated with my thinking is somehow innate to the four fundamental forces of physics (4FFOP). In other words, science will need to prove that my thoughts don’t really interact at the “thought level”, and instead everything within my brain is controlled solely by the 4FFOP (e.g., gravity) in a predeterministic manner from the bottom-up. Until science develops that proof, there’s no *reason* for me to doubt that I have ambitious free will. I *experience* it every day – my thoughts interact with one another in an intelligent manner, not simply like two ocean waves interacting with one another on the surface of the ocean. I think it’s fair to say that there isn’t any intelligence associated with the interaction of two waves on the surface of the ocean, whereas human thoughts are fundamentally different – there is associated intelligence and it’s an emergent property of our thoughts. Our intelligence exerts real control.

  4. gcaruso says:

    Nice Post Al!

    My view is that the empirical findings in the behavior, cognitive, and neuroscience *are* relevant to some extent. Unfortunately when people discuss the “scientific threats” to free will too much attention is spent on Libet, Haynes, and Wegner and not enough on situationism, automaticity, and the adaptive unconscious. As I see it, compatibilism faces two potential lines of attach: external and internal. By external threats I mean the traditional philosophical arguments against compatibilism (e.g., the consequence argument, the basic argument, the luck argument, Pereboom’s four case argument, etc.). These arguments question whether compatibilism as a whole is capable of provide a positive account of free will and moral responsibility. The internal threat, however, while not as potentially devastating as the external one (meaning it is probably not capable of refuting compatibilism on its own) is nonetheless worth discussing. The internal threat is essentially the one of shrinking agency. The question presented by this internal threat is whether the freedom-conferring conditions compatibilist accounts put forward (leading candidates being control conditions, reason-responsiveness, hierarchical identification, etc.) are difficult or impossible to satisfy given what we are learning about the pervasiveness of unconscious processes. I’m not prepared to make an argument one or the other here as to how to answer that questions, but I think it is an empirical question what requires a carefully look at the literature in social psychology. Put differently, I believe compatibilists accounts of free will have empirical constraints (and different compatibilist accounts have different empirical constraints depending on the account), hence they should be subject to empirical analysis. It would be at this point that I propose the empirical literature on situationism and automaticity is relevant.

    BTW, Neil Levy has a wonderful new book which defends something he calls the consciousness thesis: Consciousness of key features of our actions is a necessary condition of moral responsibility for them. I will let him speak for himself, but I see it as an important argument and will force compatibilists to take more seriously the internal threat. (BTW, I think Neil and I disagree on how big a threat this internal challenge is and how easy compatibilists will be able to satisfy the consciousness condition—I believe it may be a harder condition for compatibilists to satisfy than Neil does. At least that is the impress I have gotten from Neil.) I want to be clear, I think the internal threat (as I describe it) is an empirical one and is probably not capable of refuting free will. Depending on how big a threat it turns out to be, however, it has the potential to seriously limit even the kind of free will compatibilists defend.

  5. Matthew Flummer says:

    Why believe proposition 2? Perhaps because of freely formed character traits or habits, one acts without conscious reflection. Such actions are not consciously made. But I see no reason to believe that they are unfree.

  6. taylorwcyr says:

    Thanks for posting this, Al!

    I agree that arguments of the type you discuss (which aim to show that free will has been disproved) are problematic. I tend to find (some) theoretical considerations more problematic than scientific worries for (certain) theories of free will. That said, I wonder what it would take for me to be convinced by a neuroscientist that I lack free will. Perhaps if it could be shown that we human beings never form intentions on the basis of conscious deliberation, then I would have trouble seeing how we could act freely. But that’s a tall order for the scientist! 

    One question concerning your closing sentence (“When we pay attention to details, we see that the neuroscientific challenge to free will is misguided.”): do you see the neuroscientific challenge as the challenge presented by neuroscientists so far (which I agree that you’ve shown to be misguided), or do you see the challenge as the project of using neuroscientic findings to show that we lack free will (which I think has had a rough start but might not be entirely misguided)?

  7. Alfred Mele says:

    Kathleen, George, James, and Gregg,

    Thanks for the comments. About propagation delays: I take up that issue in “Unconscious Decisions and Free Will,” Philosophical Psychology 26 (2013): 777-789. I don’t see strong evidence for the proposition that we never become aware of our decisions until after we make them. But suppose that proposition is true. What then? Here’s a quotation from the article of mine I mentioned:

     The supposed fact that we are just a bit off in consciously detecting decisions leaves it wide open that the conscious deliberation that preceded the decision played an important role in generating the decision.

    A comment on a remark by David Rosenthal may prove useful in this connection.  Rosenthal writes: “there is experimental evidence that we come to be conscious of our decisions only after those decisions have been formed . . . ; so consciousness cannot play a role in determining what we decide even when our decisions are conscious” (2009, p. 246).  This is a non sequitur: No one should believe that consciousness of a decision we make plays “a role in determining” our making it – even if it is supposed that we are conscious of the decision right when we make it.  We should look for causes of decisions in things that precede them; and among the candidates to be considered for causal contributors in some cases are such things as conscious reasoning, conscious beliefs, and conscious desires. (End of quotation)

     This morning my washing machine stopped working – after it filled up with soapy water and clothes, unfortunately. (This is a true story.) I wondered what to do, and I had conscious thoughts like the following. . . I should try to remember or figure out how long ago I bought the machine, and I should get online and see how long a machine like mine normally lasts. Then, after I reply to the blog comments, I should call Sears, and find out what it will cost to have a repair person look at the machine. Depending on the cost, I should get online again and see what new washing machines cost. And so on. Eventually, I’ll make a decision about whether to have this machine repaired or buy a new one. Suppose that my conscious information gathering and conscious thinking about pros and cons has an important effect on what I decide but that I make my decision a couple of hundred milliseconds before I’m conscious of the decision. What’s the problem? Being just a bit off on consciously registering the time of the decision is no cause for worry about free will. On this point, I agree with James. (Maybe tomorrow I’ll let you know what I decided.)

     About the various scientific threats or challenges to free will: In my own writing, I started with the challenges that were getting the most attention at the time. They came from Wegner and Libet and some later Libet-style experiments. Gregg proposes that “the empirical literature on situationism and automaticity is relevant,” and I agree. The role of automaticity in action-production is a major theme in Wegner’s skeptical work on free will, and I discuss this theme at some length in Effective Intentions. My view is that many actions proceed from a combination of automatic and controlled processes.

     I find the situationist literature very interesting. I didn’t discuss it in Effective Intentions, but I do take it up in A Dialogue on Free Will and Science and in Free; and Josh Shepherd and I discuss it in an article that is available online: “Situationism and Agency,” Journal of Practical Ethics 1 (2013): 62-83; http://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/situationism-and-agency/. In Free, I discuss some classic situationist studies, including Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment. The line I take on situationist findings is optimistic. Yes, we are influenced – sometimes very strongly – by features of our situations that fly under the radar of consciousness (or, at least, that we wouldn’t cite as having a significant influence on our behavior); but our normal behavior is not wholly driven by such features, and knowledge of situationist findings can help us be more autonomous.

     And now it’s time to call Sears, I’m afraid.

  8. marcela herdova says:

    My main worry with the timing experiments is that it is highly unclear what they measure and whether they are about people making decisions and forming intentions in the first place. The mental states that the agents come to have are, in many ways, different from paradigmatic cases of intentions—they lack most of the functions that we traditionally ascribe to intentions. If they are not intentions—that is, if the states measured in the experiments are functionally rather different from the states that we normally refer to as intentions—then we don’t have to worry about the results being generalised to normal, non-laboratory situations involving (paradigmatic) intentions. (You might want to insist on calling such states intentions, even if they share only a minimal number of functions with paradigmatic intentions, but the point still stands even then). If the measured states are not intentions, then the results are perhaps not that surprising at all: why should we worry about unconscious desires/urges etc. causing actions?

    Also, along with Matt, I too wonder why we ought to believe proposition 2. We need better understanding of how consciousness is relevant to free will, or more specifically, in what way consciousness is required for free will, if at all. It certainly seems to be an implausible requirement on free (overt) actions that they should be initiated by conscious mental states (or executed consciously) or that free decisions should be made consciously (it seems that those who argue against the existence of free will on the basis of the timing experiments think that both of those are true). Take decisions, for instance: if (and that is a big IF) free decisions require consciousness in some way, why would it not be enough to say, for instance, that unconsciously made decisions are free because they, at least in part, caused by (and in line with) our (consciously formed) long-term goals/intentions/desires? To put such an emphasis on conscious initiation of action and conscious deciding seems misguided.

    Further, when interpreting the experiments we need to be cautious about the notion of consciousness employed. As I believe Adine Roskies pointed out, it may well be that the timing experiments just measure the timing of when we become conscious OF our (already) conscious states. (You might want to reject this if you pursue some form of a HOT theory of consciousness).

    Perhaps a bigger threat to free will is situationism, and unlike Al, I am not sure how optimistic to be regarding how much knowledge of situationist factors can help us combat the undesired influence of various situational factors. It may be that our attempts at self-control will be subject to the same environmental influences, making it harder for us to control our responses in the right way. (Here’s a link to a popular piece that Stephen Kearns and I wrote on situationism and free will and responsibilityhttp://philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1201in which we argue that even situationism is not a threat to free will & MR)

  9. Alfred Mele says:

    Matt and Taylor,

    Thanks for the questions. Here’s proposition 2 (so no one has to look back): “Only consciously made decisions can be freely made.” I suggested in my earlier reply that a decision might be freely made even if the person who makes it becomes conscious of the decision a couple of hundred milliseconds after he makes it. But there I was talking about decisions made after conscious reflection (like the decision I made a while ago to have that washing machine repaired), and Matt refers to acting “without conscious reflection.”

    Can a person make a decision without conscious reflection? As I understand deciding to do something, it is a very brief action of forming an intention to do that thing. Some decisions are preceded by painstaking deliberation. Others aren’t. Now, I distinguish deciding from passively coming to have an intention. For example, when I get to my office door in the morning, I unlock it, and I intend to unlock it, I believe; but because I’m not at all uncertain about what to do when I get to the door (under normal circumstances), there’s no need for a decision to unlock it. So some things that some people might say are decisions without conscious reflection I would view as not being decisions at all. Instead, they are passively acquired intentions.

    What about some sudden emergency situations in which you’re uncertain about what to do? Say, a dog darts into the path of your car. You might panic and lose control. You might “automatically” hit the brakes. Or you might rapidly survey the situation (noticing, for example, that the lane to your left is clear) and swerve to avoid the dog. In this last scenario, maybe there’s nothing that people would count as conscious reflection. But it does look like conscious processing is playing a role in generating the decision.

    At this point, so I don’t go on too long, I’ll just ask if anyone has a good example of a decision that isn’t associated with any conscious processing at all around the time the decision is made. If a good example is forthcoming, we can think about whether this decision might be free.

    About my closing sentence: “When we pay attention to details, we see that the neuroscientific challenge to free will is misguided.” Actually, I just meant the challenge that I described in my post, but I do like the question. An Oxford editor suggested Why Science Can’t Disprove Free Will as the subtitle for my book Free. I vetoed the idea and explained that, in my opinion, it’s possible in principle for science to prove that there’s no free will. Here’s a seemingly possible scenario: one day, a philosopher proves that the kind of openness that I talked about in my post is required for free will and a physicist proves that that kind of openness doesn’t exist. That would close the door on free will. But what about neuroscience in particular, you might ask? Well, imagine that we have the philosophical proof just mentioned and on some distant day a neuroscientist proves that there’s no such openness in the brain. That would do it.

  10. Alfred Mele says:

    Thanks, Marcela. You make some good points. I agree with your worry about what is being measured in the experiments you have in mind. In my initial post, I wrote: “There is no good reason to believe that the early brain activity (measured in seconds with fMRI and in milliseconds in the other studies) is correlated with a decision that is made – unconsciously – at that time. The data leave it open that any actual decision is made much closer to the time of action; indeed, they leave it open that decisions are made around the time participants say they are conscious of making them, often around 200 milliseconds (two tenths of a second) before muscle motion.” I’d say the same thing about the associated intentions.  (In fact, I do say the same thing about them in Effective Intentions.) And I agree with your worry about generalizing from findings in these studies to conclusions about all intentions, though your way of motivating this worry is a bit different from mine.

    About situationism: Might it be interesting to do a study in which people who attend a one-hour class on the bystander effect are later – say, a week later – put in a bystander situation? In the class, they could be informed about classic studies of the effect and encouraged to think about what they should do if they were to find themselves in a bystander situation. A control group would be put in the same situation but would not take the class.

    For readers who aren’t familiar with the bystander effect, here’s a brief description of a classic bystander experiment from Free:

    In a study by John Darley and Bibb Latané (1968) that was done in the wake of the Genovese murder, participants were told that they would be talking about personal problems associated with being a college student. Each was in a room alone, thinking that he or she was talking to other participants over a microphone. Sometimes participants were led to believe that there was only one other participant (group A), sometimes that there were two others (group B), and sometimes that there were five others (group C). In fact, the voices the participants heard were recordings. Participants were told that while one person was talking, the microphone arrangement would not let anyone else talk. At some point, the participant would hear a person – the “victim” – say that he felt like he was about to have a seizure. The victim would ask for help, ramble a bit, say that he was afraid he might die, and so on. His voice would be abruptly cut off after he talked for 125 seconds, just after he made choking sounds.

    The percentage figures for participants who left the cubicle to help before the voice was cut off are as follows: group A eighty-five percent, group B sixty-two percent, group C thirty-one percent. Also, all the participants in group A eventually reported the emergency, whereas only sixty-two percent of the participants in group C did this. Clearly, participants’ beliefs about how many other people could hear the voice – none, one, or four – had an effect on their behavior. Even so, there being one or four other people around to help the victim would seem, in itself, to be no reason not to help.

  11. joshmay says:

    Excellent post, Al! I’m not only glad to see this summary but also to hear a bit about what you think of the situationist challenge in the comments. Looking forward to the new book.

  12. James Laird says:

    Al,

    Thanks for your reply, and I’m sorry to hear about your washing machine – at least it didn’t leak water throughout your whole house!

    I agree with you, that conscious deliberation preceding a decision plays an important role in generating the decision. What I’m thinking (hypothesis), however, is there are likely propagation delays associated with conscious deliberation as well. In other words, there are likely propagation delays between the time when any process physically occurs within a neural net and the time when the person becomes conscious of said process. Consciousness isn’t the driver – it’s more of a receiver.

    The reason mankind will have difficulty buying into that idea, is because ever since birth, each of us have experienced our thoughts in what we believe is real time – we haven’t been aware of any time delays.

    As I suggested previously, I don’t believe propagation delays will adversely impact ambitious free will in the long run. Propagation delays simply mean that free will advocates will need to tolerate future findings of neuroscience until it’s eventually proven that human thoughts exert new emergent forces. (I hope we live that long!)

    • urimaoz says:

      Thank you, Al, for a great post, and everyone for an interesting discussion. The discussion so far was more conceptual and philosophical in nature. And while I agree with much of what was written, I want to relate to what I know better: the science discussed in Al’s original post.

      The far-reaching conclusions that some scholars drew from the Libet and followup experiments hinge on at least the following four premises. First, the neural signals correlated with the decisions and preceding their reported onset are associated with the decision process (Al discussed a similar concern in his paragraph about the problem with proposition 1). Second, subjects can accurately report the onset of their decisions (Al mentions that this is contested). Third, these experiments found pre-conscious neural information about upcoming actions of a random nature – such as raising the left or right hand for no reason or purpose and with no consequences. And it is not clear to what extent these conclusions could be generalized from random to deliberate decisions (again, Al mentions this concern). Such deliberate decisions seem the more interesting kind for the free-will debate, and are certainly the more interesting type if one wishes to continue from free will to moral responsibility (how would we associate praise or blame with such random hand raises?). Last, is the premise that the results of such “postdiction” experiments (I agree with Nate Silver that the word “prediction” should be restricted to forecasts about events that have not yet taken place), where the neural data is analyzed after the fact, would also repeat if the analyses were carried out on the fly, during the experiment, online and in real time. Intuitively, seeing such real prediction is important to convince that there is information in the brain about decision outcomes before the onset of conscious decisions. (Various technical analyses found different technical flaws in the postdiction experiments that could be overcome using real-time prediction.)

      Let us discuss some empirical data pertaining to these premises one by one. First, using single-neuron analysis of monkeys deciding between a smaller, immediate reward and a larger, delayed one, we showed that there is information in the monkeys’ brains about the upcoming decision before the decision alternatives are presented and rational deliberation can begin. (The delays and positions of the decision alternatives were randomized to make sure the animals had no information about the decision alternatives appeared.) This was especially true when the values associated with the decision alternatives were similar – i.e., especially for more-random decisions. A circuit model that we developed suggests that the early neural signals captured in such Libet-like decisions may reflect random, predeliberation bias activity that is dissociated from the later decision process [Maoz et al., Predeliberation activity in prefrontal cortex and striatum and the prediction of subsequent value judgment, Front. Neurosci. 7:225, 2013]. So the neural signals captured during the Libet-like experiment might have had more to do with predeliberation biases than with the actual decision process.

      Second, while there is a lot of evidence that W time is a systematically biased and an inaccurate measure of decision onset, there is no evidence that it a good measure of decision onset (even the intuition of anyone trying to time her or his decision would not supports it). There is not even evidence that the onsets of our decisions are consciously available to us (if such onsets are even clear neural events to begin with) [Maoz et al., On reporting the onset of the intention to move, in Alfred R. Mele, ed. Surrounding Free Will. Oxford University Press, forthcoming]. So it may be best to stop using the timing of the subjective reporting of the decision onset as a measure for actual decision onset.

      Third, our research shows that the early predictive signals found by Libet and others for random decisions do not replicate for deliberate decisions. Instead, such predictive signals appear to be finalized only very close to movement onset for deliberate decisions [Mudrik, Maoz, et al., Neural precursors of decisions that matter – an ERP study of deliberate versus random choices. In preparation]. So the Libet results do not seem to generalize to deliberate decisions.

      Last, we developed a system to analyze neural activity during the experiment, online and in real time, and predict which hand a person would raise on the fly in a competitive, deliberate-decisions environment. Using this system, we were able to show that action contents can be decoded from brain activity before action onset for deliberate decisions [Maoz et al., Predicting Action Content On-Line and in Real Time before Action Onset – an Intracranial Human Study. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25, 2012]. But, so far, neither we nor others have been able to demonstrate the prediction of action contents before decision onset online and in real time. One reason for this could simply be that no such predictive information is available well before decision onset, and that our intuition that we become conscious of the decision more or less when it is made is valid. We will have to wait and see. Perhaps someone is already working on an online, real-time system that will successfully predict action contents before decision onset.

      Given the state of the empirical evidence so far, I therefore agree with Al that strong conclusions about the illusory nature of free will from current neuroscientific results are hasty at best.

      I would like to conclude by discussing the compatibility of what Al termed “ambitious free will” with the current neuroscientific evidence. I think that there may be some confusion here. When a paper reports 80% accuracy in predicting the decision before its onset (let us ignore the above criticism for the sake of argument here), the authors mean the following: say that the task included 100 trials, the decoding algorithm successfully predicted the decision outcome (say, which hand will be raised) in 80 of those 100 trials. According to Al’s interpretation, in every trial, say 700 ms before the onset of awareness, the prediction algorithm would output 80% confidence for a specific choice. This would be congruent with a non-deterministic approach. But a well-constructed system could possibly be able to output a prediction and its confidence in that prediction. And thus, on most trials it would output high confidence and predict correctly, and on fewer trials it would output low confidence and predict incorrectly, reaching 80% correct overall. So the system would not leave a 20% chance that the participant would press the other button on each trial, it would just output “I do not know” on some percentage of the trials.

      A related, possibly more-minor, issue is that when testing these systems on brain activity after the decision has been manifested in action (say, after one of the hands was already raised), they are also typically not 100% correct. This suggests that at least some of the inaccuracy in the prediction does not lie in the indeterminism of the universe but rather in our technological abilities as well as in our imperfect access to all the relevant neural activity.

      Last, this 80% accuracy that is reported is on average over all participants. So usually for some participants the accuracy is lower, say at 60%, while for others (and this does happen) it is at 100%. Would this then mean that participants that are 100% predictable do not enjoy free will of the ambitious kind, while the others do? It seems more parsimonious to explain the differences using electrode placement, scalp thickness, the accessibility of the relevant neural processes, and so on. (Again, I think that until online, real-time prediction of action contents before action onset is available, if ever, the discussion will remain hypothetical.)

  13. sam.sims.148 says:

    I really enjoyed this post, Al!  Two questions:

    First, could someone weaken the third proposition to make a more successful but less ambitious argument for the claim that people make decisions unfreely when they don’t have time to consciously reason about what to do?  Instead of claiming that people always make decisions in the same way as in the experiments, a revised version of the third proposition might claim that only in certain cases people make decisions in the same way as in the experiments.  These cases might include situations in which people don’t have time to consciously reason about what to do. 

    Second, do both or just one of the kinds of free will you mentioned (modest or ambitious) make a difference for how we should treat people?  For instance, are both or just one of these kinds of free will important for justifying punishment?

  14. harmonylion says:

    Please forgive the pedantic tone I take in this comment. It’s kinda silly as I read it back to myself, but I just find it helps me get the ideas out. Thanks.

    I don’t think there’s enough nuance in the definition of “free will.” The automatic conception is that it means decisions aren’t “caused” by anything; no matter what happens, we choose our actions, at least in the moments when we’re “free.” 

    Since science has shown that our actions/decisions are in certain ways caused, that is believed to contradict that conception of free will.

    However, I would propose that free will is not the absence of cause in decisions, but absence of physical cause. That is, the laws governing decision making must supersede physical laws to the point that no necessary interaction between the two can be observed. If physical circumstances could cause human decisions — like if everybody were compelled to do a jumping jack every time they saw a pink ball — I would indeed say there is no “free will.” That may be the case for people who are deeply conditioned to do that, but we can also undo our conditioning. Therefore, slavery to pink balls isn’t inherent in the human condition. When scientists observe our “unfreedom,” they’re right in the sense that decisions indeed have causes, but it’s irrelevant because the causes themselves are ultimately subject to our will. 

    Allow me to explain further:

    As Baruch Spinoza claimed in his Ethics (if memory serves), everything is caused by something prior. We can observe this with decisions in a trail of “why” questions (like those children are famous for asking). For instance, let’s say I wanted to buy some Gucci sunglasses. Why? Because I like the way they look. Why? Because I have them associated with wealthy, successful people pictured wearing them. Why do I want to emulate them? Because I want what they have. Why? Because I have trouble finding satisfaction in my mundane life, imagine theirs to be far more exciting and interesting and luxurious, and imagine I could enjoy a life like theirs more than I can enjoy a life like mine. So my decision to buy sunglasses is not “free” in the sense that nothing caused it; it’s influenced by the layers of desire and satisfaction-seeking that underly it. My desire to buy sunglasses doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s just the tip of an iceberg of long-standing desires and motivations. If I were to become satisfied with my life, the entire chain would disappear, and there wouldn’t be anything to cause me to want to buy Gucci sunglasses.

    Thus over time, I may be able to dissolve the iceberg. I may be able to melt it away gradually with good habits and meditation and therapy, etc., and in that way I am totally free, as even the forces that control me are ultimately subject to the consequences of my actions; my will. Given infinite time, I am absolutely free (as I have time to melt all decision-causing icebergs), but given this moment, I am relatively free. 

    Thus, “are we free or not” seems to lack the necessary nuance. It seems to me the answer is: We are somewhat unfree right now, but what freedom we do have ultimately has dominion over that unfreedom. Therefore, we are also completely free right now, but we don’t get to enjoy the effects of that freedom until later, after we’ve exercised it and melted our icebergs. Too long for a tweet!

  15. Alfred Mele says:

    Good to hear from you, Josh. I might say more about situationism later.

    Thanks for the clarification, James. I have a question for you. It’s about something I talk about in Effective Intentions (and other places) – my experience as a subject in a Libet-style experiment. I waited for a while for urges to flex to pop up, so that I could flex in response to them and then report on where the hand was on the Libet clock (which makes a complete revolution in about 2.5 seconds) when the urge popped up in consciousness. But nothing was happening – I had no conscious urges or intentions to flex. So I hit on the following strategy: I would silently – and consciously, of course – say “now” to myself and treat the now-saying as a decision to flex now (or as a go-signal). In your view did I unconsciously say now to myself and then become conscious of that event a bit later?

    I’m not asking now about the causes of my saying “now” (on any particular occasion) or the processes that led to these little speech acts. I’m sure there were important causes of the speech acts that I wasn’t conscious of. I’m asking about the now-sayings themselves.

    Thanks for the questions, Sam. Proposition 3 (so no one has to look back) is this: “The way participants decide in these experiments is the way people always decide.” You ask about weakening it to something like this: The way participants decide in these experiments is the way people decide whenever they make decisions in the absence of conscious reasoning. So now we’d have an argument that goes as follows:

    1. In various experiments, participants decide unconsciously.

    2. Only consciously made decisions can be freely made.

    3*. The way participants decide in these experiments is the way people decide whenever they make decisions in the absence of conscious reasoning – that is, they decide unconsciously.

    4. So whenever people make decisions in the absence of conscious reasoning, they don’t decide freely.

    Let’s see what people think about this new argument. It might bring us back to Matt’s question about proposition 2.

    About modest and ambitious free will and moral responsibility: typical proponents of these views of free will associate their views closely with moral responsibility. It’s this typical approach that I have in mind.

    Uri, it’s great to have a neuroscientist who’s an expert on these issues on board. Thanks for the very informative comment. You mentioned the Maoz et al. paper in Surrounding Free Will. People may be interested to know that we’re checking page proofs for that volume now. So despite its 2015 publication date, I expect it to be released late this year. Also, I want to highlight – by repeating – one of the points you made: “our research shows that the early predictive signals found by Libet and others for random decisions do not replicate for deliberate decisions. Instead, such predictive signals appear to be finalized only very close to movement onset for deliberate decisions [Mudrik, Maoz, et al., Neural precursors of decisions that matter – an ERP study of deliberate versus random choices. In preparation]. So the Libet results do not seem to generalize to deliberate decisions.” It will be great to have this article in print.

    You ask an interesting question: Should we think that the people who are 100% predictable lack ambitious free will while the others have it? Let’s imagine a person who is always 100% predictable and let’s imagine that this predictability is underpinned by determinism being true of this person’s universe. Then, by definition, this person lacks ambitious free will. But it’s not the predictability that’s doing the ambitious-free-will blocking work here; it’s determinism that’s doing that work. And determinism would do the same ambitious-free-will blocking work for all the other people in this guy’s universe, even if they are never 100% predictable (by the people there who make predictions).

    For readers who aren’t familiar with a pretty standard philosophical way of understanding determinism, here’s something on it from Free:

    In mainstream philosophical writing about free will, as in physics, [determinism is] the idea that a complete description of the universe at any time – fifty years ago, shortly after the Big Bang, or whatever – together with a complete list of all the laws of nature entails everything else that’s true about the universe, including everything that will ever happen. One statement entails another when, necessarily, if the first statement is true, then so is the second. We ask, “Does statement A entail statement B?” If there’s no possible way for the first statement to be true without the second one being true, then the answer is yes. So let statement A be a complete description of the universe a billion years ago together with a complete list of all the laws of nature, and let statement B be that I ate cornflakes for breakfast today (which is true). If determinism is true of our universe, then there’s no possible way for statement A to be true without it also being true that I ate cornflakes for breakfast today. If determinism is not true of our universe, statement A is compatible both with my eating cornflakes for breakfast today and with my doing something else instead.

    You’ve heard the expression “free will versus determinism.” Some people who use it don’t mean much more by “determinism” than “something or other that is incompatible with free will.” But I’m not using it that way. And, by the way, determinism, as I have described it, isn’t a force. It’s just a way a universe is if a statement about it like A entails all the other true statements about it.

    Just yesterday, a reporter from a local newspaper phoned me. He said he’d heard about my Big Questions in Free Will project and thought I might be able to answer a question for him. His question was whether God cares which teams win football games. When I asked how this question is related to free will, he mentioned determinism. And when I asked him what he meant by determinism, he was stumped for a while. Eventually, he described determinism as a force that makes free will impossible. I explained to him, as I explained to you, that philosophers and physicists have something much more definite in mind. (End of quotation)

    Harmonylion, your comment didn’t sound pedantic to me, but I might not be a good judge of such things, given my profession. I definitely agree with you that “free will is not the absence of cause in decisions.” In fact, I believe that uncaused decisions – and uncaused actions in general – are impossible.  (I won’t go into why I believe that, but interested readers can have a look at chapter 2 of my 2003 book, Motivation and Agency.) Does that mean that I believe that all actions are deterministically caused and that determinism is true? Not at all. Causation doesn’t depend on determinism.

    I also agree that free will is not an all-or-nothing thing. The same person can do some things freely and other things unfreely.

  16. Eddy Nahmias says:

    Hi Al, Great essay.  And I look forward to Free.  (Will the publisher match the price to the title?)  Rather than commenting on your main points about the relevance of science to free will (since we agree about most of that), I’ll ask you about something you wrote in your latest comment: “I also agree that free will is not an all-or-nothing thing. The same person can do some things freely and other things unfreely.”

    That’s certainly one way for free will not to be all-or-nothing; that is, for the same person to have it regarding some actions (to act freely) and not have it regarding other actions (to act unfreely).  But (as you know) I think we should also say that free will comes in degrees in (at least) three other ways, and I’d be curious whether you agree.

    1. Different agents can possess free will to varying degrees (because they possess the relevant capacities or powers to varying degrees).  For instance, humans have more than dolphins (if dolphins have any), typical adults have more than children, and mentally healthy humans have more than humans with various mental conditions such as schizophrenia or perhaps addiction.

    2. The same individual may possess free will to varying degrees regarding different types of decisions or actions.  For instance, an alcoholic may have more free will regarding decisions about whether, when, and what to eat than he does about whether, when, and what to drink. (Your comment may cover this one.)

    3. Individuals may have varying degrees of opportunities to exercise free will in different decisions and actions.  For instance, I have the opportunity to exercise free will more (better?) when I am not worn out or stressed or cognitively overloaded (e.g., ego-depleted).  And a person may have more free will regarding decisions about which she can take time to consciously deliberate than ones she must make quickly with little or no deliberation.  And so on.

    Assuming these ways of talking about (or intuitions about) free will are on the right track, I think they put some degree of pressure on the “ambitious” conception of free will in that it’s hard to see how to analyze that conception in terms of degrees of satisfaction (possession, opportunity), though most “ambitious” theorists would presumably be happy to piggyback on the modest conception to make sense of degrees of freedom.

    • Jeff Johnson says:

      Greetings, Eddy! Great post! I’ve said over at Flickers of Freedom that I think your view on Free Will  makes more sense to me than anything else I’ve ever come across. I also think your 2011 NYT article is perhaps the best one I’ve seen yet on the whole free will debate. The argument you presented in the article was amazingly close to the feelings I already held but just couldn’t quite articulate. Do you have any other upcoming articles in the works? I certainly hope also that you’ll be part of Dr. Mele’s new study on self control.

  17. James Laird says:

    Al,

    My (humble) answer to your question is yes. I believe there was a short delay from the time when the wave of neural activity within your physical brain formed the “now” thought, until the time when you were conscious of that thought. I’m thinking (hypothesizing) there’s a very short lag from the time when any thought is formed within your brain, to the time when you become conscious of that thought. Depending on the type of neural activity, perhaps the durations of the delays vary. Neural activities that are closely linked to consciousness may have shorter delays, whereas activities that aren’t closely linked may have longer delays. I’m definitely waaaaay out on a limb here, so with little delay, I’m going to gently remind myself of something my wife might say to me: don’t believe everything that you think. I’m open to your better ideas (and everyone else’s).

  18. Alfred Mele says:

    Hi Eddy,

    Here’s something from my 2006 book, Free Will and Luck: “Whatever, exactly, free will is, it is, most fundamentally, the power or ability to act freely. So one can try to understand free will by ascertaining what it is to act freely. One can develop an account of free action and define free will as the power or ability to perform actions that satisfy the account.” Thinking of free will in this general way – in terms of a power to act freely – leaves room for points like your #s 1 and 2. And your # 3 isn’t far away. Take your examples of being tired, stressed, or cognitively overloaded. Maybe what you have here is a temporary diminution of the power to act freely. So power again.

    The sentences I quoted from Free Will and Luck are meant to apply to both modest and ambitious free will. The modest and ambitious views of free will that I float there (i.e., a certain compatibilist view and a certain event-causal libertarian view) are pretty similar. The main difference is that the ambitious one insists on indeterminism in a certain connection. In that book, I was mainly interested in what plausible sets of sufficient conditions for free action would look like. So I didn’t get into issues about degrees of freedom (at least as I recall; I did discuss degrees of moral responsibility). If someone makes a convincing case for points like your 1 – 3 about free will, both of my favorite views of free will can accommodate the points. I’m not making the same claim about all views of free will.

    • Jeff Johnson says:

      Greetings, Dr. Mele! Thank you very much the wonderful project you just headed (Big Questions in Free Will). It was certainly something that was LONG overdue and very badly needed. Also, congratuations on the new project you’re heading on self-control. I was very happy to hear of it and even happier to know that you’re leading that one as well!

      Dr. Mele I know that one of the things you and others have investigated is how the ordinary lay folk think about free will. (In other words, what the term “free will” means to them as they understand it.)

      Have any of your studies, however, ever examined how the ordinary lay folk view the proclaimations and mindsets of the  Willusionist Neuroscientists who are  “studying” the free will issue?  I’m neither a scientist nor a philosopher, just an ordinary person who enjoys reading about these issues. With all that being said, I find the Willusionist mindset to be about the most impoverished and dehumanizing view of humanity I’ve ever seen. Some of these guys literally seem like they’re absolutely gleeful and giddy about the prospect of using science to deny humanity free will! Frankly, I find these scientists to be a very weird bunch.

      I also see two CONTRADICTIONS that are happening right now. I was wondering if you could comment.

      1. The Neuroscientists who are most seen as the “experts” on free will are the same ones who deny its existence In other words, people like Patrick Haggard and John Dylan Haynes have already written off free will and declared it “dead on arrival” before the first EEG, MRI, or Transcranial stimulation of their latest experiment begins. So they’re not really looking for free will or even willing to consider it. OK. Sure. Yes, they’re scientists. And yes, they do many studies on it. But honestly, what possible interpretation would either a Haggard of Haynes study ever come out with besides one that was negative towards the idea of free will? What I’m saying is that as a layperson it appears to me that they’re not really “studying” or “experimenting” for it. To them, the case is already closed.  So although I respect them as scientists, I sometimes wonder just how much their mindsets interfere with how they view their own findings. It seems to me that these fellows go into their studies with quite an ax to grind.

      2. At the same time Neuroscience is producing unbelievable advances to help humans live better (example: helping crippled people regain use of limbs), you have Willusionist Neuroscientists spending their working days trying to work towards denying free will. Do you see the contradiction? Imagine, for instance, that two groups of Neuroscientists visited a home for crippled vets. The first group gets the hopes of the vets up by telling them about new technologies to help the vets walk again or live normal lives. The second group, led by people like Patrick Haggard and John Dylan Haynes, then walks in and goes around the hospital telling people that none of themt have any free will. Do you see the problem/contradiction that I’m seeing?  On the one hand, you have part of contemporary Neuroscience that is all about hope and human potential. But on the other hand you have this Willusionist group that is all about denying those things.

  19. James Laird says:

    Al,

    I have another idea that’s closely related to the topic we’ve been discussing, and it supports my hypothesis that a person’s consciousness isn’t what drives their free will.

    In order for a person to be conscious, a certain type of physical brain state is first required. To illustrate, let’s consider the following scenario: If I’m resting in post-op coming out of anesthesia from surgery, in order for me to regain consciousness, the concentration of drugs within my brain needs to be reduced below a certain level. As the concentration is reduced and I slowly regain consciousness, my consciousness isn’t what causes my physical brain state to change. Instead, my consciousness simply results from the changing brain state.

    With that in mind; when two thoughts are interacting with one another inside a person’s brain, the physical state of the neural nets is changing and the person subsequently becomes conscious of said changes (e.g., a conclusion, if you will). I’m thinking there’s a parallel here. In a manner similar to how brain states cause consciousness to emerge in the first place (i.e., the hospital scenario), it seems reasonable to believe that the interaction of two thoughts causes changes in brain states, and once again, consciousness is affected *after* the changes in brain states. Consciousness isn’t what drives changes in brain states.

  20. Vonasch says:

    One argument against the existence of free will is based on the idea that people are bad at introspecting the true reasons for their behavior. Social psychologists have done a lot of clever experiments over the years showing that people’s introspections can be flawed. People don’t always know why they acted the way they acted, and worse, people sometimes invent reasons that we know are not true to explain the way they acted. Now, it would probably be a mistake to say that introspection is never accurate, but there is a lot of evidence that introspection is not always accurate (see works by Nisbett, Wilson, and Wegner for some of the best examples). I have a few questions about this:

    Can a person act based on free will if she cannot accurately introspect the reasons for that particular action? Or is knowledge of the true reasons for one’s actions a requirement for having free will? If knowledge about the reasons for one’s own actions is a requirement of free will, is it possible for a person to think she has free will (because she invented a false reason for the action she took) when actually she does not? And if it’s possible for her to think she has free will when she does not, why does she think and feel as though she’s free?

  21. George Gantz says:

    You asked for “a good example of a decision that isn’t associated with any conscious processing at all around the time the decision is made”.  In the case of athletic competition, one of the goals of training is to build automatic reflexive responses designed to achieve an intended outcome.  For example, if a baseball player wants to hit a 100 mile-an-hour fastball, the intention to hit is present well in advance, but the physical act of swinging (including the micro muscular adjustments based on perceptions about the probable trajectory and potential spinning of the laces) is triggered at a level of brain activity below and preceding any conscious reflection.  I would maintain that the player is freely willing but using the sublminal brain itself as a tool.  Note also what happens if an athlete starts to “think too much” about body movements during competition – as in the “yips” in golf, competitive ability deteriorates badly if there is too much feedback between the conscious brain and the subliminal brain.

  22. Alfred Mele says:

    George, Andy (Vonasch), and James,

    Thanks for the comments.

    George, suppose we keep my distinction in place between deciding and coming to have an intention without deciding.  Another example of the latter: I’m in the habit of signaling for my turns before I make them. In normal conditions, I don’t decide to signal but I do intend – right then – to signal.

    In a hit-and-run play, the batter does go up to the plate with an intention to swing. Let’s also say, as you do, that he goes to the plate with an intention to hit the ball. (If I were a batter facing a 100 mph pitch, I’d intend to swing and hope to hit it. But I’d hope much more not to be hit by it.) And now he swings. So did he have an intention to swing just then too? And, if so, did he decide to swing just then? Or did it instead happen that no decision was made and an intention to swing just then was triggered by various factors? I’m definitely not trying to give you a hard time about this. I’m curious about what you think. It’s something I’ve thought about off and on for years. This is one of those situations in which I can see two competing hypotheses and don’t see how to settle the matter. And I’d need to see how to settle it before I could be confident that we have a good example of the kind of decision we’re looking for.

    Good questions, Andy. I discuss questions of this kind in Free. I’ve quoted from that book a couple of times here. But that’s because that book was written for a general audience and my BQO blogging is intended for a general audience. Or am I actually mentioning Free because I want to promote the new book?  Hmm. Maybe I should think about that – after I go find something to quote.

    OK, here’s something, the first paragraph of chapter 5 of Free:

    “When we set out to explain our actions,” neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga writes, “they are all post hoc explanations, using post hoc observations with no access to nonconscious processing” (2011, p. 77). This remark, in a book entitled Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain, bridges neuroscience experiments of the kind I discussed in earlier chapters to the social psychology experiments I’ll be exploring soon. What’s the connection to free will? Well, if we never know why we’re going to do what we’re about to do, then it would seem that it’s never actually up to us what we do. And if what we do is never up to us, we never act freely. That seems pretty straightforward. But is Gazzaniga right? (End of quotation.)

    The connection between our beliefs about our reasons for acting and our acting freely turns out to be tricky theoretical business – or at least something philosophers seriously disagree about. I’ll start with something very different from what Andy is asking about and then build a bridge. Consider the following story (based on a story in my 1995 book, Autonomous Agents).

    Through no fault of his own, the only access George has to his kingdom is through his staff of advisors. His primary concern in life is to do what is best for his kingdom as a whole. The staff provide him with information, and he takes legislative and other measures on that basis. They also provide George with feedback about his measures, which information he takes into account in drafting further legislation and in modifying previous measures. They give him monthly figures on a variety of matters, including the gross national product, the distribution of wealth, the percentage of the population living below the poverty level, the King’s popularity, and the popular reaction to his legislative acts. However the staff have their own agenda – namely, their own enrichment at the expense of the populace. Knowing the King’s preferences, they systematically provide him with such false information as will lead him to make decisions that will further their aims. Of course, they are careful not to be so obvious about this as to call their loyalty into question.

    Today, George’s advisors presented him with information they knew would lead him to conclude that his issuing a decree raising property taxes by five percent would put an end to poverty in his kingdom while not greatly inconveniencing anyone. George rationally drew that conclusion, and he issued such a decree. The advisors kept the new tax revenues for themselves, as they planned all along to do; and they knew that even if the proceeds had gone to the poor, poverty would have continued to be a serious problem in the kingdom. Most landowners are in debt to wage earners – especially to the King’s advisors. A raise in income taxes (rather than property taxes) would have helped significantly with poverty in the kingdom (provided the money actually went to the poor). In their subsequent monthly reports to George, his advisors provide very encouraging news about shrinking poverty figures.

    In my view, issuing the tax decree is not something George freely does. By controlling what George believes about the effect a five percent raise in property taxes will have, his staff gain control over whether he will judge it best to issue the decree and whether he will issue it.

    That’s how I see it, but there are philosophers who think I’m dead wrong. I certainly won’t be able to settle the disagreement here. Now for the bridge. As far as free action is concerned, who’s in worse shape – George or me, if although I believe I’ve been quoting from Free only for reasons having to do with the accessibility of the prose, I’m actually quoting from it because I want to make a lot of money on that book by selling tons of copies?

    The question I just raised is for people reading this. I’d say George is in worse shape, and I’d guess that people who say that George freely issues the decree would also say that I freely quote from Free in my example. They’d say I freely quote from it even though I’m wrong about why I’m quoting from it. And that might be right even if, as I claim, they’re wrong about George.

    I wouldn’t say that “knowledge of one’s true reasons” for doing something is a “requirement” for doing it freely. But I do think that evidence of the kind Andy mentions should concern us when we think about free will and moral responsibility. Maybe (other things being equal) we’re more fully in charge of what we’re doing when we understand why we’re doing it and less fully in charge when we don’t. Eddy Nahmias, who talked about degrees of freedom in an earlier post, would be a good person to ask about this.

    I know this reply is very long already, but let me add something on a famous study. Suppose a particular person in Milgram’s obedience study believes he has decided to shock the learner again because the experiment is important and requires that he continue whereas, in fact, he decided to do it because he is strongly inclined to obey to authority figures. Might this not be a free decision despite his self-misunderstanding? Do many of you think he deserves to be blamed to some degree for his decision and that he could have got a grip on himself and decided to disobey? Would you think this if you thought he unfreely made his decision?

    James, I’m not sure what it means to say that a person’s consciousness drives his or her free will. So that’s not something I would say. Also, I don’t think of our conscious states as nonphysical states. And I do think of our conscious states as caused; the causal chains include events in the external world and events in the brain. What I was asking about is whether every conscious intention, decision, or now-saying has to be an unconscious thing of that kind before it is a conscious thing of that kind.

    • George Gantz says:

      Al – Thanks for the extensive reply to all of us (and to those that follow).  I did not mean to be obtuse – I believe the actions of athletes who are “in the flow of the moment” are freely willed as they are exerting intentional direction even if the specific bodily movements are triggered below the conscious level.  As you say, conscious control is not necessary for free will.  However, I do believe that conscious activity is required to fix one’s intentions – even though a person may not be fully aware (indeed is never fully aware) of all the inputs….  -George

  23. James Laird says:

    Al,

    Yes, I believe every conscious intention, decision, or now-saying has to be an unconscious thing of that kind before it is a conscious thing of that kind.

    In your last comment, you said “I’m not sure what it means to say that a person’s consciousness drives his or her free will”. I think I can clarify that. What I’m trying to say, is that a person’s consciousness doesn’t exert any form of control.

    I would venture to say, that for many ambitious free will advocates, an important component of their beliefs is that their consciousness exerts some form of real control. If they don’t think their consciousness exerts any control, and they don’t believe their thoughts exert new emergent forces, then what is the basis of their ability to do otherwise (i.e., take a different path in life than that which is controlled solely by the four fundamental forces of physics)?

  24. Chandra.KethiReddy says:

    If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
    Voltaire

    As important as the question is about what free will is, perhaps we also have to begin asking how we can invent free will.

    A is a college-educated, upper-middle class American male. A is philosophically educated and works from home, giving him free time to do what he would like, namely, set up a company. A hires an old high school friend, B, a hard-working, high-school dropout, who is down on her luck because, let’s say, both her parents have advanced cancer and she has to help cover the bills. 

    Before A hired B, how much free will could B have if all her time is spent working two shifts, six days a week at grueling jobs? How could B dedicate time to long-term financial planning, conscious consumerism, or anything else she would want to do to benefit herself or society? Stress does have a significant impact on our ability to reason and act freely (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289607000219).

    I, myself, wish I had more time to dedicate to adding content to this comment, yet I will have to summarize:

    First, I will admit ignorance of the general place of the field at the time being. It may be the case that I am saying nothing original, and I am okay with that. 

    I believe that there exist power structures in the world which interfere with the possibility of free will in individuals. Examples may be those surrounding race, gender, social and income class, cultural expectations for intersectional individuals from their guardians, slavery, and so on. The existence of these power structures may have neural correlates, such as an increase (I conjecture) in adrenaline, cortisol, or norepinephrine. Constant exposure to these chemicals as a result of environmental distress may negatively impact the amount of free will an individual may have. 

    As individuals radically situated within cultural contexts, culture is not indepedent of our natures and, I claim, our neurophysiologies. If we are to ask the question of free will, we should also ask for whom it exists, and in what ways it may exist differently between individuals. What I am suggesting is that our concept of free will may have to go beyond neurophysiology and enter some kind of neurosociology, that study of this topic must also address the impact of a society unto a mind.  

    If person B could have as much free time (mobility, education, etc.) to act as person A has, what could person B do? Is person B even aware of this question?

    I conclude that if free will does not exist, then it will be necessary to invent it.  

  25. alan.white.750983 says:

    Hi Al (if I may)–and you can call me Al, to invoke Paul Simon.  (I won’t call you “Betty” in any case!)

    Today I taught for the xteenth time Walter Stace’s classic article on classic compatibilism, where he pushes a lexical approach for defining “free will” based on common usage.  I know that common usage is at best a pragmatic solution to what terms and concepts primarily mean as lexically ordered by definiens, and is susceptible to vagaries of usage over time (I trace the usage of “faggot” over the last hundred years from a bundle of sticks to cigarettes to its present generally derogatory primary meaning as a homosexually-laced insult).  But Stace’s point that “free will” means freedom of action still has legs in 2014 as it did in the early 50s.  I’ve surveyed my 101/FW sections for over twenty years about what they think “free will” means in the second class session, and the predominant open-ended-and-unprompted response is still Stace’s “I can do what I want.”  So that sort of simplistic compatibilism sits on lots of people’s tongue-tips independent of X-phi-type scenarios.

    Still there is nothing sacrosanct about common usage except for questions of settling time-indexed issues about meaning, and what “free will” means to most people at any given time certainly won’t settle metaphysical or axiological questions about free will.

    Enter Manuel Vargas’ Building Better Beings.  This important work suggests that revision of the meaning of “free will” should not be left to the vicissitudes of common speech, but should diagnostically examine what we mean and prescriptively move our meanings to more rational grounds.  He thinks those grounds should be compatibilist, but he rightly only advocates that such an important concept should not be left to the drift of linguistic chance, but deliberately reformed by inquiry if deemed necessary.

    Here I would insert some recent political facts that are relevant.  Four states–ID, MT, UT, and KS–have since the infamous John Hinckley case abandoned mens rea defenses of innocence, and along with that, internalist FW exculpation.  That’s important.  Have they de facto embraced Stace-style externalist compatibilism?  I put that to my students today.

    What Vargas offers more generally is a reflective replacement of current possibly unjustified FW practices of blame and punishment centered on what we both philosophically and practically may know about human choices. 

  26. Taylor Winslow says:

    I found this to be a particularly insightful discussion of free will, as it efficiently underscored practical, real world relevance within an often technical and scientific debate. A belief in free will, to me, elucidates individual empowerment — it connotes a degree of control over our lives, circumstances, and experiences. Noting the correlation between positive behavior and faith in free will translates to me as an endorsement of this belief. I find it to be reminiscent of Pascal’s Wager in that, if this belief yields more good than bad, why not hold it?

    Free will means we are not victims of our circumstances, nor are we mindlessly trudging through our lives. Conversely, we have the power to consciously dictate our actions and behavior, and therefore create our own realities. The controversy lies in the preponderance of unconscious decisions, but, as Mele pointed out, there is a large spectrum of decisions we make, and therefore a large spectrum of ways in which we make decisions to reflect this. To consider any decision making process in isolation, and deem it indicative of our overarching decision making process and existence or non existence of free will, would therefore constitute a grave travesty.

    I’m obviously not alone in thinking the mark of free will is a conscious decision. That being said, the degree of conscious engagement depends largely on the individual. Various studies on Mindfulness and Meditation have proven that we can in fact enhance our ability to be consciously attentive and aware throughout our daily lives. That being said, I would love to see the Dalai Lama hooked up to the fMRI machine to see when he becomes aware of the urge. My guess is that a man who has dedicated the majority of his life to cultivating his mindfulness practice, or his awareness of all that lies in each moment, would be aware of an urge to flick his wrist far before the average human being — distracted and plugged into their various devices or activities.

    I hope to see this debate empower us both individually and on a societal level, as I hope to see research suggest that we can increase the extent of our free will as we increase our awareness (perhaps through meditation, or other mindfulness practices).

     

  27. Alfred Mele says:

    Jeff, James, Chandra, Al, and Taylor,

    Thanks for the comments. There’s a common thread in them – the meaning of “free will.” Jeff reminded me of one of my gripes. Normally, journalists who write articles suggesting that scientists have proved that there’s no free will, don’t say what the scientists (or the journalists themselves) mean by “free will.” A typical non-specialist reader – call her Betty, a name Al’s post primed me to use – might just assume that the journalists and scientists mean what she means by free will. And if, somehow, the article causes Betty to believe that there’s no free will as she thinks of it, she might find her new belief disturbing indeed. But suppose Betty discovers that the scientists at issue set the bar for free will way higher than she does. Then she might think: “Well, there’s no free will as these particular scientists understand what ‘free will’ means. But I never cared about that sort of thing anyway. As far as I can tell, they’re leaving what I think of as free will alone. So no worries.”

    So what do some scientists mean by “free will”? (I’ll be quoting from Free for a while.)

    In a 2008 article in Current Biology, Read Montague writes: “Free will is the idea that we make choices and have thoughts independent of anything remotely resembling a physical process. Free will is the close cousin to the idea of the soul – the concept that ‘you’, your thoughts and feelings, derive from an entity that is separate and distinct from the physical mechanisms that make up your body. From this perspective, your choices are not caused by physical events, but instead emerge wholly formed from somewhere indescribable and outside the purview of physical descriptions. This implies that free will cannot have evolved by natural selection, as that would place it directly in a stream of causally connected events” (p. 584). This picture of free will is distinctly magical.

    Biologist Anthony Cashmore, in a 2010 article, asserts that “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” (p. 4499). He goes on, writing: “In the absence of any molecular model accommodating the concept of free will, I have to conclude that the dualism of Descartes is alive and well. That is, just like Descartes, we still believe (much as we pretend otherwise) that there is a magic component to human behavior” (p. 4503).

    In his 2011 book, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga says that free will involves a ghostly or nonphysical element and “some secret stuff that is YOU” (p. 108). Obviously, this isn’t a report of a scientific discovery about what “free will” means; he’s telling us how he understands that expression – that is, what “free will” means to him. The same is true of Montague and Cashmore, who tell us what they mean by this expression. Given what Gazzaniga means by “free will,” it’s no surprise that, in his view, “free will is a miscast concept, based on social and psychological beliefs . . . that have not been borne out and/or are at odds with modern scientific knowledge about the nature of our universe.”

    The overwhelming majority of philosophy professors who write about free will these days don’t see free will as magical, supernatural, or unnatural. They would reject as outlandish the descriptions of free will offered by Montague, Cashmore, and Gazzaniga.

    If a philosophy professor and a biology professor who disagree about what “free will” means were having a cordial discussion about their disagreement, it would not be surprising if, before very long, one of them said that the other was using the expression in a specialized way that is out of touch with ordinary usage. Now, biologists know that the simple fact that they are biologists doesn’t give them any special insight into what the expression “free will” means. (Some biologists may believe that philosophers don’t have any special insight into its meaning either, and they may offer as evidence the fact that philosophers disagree with each other on this topic.) Biologists can be led to entertain the thought that their understanding of that expression may be an artifact of their own personal upbringing and to consider the hypothesis that they are out of touch with ordinary usage of “free will.” In experiments with human participants, scientists definitely prefer to have a sample size larger than one person; and any scientist can see that if the way he or she goes about determining what “free will” means is simply to consult his or her own feeling or intuition about the meaning, then – to the extent to which it is important to avoid being mistaken about the meaning of “free will” – he or she should seek a better method. (The simple, navel-gazing method is not recommended for philosophers either, of course.)

    The imaginary discussion between the pair of professors might grind to a halt, with neither professor giving any ground. If that happens, should the professors just agree to disagree and part company? Should they instead look for an arbitrator who is neither a biologist nor a philosopher? If so, where should they turn?

    Here’s an idea. There’s an interesting body of work in psychology and experimental philosophy on what nonspecialists mean by “free will.” It uses survey studies, and thousands of people have now been surveyed. If our imaginary discussants were to look into this work, they would discover that much of it supports the idea that the bold claims about the meaning of “free will” that I have quoted from Montague, Cashmore, and Gazzaniga are accepted only by a minority of people. (To interested readers, I recommend Mele 2012, Monroe and Malle 2010, and Nahmias and Thompson 2014. I’ll try to remember to supply the references at the end of this reply.) For example, even if lots of people believe in souls, there is considerable evidence that many of them do not regard free will as something that depends on the existence of souls. It looks as though Montague, Cashmore, and Gazzaniga are setting the bar for free will way higher than most people do. And, as I explained, the reason for which they set it so high doesn’t come from science. Instead, they’re simply telling us what they themselves happen to mean by the words “free will.”

    I asked why some scientists say that free will doesn’t exist. Here’s a short answer: Because they set the bar for free will ridiculously high. It’s a simple fact that you can argue that something – anything at all – doesn’t exist by setting the bar for its existence extremely high. Let’s look at an example. Bob claims that there have never been any great baseball players – that the existence of great baseball players is an illusion. When I ask him to explain, he says that a great baseball player would need to have a batting average of at least .400 for at least twenty consecutive seasons, pitch at least ten perfect games, and hit a minimum of two thousand home runs; and he correctly reports that no one has ever come anywhere close to this incredible performance. If that is what it takes to be a great baseball player, then no great baseball players have ever existed and Bob has made his point. But, of course, most of us who are interested in baseball set the bar for greatness far lower, and we are not at all embarrassed about doing so. Babe Ruth and Willie Mays were great baseball players, and so were a host of others. Bob’s requirements for greatness are ridiculously excessive.

    Where should we set the bar for free will? That’s an interesting question, to be sure, and one that philosophers have argued about for a very long time. The point I want to make is that the higher one sets it, the more likely one is to see free will as an illusion. Here are two different high bars: having free will requires making conscious choices that are entirely independent of preceding brain activity; having free will requires being absolutely unconstrained by genetics and environment (including the situations in which we find ourselves). Now, there is excellent evidence that our conscious choices are never entirely independent of preceding brain activity and that we are not absolutely unconstrained by genetics and environment. But this evidence threatens the existence of free will only if the bar for free will is set absurdly high.

    A good way to tether our thinking about free will to the real world is to view free will as something we need in order to deserve moral credit or moral blame for some of our actions. If we think about free will this way, then to the extent to which it strikes us as plausible that people sometimes deserve – from a moral point of view – credit or blame for what they do, we should also find it plausible that people sometimes exercise free will. Thinking about free will in terms of what important uses it might have tends to curb enthusiasm for setting the bar for free will at dizzying heights.

    It’s interesting that although Gazzaniga rejects free will as magical and contrary to science, he takes a very different view of responsibility and accountability. “There is no scientific reason not to hold people accountable and responsible,” he writes (2011, p. 106). Someone might say that it’s a good idea to hold people responsible even if they aren’t, in fact, responsible, but Gazzaniga isn’t advocating that idea. Evidently, he sets a much lower bar for responsibility than for free will. But, as I have said, he has no scientific grounds for setting the bar for free will where he does. Nothing that comes from science prevents him from lowering his bar for free will to bring it into line with his bar for responsibility. If he were to do that, he might start saying that there is no scientific reason to believe that free will is an illusion!

    The preceding 11 paragraphs are from Free, and here you are getting them for free. I thought about making the points made in them in a shorter way here. But the material seemed just fine as it was. (If you look back at the comment by [Andy] Vonasch and my reply, you might wonder what actually motivated me to include these paragraphs – laziness, maybe? or a selfish desire to promote Free – and whether I might be wrong about my motivations.) It’s time to move on.

    Jeff, you asked how non-specialist readers react to the news that there’s no free will. In my initial post I mentioned that “there is evidence that lowering people’s confidence in the existence of free will increases bad behavior – cheating, stealing, and aggressive behavior.” Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler used passages from a scientist claiming that free will is an illusion to lower people’s confidence in free will in one of the studies I had in mind there. See their “The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating.” Psychological Science 19: 49-54. Also see Baumeister, R., E. Masicampo, and C. DeWall, 2009, “Prosocial Benefits of Feeling Free: Disbelief in Free Will Increases Aggression and Reduces Helpfulness.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35: 260–68.

    By the way, Patrick Haggard was a winner of one of the two-year Big Questions in Free Will grants. He’s now been to Tallahassee three times for BQFW conferences, and we’ve participated together at events on free will and science in New York City and London. I know John Haynes too. Both are extremely bright and talented, and they’re very nice, interesting guys. If, as you suggest, they’re biased about free will, maybe that’s because they set the bar for it pretty high.

    About the vets: Imagine that Betty is one of them. She might say: “Thanks for all the help. And no worries about your skepticism about free will. I think you and I are talking about different things when we say ‘free will’.”

    James, I understand your position. I mentioned that, in Free Will and Luck, I offer two different sets of sufficient conditions for free action – one for compatibilists (“modest”) and the other for incompatibilists (“ambitious”). Neither set of conditions appeals to emergent forces. Explaining and motivating my ambitious view would take too much space. But check out Free Will and Luck, if you have time – especially chapter 5.

    Chandra, you nicely bring us back to an issue Eddy Nahmias commented on. People’s situations definitely can have a huge effect on their opportunities for free action. Their situations can expand or contract these opportunities. Think about prisoners. You have a lot more opportunities than they do. But we shouldn’t go overboard and insist that they have no opportunities at all for free action. After Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (a great boxer who died recently) was wrongly convicted of murder in a second trial (on the same charges as the first), this is what he said to a reporter: “They can incarcerate my body but never my mind.”

    Al, thanks for motivating me to go into the meaning of “free will” issue. Thanks, too, for calling attention to Manuel Vargas’s fine book. I attended an excellent session on it in San Diego not long ago.

    Taylor, your way of thinking about free will is very attractive. I think was you’ve offered is a very well expressed common conception of free will. I really should look into the mindfulness literature sometime.

    I said I’d provide references to the articles I mentioned on lay concepts of free will. Here they are:

    Mele, A. 2012, “Another Scientific Threat to Free Will?” Monist 95: 422-40; Monroe, A., and B. Malle, 2010, “From Uncaused Will to Conscious Choice: The Need to Study, Not Speculate About People’s Folk Concept of Free Will,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1: 211-24; Nahmias, E., and M. Thompson. 2014, “A Naturalistic Vision of Free Will.” In E. O’Neill and E. Machery, eds., Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy. Boston: Routledge.

    • Jeff Johnson says:

      Dr. Mele,

      Thanks very much for your thought-provoking and interesting response to my as well as others’ comments. I really like your “setting the bar” analogy concerning free will. In fact, I had actually planned to make a similar comment in a follow-up posting today. Yes. I agree with you 100 percent! It seems  many Neuroscientists do set the bar too high–much too high in fact. Frankly, they set such an impossible standard that it’s easy to see why they never “find” free will or even leave open the possibility for it. Thank you also for addressing my Vets’ hospital analogy by using Betty. I really do believe that there are more “Bettys” out there than many of these neuroscientists believe.

      As for Patrick Haggard and some of these other “Willusionists,” I have no doubt that they’re very bright, very accomplished, and probably very nice people. Moreover, I was actually aware that Patrick Haggard had a big role in your BQFW project. In fact, having someone like Patrick Haggard (with his skepticism on free will) as part of BQFW added an absolutely HUGE amount of credibility to your project as well as to the Templeton Foundation itself. I do believe, however, that Dr. Haggard has set an extremely unreachable standard for free will. Also, I don’t think he did himself or his profession any favors by articles like this one (below link). It made him appear as though 1) he “enjoys the idea of no free will, and 2) likes the idea of being a “machine” instead of a human. Very weird and disturbing.

      http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8058541/Neuroscience-free-will-and-determinism-Im-just-a-machine.html

  28. Gunnar Rodin says:

    Al,
    I have a question. In the end of your essay, you say “There is evidence that lowering people’s confidence in the existence of free will increases bad behavior – cheating, stealing, and aggressive behavior. And there is evidence that belief in free will promotes personal well-being.” I was a bit astonished to read this. I live in a subculture where most of the persons I know do not believe in a free will defined according to what you call the ambitious view and I am rather convinced that they don’t cheat, steal or are aggressive. Of course, I have not done any scientific study but I have difficulties to believe that your sentences above reflect a universal truth. Your view may be true in other cultures than mine and it would be interesting to read more about it.  I appreciate if you could give me some references.

  29. Gunnar Rodin says:

    Al,
    After I sent my question I read your last post and see that you anticipated my question and answered it in advance! Thanks a lot.

  30. James Laird says:

    Al,

    I like your analogy regarding the high bar. It fits with what mankind is trying to achieve – raising the bar a little bit higher over time and achieving something more.

    If the free will bar is set at the level of the hypothesis “life exerts new emergent forces and is thereby the source of our free will”, and we’re able to eventually make that hurdle, I believe we’ll find resolution that’s completely natural and compatible with what we physically observe (i.e., nothing magical or supernatural is required – it’s simply life). By achieving that goal, I’m thinking that mankind will likely follow and jump up to the next evolutionary step forward.

  31. ntadepalli says:

    When we identify ourselves with our natures,we notice slow changes happening

    in our identities based on past experience.These are sub-conscious ones.

    Again we can notice changes ,like improved self-control with meditative 

    exercises.Though consciousness has no role in bringing about these changes

    there is a feeling that we are progressing towards greater freedom with 

    meditations.

    May be even neuroscientists can detect this progressive freedom,though

    not the real freedom.

  32. Alfred Mele says:

    Ntadepalli, what do you have in mind by “the real freedom”? Self-control has come up a few times now. Here’s a link to the webpage for my new project, The Philosophy and Science of Self-Control. http://philosophyandscienceofself-control.com/

    James and George, I think we’ve made good progress in understanding each other. About whether conscious control is required for free will: Suppose we think of free will as the power or ability to act freely or perform free actions. Free will is one kind of thing – a power or ability – and free actions are another kind of thing; they’re actions, not powers or abilities. Then one possibility is that (1) the capacity to exert conscious control over some of my behavior is required for having free will and (2) not all of our free actions need to be consciously controlled. In the latter connection, maybe I freely flipped my turn signal a couple of times today during my short drive to my office, even if I didn’t exert any conscious control in flipping it. In the former connection, recall the story about my washing machine. In the end I decided to have it repaired, by the way. My conscious thinking about what to do had an effect on what I decided to do, and that’s an example of conscious control over behavior. If I had no capacity at all to do that kind of thing, I don’t see how I could have free will.

    Good, Gunnar. I’m glad that worked out. Maybe in your culture (you didn’t say where you live) belief in what I called modest free will is common. A few years ago, at the World Science Festival, neuroscientist Patrick Haggard, psychologist Daniel Wegner, and I – under the direction of moderator Paul Nurse – chatted about free will in front of a large, enthusiastic audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. A New York Times article on the session inspired many bloggers. Some of them said they believed in free will; others took the opposite position, sometimes citing scientific studies as support. Most of them sounded very confident. I was struck by the variety of different ways in which the bloggers seemed to understand the expression “free will.” To some, free will had to be utterly magical or absolutely unconstrained. Others thought of free will in a very down-to-earth way. And as you might expect, whether the bloggers affirmed or denied the existence of free will tended to vary with how high they set the bar for it.

    Speaking of blogging, I have to say that the comments I’ve received on this blog are definitely of much higher quality on average than the ones I read on the NYT blog. In fact, I lost patience with the latter blog pretty quickly – too much hot air.

  33. JamieLuguri says:

    Great post, Al! I agree with you that the door is still very much open for both the modest and ambitious types of free will you describe. It seems like a lot of the psychology and neuroscience literature is really about the question of the power of the conscious vs. unconscious. This is an interesting question in and of itself, but we should be careful not to extropolate far past these findings and say that they suggest there is no free will.

    As you point out, one of the reasons that this erroneous view of the findings so far is detrimental is that believing in free will has positive benefits. Recent research of ours (led by Cory Clark), has found that buying into the concept of free will is motivated by wanting to hold others morally accountable for the immoral actions (http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/106/4/501/). Therefore, it seems unlikely that the average person will be easily swayed to the anti-free will side of debate without much more compelling evidence (and maybe not even then).

  34. Alfred Mele says:

    Monday is the last day for the Big Questions Online discussion of my “What are the implications of the free will debate for individuals and society?” On Tuesday, I’m willing to move the discussion over to a little upstart blog of mine if anyone is interested in doing that. It’s http://freewillforall.com/ . There’s not much to that blog now, as you’ll see. I’ll see what can be done about that. It was created recently for purposes like this. I was thinking that it might be a place for undergrads and others to discuss free will and science, but I haven’t had time to do much with it. I’d be willing to continue the discussion there until Saturday afternoon. I’ve enjoyed it.

    Good to hear from you, Jeff and Jamie; and it’s good to have that journal article reference.

  35. James Laird says:

    Al,

    I agree – we’re making good progress, and it’s fun.

    In your second to last comment, you talked about whether conscious control is required for free will. Fundamentally, I separate the concepts of consciousness and control, so the term “conscious control” simply means (to me) that a person is conscious of their control. I think all living things exert control (i.e., they possess ambitious free will); living things aren’t controlled solely by the four fundamental forces of physics. Since I believe that’s true, I also believe consciousness isn’t a requirement in order for ambitious free will to exist. Consciousness is an emergent property of many, but not all living things. I believe that all living things have the capability to change the path forward, and in that sense, they’re all capable of design. To me, the spectrum of all living things across the full range of 3-D scale is the creator – God, if you will.

    Okay, I’ll try to get back on track… You mentioned there’s a difference between free will and free actions. My take on that, is simply that free actions are a direct result of free will. In other words, new emergent forces are associated with free will, and those forces cause actions.

    Your upstart blog sounds like fun – I’ll check it out! (If you’re ever interested in my two-cents worth during any other discussions, please send me an email: atjim (at) tmsolf (dot) org, and I’ll be happy to chime in. It’s sincerely a privilege to brainstorm with you and others.)

  36. ntadepalli says:

    Thank you ,Dr.Mele.

    In my post I was referring to the freedom enjoyed by individual neuron inactive networks of neurons. This freedom is limited by genetic and experiential conditioning. Obviously, consciousness, a byproduct of neuronal activity cannot be having any influence on freedom.

    Thank you once again for the related link ,for follow-up.

  37. LinusHuang says:

    Generally, I have reservation about the research approach of applying ordinary conception of free will directly onto neuroscientic models in order to carve up free/unfree actions. The reason behind my worry is that I believe our ordinary concept of free will is based on an idealized model of human mind (aka, Folk Psychology) that is the product of complex interactions with the natural and social worlds, and as a result, it does not (aim to) carve our mind at its natural joints but serves various other social functions. 

    Instead, analyzing our ordinary conception of free will can be a worthwhile project for different purposes. As Professor Mele points out in the discussion, the two different understanding of free will both “encompass the ability to learn from our successes and mistakes and the ability to improve our behavior in light of what we learn. These abilities are important not only for personal development but also for social cohesiveness.”  So, we can ask how biological and cultural evolutions lead different human societies to embrace a variety of conceptions of free will, what functions these various conceptions of free will serve, and how they come to serve these various functions.

    The last question particular will make contact with scientific studies of human mind. We can posit specific scientific hypotheses about how the social practice of treating behaviors as free/unfree/none- actions interacts with psychological processes to produce desired outcomes. For example, whether and how such social practice enhances our abilities for self-control, for behaving morally, for social cooperation, for becoming a responsible agent, etc.

    In conclusion, I believe there are very fruitful investigations to be done at the intersection of philosophy of free will and scientific studies of mind. 

  38. Alfred Mele says:

    Although our discussion was to end today, BQO asked me to extend it for a few more days. I agreed. So there’s no need need to move over to http://freewillforall.com/ .

    Thanks for the latest comments. James and ntadepalli, it would be interesting to see a taxonomy of views of free will. Linus, I agree that the approaches you describe are very interesting ways to study free will, and I like the connection to self-control. Uri Maoz mentioned a volume I’m editing of articles by BQFW grant winners. I called it Surrounding Free Will because the authors are investigating free wil from many different angles. I’m a big fan of the “surrounding,” multi-angled approach to free will.

    • Jeff Johnson says:

      Dr. Mele,

      Thanks for providing that link to your blog, and I’m also very glad that we’re able to continue this discussion here at BQO least a little while longer. This has certainly become an amazingly interesting thread with a lot of VERY worthwhile ideas and discussion! I hope to add more in the coming day or two.

      Athough I really enjoy this site (and “all” the questions), this particular thread marks the first time I’ve posted anything here.. Actually, the quality of the discussion in this thread reminds me somewhat of a thread over at Flickers of Freedom that Peter Tse started late last year. That thread was simply incredible for all the info it gave and all the ideas that were exchanged.. In fact, it was that thread over at FLF that finally got me out of “lurking” mode and and into posting there. The thread was just too fascinating to pass up!  : )

      This thread seems like it’s starting to go the same route. I have to say that I am quite honored to be able to discuss these issues with you, and I really enjoy reading everyone’s contributions and ideas. Fascinating stuff!

  39. shaun2000 says:

    Why bring in science? Human nature invites a species-length view, wheras science is transitory–it has meant Aristotelian dymanics, 17th century atomism, phlogiston, now quantum theory.  Anyway, science is still Positivist–Positivism explicitly banned human volition from consideration by science, so it can have developed no wisdom about free will.

    In practical terms belief in free will is simply a necessary principle for living, both for individuals and society. Most of our behavior we direct consciously to bring us further experiences we anticipate being delightful. How could we develop a taste for fine conscious experiences and train ourselves in the behaviors more likely to bring them about if we assumed we had no conscious control over our behavior? Sometimes it seems scientists place loyalty to science above the development of fine and enduring conscious experiences.

    The problem seems to originate in a supposed opposition between free will and physics. Instead I base my belief in free will on creativity evident in the processes of evolution. If nature is truly creative then true creativity can exist in us, with free will as one component of it. I notice that denying free will often involves the claim that nature is subject entirely to physical law as we conceive of it in 2014, making nature the result of purely physical processes, ie the modern synthesis.  But for me that is a terrible mutilation of sensibility, a tragic modern version of a Procrustean bed. I explain this in “Self Improvement Through a New Approach to Evolution,” the play “Dialogue Between Darwin and Galileo” and the website takeondarwin.com.

  40. Alfred Mele says:

    Good to hear from you again, Jeff. And thanks for your comment Shaun. For my own part, I’m both a science lover and a believer in free will. But, of course, I believe in free will as I myself understand the expression “free will.” And, actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. I believe that it’s more likely that we have either modest free will or ambitious free will than it is that we have neither. The first time I argued for that thesis (but the terminolgy was different) was in my 1995 book, Autonomous Agents. The argument took most of a long book. So I won’t try to present an argument here.

  41. James Laird says:

    Shaun2000,

    You asked “why bring in science?” I think it’s fair to say that science is important for mankind, while at the same time, we need to keep in mind that our natural human references occasionally cause us to draw false conclusions (e.g., the Earth is flat, and the sun revolves around the Earth). I believe we’re currently facing another fundamental human reference issue and it’s causing science to doubt the existence of our free will.

    Here it is in a nutshell:

    When scientists investigate reality, they are limited to using their 5 ea. senses. So when they take something apart to figure out how it works, they’re always sensing the *result* of the net sum of forces after it has already occurred for each moment of time. What that means, is if the system level that they just took apart was exerting forces that affected the path forward (e.g., a living frog), that system no longer exerts any forces from the “frog level”. Before they took the frog apart and after taking the frog apart, the scientists believed that all of the matter associated with the frog’s body was controlled solely by the four fundamental forces of physics (4FFOP). Scientists believe “life” is difficult to figure out – it’s really illusive, but they still believe everything is controlled by the 4FFOP.

    What I’m trying to say, is that our basic human references prevent us from relating *directly* to the forces associated with other living system levels (e.g., the frog) because we simply don’t have the sensory capability to do so. We can’t sense the forces exerted by a tree from the “tree level”, and therefore we think the tree’s growth is solely controlled by the 4FFOP.

    Okay, with that in mind, science has evolved over time with the idea that the 4FFOP are the *only* forces that exist, and that mantra has permeated our educational systems. Science teaches our students that the 4FFOP control everything in a predeterministic manner from the bottom-up (and some events are random in nature). Granted, that’s a totally *natural* conclusion due to our human references, and I don’t fault science. I’m thinking, however, that it’s time for mankind to consider the existence of living forces (i.e., forces which don’t result solely from a direct sum of preexisting forces – for example, the forces exerted by our thoughts), and begin investigating them in earnest.

    I think there are a couple of compelling arguments that support the hypothesis that our thoughts exert new emergent forces. For example, humans are required to think in order to learn. If a student doesn’t think about the ideas presented by a professor during a lecture and form thoughts within his brain, his neural nets won’t be physically changed and he won’t learn anything. Doesn’t that support the idea that our thoughts exert new emergent forces? I don’t think science currently understands how learning works, and the process is viewed as an unknown. Perhaps the concept of “living forces” will help develop an understanding.

    Another argument is the following: If the intelligence associated with the interaction of two human thoughts isn’t an emergent property of said thoughts, where does it come from? Intelligence exerts real forces within a human brain, and unless those forces sum directly from the 4FFOP (i.e., the intelligence is somehow innate to the 4FFOP, like gravity), they must be something new.

    Okay, this comment is getting too long so I’d better end it. In summary, science will likely continue trying to convince mankind that he doesn’t have free will, when truth is likely that we do. What’s the solution? Science needs to discover the existence of living forces.

  42. shaun2000 says:

    James, I believe discovering we evolved faces us with paradoxes in our day  like those Zeno proposed to the people of his time. I expect it to take us just as long or longer to arrive at the concepts we’ll need to fully resolve our paradoxes. So both the science and the natural human references of our day may be inadequate.

    Given those assumptions, I look for wisdom to the practice of science. A scientist is able to weigh two hypotheses in consciousness at the same time, to invent procedures capable of deciding between them, to design novel apparatus to support that experiment, to apply physical processes to matter through the carrying out of that procedure, to be free enough of physical determinism to judge which of the two hypotheses the results support, and to trust that other scientists will similarly be equipped with those talents, able to make similar sound judgments.

    Given the importance of science for society, I suggest we encourage these practices–the conscious weighing of alternatives, the conscious design of new procedures and behaviors, the creation of novelty whether in scientific apparatus or the arts and crafts, the judgment to make sound decisions free to some extent  of physical determinism, and trust that others possess these capabilities just as we do. In other words, most of what I think of as free will.

    This raises the question, can judgment ever be free, to any extent, of physical determinism? I think so, else the scientist is not fundamentally different from the chemicals in his test tube, just as much subject to their judgment as they are to his. And if that were so, why would we trust his judgment? I think there must be a difference, but I don’t see how you could apply the mere practice of science to study that practice itself. We need some other procedure.

  43. Alfred Mele says:

    As I mentioned, we’ve been invited to extend our discussion. So we’re into overtime now — or extra innings, as baseball fans might prefer to say. I might be slower to respond than I had been. I have to catch up on a few things. But you should definitely feel free to respond to one another. Back later.

    • Jeff Johnson says:

      Dr. Mele, I’ve also noticed that some Neuroscientists who deny free will still frame their contentions in dualist terms. For instance, they might say that “your brain made the decision, but YOU did not.”  Or they might say that a person’s “brain” decided to do this, do that, etc. This seems especially common in relation to claims and interpretations based around Libet-type studies.

      What’s interesting, though, is that the impression they give (again, by “framing” their comments in dualist terms). is that WE (our “conscious selves) are just passive observers while our “brains” (in a puppetmaster or Wizard-of-Oz kind of role) just sit back and order us around. 

      It’s kind of an ironic thing. These neuroscientists, in their zeal to deny free will, have actually created a kind of Reverse Dualism where the “unconsious mechanisms” have this extremely powerful role while consciousness serves no real purpose. Ironically, the image these guys have framed the human mind in seems even more nonsensical and unrealistic to me  than does the Libertarian Free Will that they spend so much time railing against.

  44. James Laird says:

    Shaun2000,

    You asked if judgment can ever be free, to any extent, from physical determinism. I believe the answer is yes.

    Inside a physical human brain, I’m thinking there’s a mixture of many different forces that are exerted from different system levels, and those forces add together in real time and effectively form a “net sum” (not a singular resulting value; an infinite set of values distributed throughout the 3-space of the brain), which thereby controls the resulting activity within the brain. Here’s a more concrete way of looking at it: The forces exerted by a person’s thoughts are partially controlled by the neurons that cause those thoughts to emerge, while at the same time, new forces emerge at the thought level and those new forces transcend back down in real time, thereby interacting with forces at the neuron level. The net sum of that activity is what actually controls (i.e., determines) the path forward. Since the forces that emerge at the thought level aren’t predeterministic in nature (i.e., they’re new life), it’s appropriate to believe that the path forward is determined, but it’s not predetermined.

    That’s a simple way of modeling the idea that forces from different living system levels transcend to other force fields, resulting in interaction between different levels (both upward and downward causation) in real time.

    Okay, so here’s where I’m going with this… I’m trying to show that it’s reasonable to believe that life at “your” system level has a genuine effect on the path forward (i.e., it’s possible for freedom to be associated with judgments), while at the same time the life at “your” system level isn’t solely in control. It’s a mixture. There’s a continuous and fluid spectrum of interaction going on inside your brain, and therefore it isn’t a simple matter to identify which living entities are exerting which forces. By a similar line of reasoning, it’s difficult to precisely define the meaning of the word “I”. I generally model myself as a singular emergent entity, a point of emergence if you will, and I believe there are an infinite number of “I’s” that exist throughout the spectrum of 3-D scale, and all of those I’s exert forces which contribute toward determining the path forward – thereby creating a distributed net sum throughout 3-space – effectively forming the will of God.

  45. Eddy Nahmias says:

    In light of Jeff’s comment, I thought I’d offer this bit from my article “Is Free Will and Illusion?” in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s new volume in the Moral Psychology series, in a section where I suggest that many scientists arguing that free will is an illusion assume that free will (and/or consciousness) requires dualism:

    It seems backwards for cognitive scientists to simply assume a non-naturalistic or dualist theory of free will, since the history of cognitive science can be seen as a series of attempts to demonstrate how we can put aside dualistic theories of mind and cognitive functioning.  Descartes argued that humans’ cognitive capacities to use language and reason simply could not be explained in terms of natural mechanisms.  As cognitive scientists increasingly explain how the mechanisms of the brain can explain language and flexible reasoning, they do not thereby conclude that we lack these capacities.  Rather, they conclude that dualist theories of such capacities are false. [note] An objective of cognitive science is to find out how the cognitive capacities of the mind/brain work, not to argue that they are illusions because they work in non-magical ways.  The sciences of the mind are in a position to explain free will, rather than explaining it away.

    [Note] Even if ordinary people accepted a dualist theory that these cognitive capacities are carried out in a non-physical soul, cognitive science would suggest that we revise that common view, not that we conclude that language and reasoning are illusory or that we should stop attributing these capacities to humans.  It would be bizarre for a neuroscientist (paraphrasing Montague 2008) to claim that, because language and reason are commonly thought to “emerge wholly formed from somewhere indescribable and outside the purview of physical descriptions,” language and reasoning are thereby “not even in principle within reach of scientific description.”  Similarly, for the minority of people who are committed to non-naturalism about free will, the proper response is to revise their view, not to adopt their mistaken definitions in order to conclude free will is an illusion (cf. Vargas, 2009).
    • Jeff Johnson says:

      Great points, Eddy. I agree fully with your contention that “the sciences of the mind are in a position to explain free will, rather than explaining it away.” I also wanted to comment that I agree with your earlier thinking about DEGREES of free will. It seems to me that seeing free will as a matter of “degrees” is one area where we could really make progress as a society and where the cognitive sciences can be extremely helpful. For instance, when we talk about moral responsibility or criminal culpability, does the heroin addict have the same “degree” of free will as an ordinary criminal? Of course not!

      Yet our justice system is still largely based on this notion; further, the cognitive sciences either set the free will bar impossibly high, or they create studies largely designed to counter an outdated dualistic picture of the human mind.

  46. Alfred Mele says:

    Jeff, James, and Eddy, I can see that you’re definitely ready for extra innings. Jeff, I like your point about reverse dualism, and Eddy does a nice job of developing a point like that in the quotation he sent us.  (Eddy, can you send us the reference for Vargas 2009?)

    In a way, it’s not surprising that the scientists who reject free will tend to set the bar for it very high. After all, after a point, the higher you set the bar for anything, the less likely it is to be reachable (to return to a point I made earlier). But, right, why lump free will together with souls and the supernatural rather than with the important capacities that cognitive science strives to understand?

    I’d like to turn to something that bears on all three of the new comments, a little study I did that was designed to generate evidence about whether the majority of non-specialists believe that free will depends on non-physical minds or souls. It was mainly Manuel Vargas – Eddy just now mentioned him – who motivated me to conduct the study. I first reported the results in a 2012 paper in the Monist, “Another Scientific Threat to Free Will?” But I haven’t quoted yet from my book for undergrads, A Dialogue on Free Will and Science (Oxford UP, 2014). So, just for fun, I quote from the presentation there of the study.

    DEB: He had them read a little story. The first part went like this. . . . In 2019, scientists finally prove that everything in the universe is physical and that what we refer to as “minds” are actually brains at work. They also show exactly where decisions and intentions are found in the brain and how they are caused. Our decisions are brain processes, and our intentions are brain states. Also, our decisions and intentions are caused by other brain processes.

    ALICE: I see. If everything in the universe is physical and souls aren’t physical, there aren’t any souls – at least not in the universe.

    DEB: Right. And the second part went like this. . . . In 2009, John Jones saw a twenty dollar bill fall from the pocket of the person walking in front of him. He considered returning it to the person, who didn’t notice the bill fall; but he decided to keep it. Of course, given what scientists later discovered, John’s decision was a brain process and it was caused by other brain processes.

    BOB: And then what?

    DEB: Then they were asked whether John had free will when he made his decision. Guess what they said?

    CLIFF: Well, I’d say yes – at least if we’re assuming that free will is possible. Maybe most people would.

    DEB: Seventy-three percent of them said that John had free will at the time.

    BOB: And the point is they’re saying that even though they’re thinking of John as a totally physical being.

    FRAN: You have an amazing memory, Deb. Do you remember how many people were surveyed?

    DEB: Ninety.

    ED: Might it be that these people have really low standards for free will? Who were they anyway?

    DEB: They were people right here in Tallahassee – students at FSU.

    BOB: Hmm.

    DEB: And about the low standards. . . . The professor tried to get at that by having them read another story, in which John is under the influence of a “compliance drug” when he sees the bill fall; and only a small percentage said that he had free will in that story.

    BOB: Well, at least the philosophy professor is providing some evidence about what people mean by free will. Dr. Montague seems just to be telling us what he means by it.

    DEB: Right, I think that was part of the philosopher’s point.

    ALICE: We started on our latest track when I asked whether most religious people think of free will in the premium way – whether they’re top-shelfers. [Note to BQO bloggers: top-shelfers are people who believe that free will depends on non-physical souls.] If we did a survey of our own, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that most FSU students believe in souls. Fran said that although she believes in souls, she doesn’t believe they’re needed for free will. Maybe many FSU students are like Fran in that respect.

    That’s it for now. More later. Btw, faculty can get a free examination copy of the dialogue here: http://global.oup.com/ushe/product/a-dialogue-on-free-will-and-science-9780199329298?q=Alfred%20R.%20Mele&lang=en&cc=us

    • Eddy Nahmias says:

      Vargas, M. (2009). Revisionism about free will: A statement & defense. Philosophical Studies, 144, 45-62. 

      Manuel discusses his revisionism in many other places, including the wonderful back-and-forth book, Four Views on Free Will (with him, Derk Pereboom, Robert Kane, and John Fischer) and his new book, Building Better Beasts.

    • Jeff Johnson says:

      Dr. Mele,

      That’s a very interesting dialogue! Thanks for sharing it. As for myself, I don’t believe a soul is required for free will, either. In fact, I think you would probably find that a free will = soul mindset is more likely to be held by older people than young ones. 

  47. Alfred Mele says:

    Thanks, Eddy. P.S. I think you meant Building Better Beings.

  48. James Laird says:

    Al,

    I enjoyed the conversation between DEB, ALICE, etc…

    So it sounds like 73% of the respondents to the survey believe the term “free will” means the “modest sense”. Either that’s the case, or they believe it’s possible for new physical entities to emerge in the universe (e.g., new physical forces), in which case, those respondents don’t necessarily have low standards since they likely believe in “ambitious free will”.

    It sounds like the other 27% believe in “ambitious free will”, along with the requirement that a person must have a soul in order for ambitious FW to exist.

    I didn’t read anything in the scenario that precluded the possibility of new emergent physical forces, which to me, means that the scenario isn’t necessarily predeterministic in nature. (Causality was specified, but that’s not one and the same as predeterminism.)

    Regarding the “compliance drug”, it makes sense to me that the majority of the respondents would believe John possessed less free will while under the influence of the medication. I’m unsure why the professor thought the influence of the drug may be related to “low standards”, when all believers – those who believe in modest FW and those who believe in ambitious FW – would likely find that John had less free will while under the influence.

    I’d enjoy reading your analysis of the survey results.

  49. shaun2000 says:

    For proof we lack concepts essential to comprehending free will I can point to our inability to distinguish consciousness from what’s supernatural, ie something divine. Consciousness is prosaic, universally reported, an everyday reality, for the godly and secular alike. It is part of the real world. But it is not yet accessible to physics. Therefore today’s physics is incomplete. The most pressing issue I see raised by consciousness is, how to develop the missing physics. Without it, efforts to identify the mechanisms of consciousness are likely to be premature.

    I can’t imagine free will existing except as a manifestation of consciousness. That seems its essence. So something else I think is premature is trying, using today’s discourse of reason and science, to plumb the nature of free will. I assume that some future physics, that I’ll call physics2200, will be able to account for consciousness, but then it won’t necessarily set the limits to free will today’s physics does.

    Meanwhile, we as individuals continue to need procedures for optimizing the experience of consciousness, as our ancestors did. I think their principles remain a better guide to how to live than a science so obviously lacking in just this crucial domain. Although belief in God is part of tradition, I prefer to look for guidance in traditional secular terms such as “consciousness” and “free will” more open to redefinition in the light of new discoveries than Christianity.

  50. Meyer1953 says:

    Hello;

    In the free-will debate, there is really a limited set of options for the non-free will set.

    One: the universe is deterministic, entirely.  What we “think” that we know, is what the universe set us to think within its defining determinacy.  In a deterministic world, there is a possibility of sensitive dependence on initial conditions – but, those conditions being deterministic can only possibly go one way exactly.  So, any random influence would blast the whole determinate-universe premise straight out of the water.  Even one butterfly wing’s worth of random anything would collapse the determinism into a free-will for all.

    Two: Modified determinism.  In this, the universe is effectively deterministic in a critically specific fashion: the universe is not really deterministic, altogether, but the universe IS deterministic from attractor to attractor.  An attractor, in this sense, is what events coalesce about even though they seem to be random.  So, this determinism is the universe lurching from attractor to attractor.  As long as the whole archipelago of attraction stays within the deterministic lurchings, the universe is functionally deterministic.  In such a universe, thought would stay irrelevant – unless, of course, thought itself was a component of the attractor function.

    In a really deterministic universe, there would be actually zero entropy since there is no possible disarrangement nor arrangement of the universe.  It would be functionally identical to watching a movie – the watching never changes the outcome.  In a zero entropy universe there would be no time, since it all is concluded before it begins.  Our idea of “time” would be a mid-state of the universe’s utter indifference to any of its self.

    In such a universe, we are explicitly and uninterruptibly free absolutely to trumpet and proclaim and celebrate and rejoice that we are gifted from the highest heavens with an unutterably unshakeable free will that is glorious and life itself.  Because, we recall, there is no perturbing Mother Nature at all, whatsoever.

    So, I live my life.  I.  Live.  My.  Life.

    I rejoice, I celebrate, I dance.  Welcome home.

  51. George Gantz says:

    Al et al –   This is a wonderful dialogue and I agree we seem to be making progress.  Even so, I am reminded of the fable of the six blind men trying to describe an elephant.  Shaun is correct that current science is inadequate to explain a causal mechanism for the emergence of consciousness and the capacity for freely willing – as a result the scientific discussions are peppered with metaphysical presumptions.  However, if such a mechanism ultimately extends into the quantum foam or the multiverse, then perhaps the science will never be adequate.  We will always be faced with paradox in trying to explain the causal mechanism behind human consciousness and the capacity for freely willing.

    One question for the team – the focus of the discussion has been on scientific explanations, but is it not possible that we can learn as well from informed introspection?  If we bring scientific understanding into meditative or mindfulness practice, perhaps we can find a different pathway for dealing with paradox.

  52. James Laird says:

    George,

    I agree with you and others, that mankind needs to develop new methods for discovering the truth. We’re living in exciting times! 

    (BTW: I’m thinking that 27% of Al’s survey respondents may also be comprised of people who deny the existence of any form of free will. In addition, the 27% could be comprised of people who believe the term “free will” means the “ambitious sense”, while simultaneously believing that the scenario is insufficient to allow the existence of ambitious FW.)

  53. twclark says:

    Hi Al,

    Glad this discussion got extended, good stuff from many quarters.

    You think it might turn out that we have “ambitious” free will, the sort that obtains if the universe isn’t deterministic (“the ambitious one insists on indeterminism in a certain connection”).  But I wonder how indeterminism adds to control or responsibility, in which case is it even rational to want ambitious free will? If, as you believe, uncaused decisions and actions are impossible, then it’s the case that agents ordinarily determine (cause) their decisions/actions on the basis of their current mix of motives and cognitions in a given situation (“I do think of our conscious states as caused; the causal chains include events in the external world and events in the brain”). That is, they usually can control their behavior on that basis. How would indeterminism enhance that control?

    One way, perhaps, is that indeterminism might leave the future open such that our decisions help to fix it at the moment of deciding (at which point it becomes the fixed past). You say ambitious free will might obtain if “What will happen is partly up to us in a way that it could not be if all our actions were already in the cards, as it were.”  The question though is how indeterminism adds to our actions being up to us, since for an action to be up to us is for our choices and actions to be determined by our desires and deliberations. If there’s something indeterministic about me, or about my situation, that leaves it open (undetermined) which way I’ll choose until I choose (and not before), how does that make it more up to me or give me more control? And on what basis does that indeterministic bit decide or influence a decision in the direction that’s actually taken?

    One mainstream view in physics, based on special relativity, is that spacetime is a four dimensional “block universe” in which all moments, past, present and future, equally exist. See for instance Brian Greene’s book and PBS series “The Fabric of the Cosmos” on time,http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/fabric-of-cosmos.html#fabric-timeand see the Radio Lab episode “No Special Now” athttp://www.radiolab.org/story/91506-no-special-now/.  On this “eternalist” view, the future is just as real and fixed as the past, which seems to rule out ambitious free will. But again, I don’t see how having the future *not* be fixed would give us more control, since what we rationally want is to be part of a deterministic (law-like) pattern of control in which the agent is an identifiable element. On this see “Scripting the Future” athttp://www.naturalism.org/spacetime.htm 

  54. Alfred Mele says:

    Things are very lively on the blog. Thanks again to everyone.

    I’ll start with my little x-phi study, which James commented on. It was intended to generate evidence about whether the majority of people believe that non-physical souls are required for free will. The story is set in a wholly physical universe, and it is silent on whether that universe is deterministic or indeterministic. A yes answer to the question whether John had free will at the time is compatible with a belief in modest free will and with a belief in ambitious free will (as I described the modest and ambitious views). The “compliance drug” part of the study is designed to test the hypothesis that my participant pool has a free-will-no-matter-what attitude. James is right that some of the people who denied that John had free will at the time might have a no- free-will-no-matter-what attitude.

    I wish I could be around for physics2200, Shaun. I know some physicists who work on free will and consciousness. I met some of them at a conference in Barcelona a few years ago. Here’s a link to the conference website. http://www.socialtrendsinstitute.org/experts/experts-meetings/bioethics/is-science-compatible-with-our-desire-for-freedom

    Meyer1953, you’re a newcomer to our discussion. I like your optimism. And George, I like your question for the group. One thing I’ve wondered about in this connection is how people think of the control they have over their behavior in situations in which they feel in control.

    Good questions, Twclark. I take up these issues in a recent paper of mine: “Libertarianism and Human Agency,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (2013): 72-92. I can’t do justice to them in this blog. But I can give you some hints. Suppose we discover that determinism is true of our universe. Even so, you and I have done some controlling. For example, we controlled the movements of our cars in a way our passengers and pedestrians did not. But, given that our universe is deterministic, we lack a kind of control that some people value – a kind of control a being exercises in doing something only if it is at no time determined that he will do it. This kind of control involves a kind of flexibility that the control we exercise in deterministic universes doesn’t.

    Now, does this second kind of control “add to our actions being up to us”? Well, what does it mean to say that something is up to you? Here I’m going to quote something from a paper of mine. It’s technical, but I think that’s ok in the present context. The paper is my “Is What You Decide Ever up to You?” in I. Haji and J. Caouette, eds. Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, 74-97.

    “A compatibilist may propose that the following is sufficient for its being up to S what he will decide at t – or, more specifically, for its being up to S whether he will decide at t to A or instead decide at t to B: S is free from compulsion and coercion, has good reasons to A and good reasons to B, is unsettled right up to t about whether to A or B, and, for the duration of his unsettledness about this, is able (on a compatibilist reading of “able,” of course) to decide at t to A for reasons that recommend his A-ing and able to decide instead at t to B for reasons that recommend his B-ing. . . It is open to a libertarian to accept a version of this proposed sufficient condition that differs from it only in that “able” is read as O-able.” [Here’s what you need to know about O-ability, from the same paper: “According to an incompatibilist view of an agent’s having been able to do otherwise than he did, an agent who did not A at t was able at the pertinent time to A at t only if in a possible world with the same laws of nature and the same past up to t, he A-s at t. This view is about what I dub being O-able to A. On this view, if agents in deterministic worlds are able to do anything at all, they are able to do only what they actually do. For in any world with the same past and laws as S’s deterministic world, W, S behaves exactly as he does in W. In deterministic worlds, agents have no O-abilities.”]

    Has the libertarian added anything interesting to the compatibilist account of it’s being up to you what you decide? Yes, the libertarian has added the kind of flexibility I mentioned. This is another hint. Sometimes people who say that indeterminism can’t make any contribution to control are looking for magical (i.e., impossible) control, and anything short of that won’t satisfy them. I’m not looking for magical control.

    • twclark says:

      Thanks Al. So ambitious free will involves a “kind of control a being exercises in doing something only if it is at no time determined that he will do it. This kind of control involves a kind of flexibility that the control we exercise in deterministic universes doesn’t.”

      I guess I don’t see what this sort of flexibility adds to control, since if the agent is at no time determined (by her motives and cognitions) to choose or act as she does, then at the time of the choice *she* doesn’t determine her actions and so can’t exert control or be responsible.  Or have I missed something?  Perhaps an example illustrating the additional, valuable control added by indeterministic flexibility would help. If it isn’t magical and is rational to want, seems to me such control should be naturalistically and transparently specifiable in a way that just about everyone reading this blog could understand. 

    • Jeff Johnson says:

      I thought I’d share a couple of links. Back in 2010, a veteran Neuroscientist (and noted memory expert) named William Klemm came out with an interesting paper that critqued many of the most well-known free will experiments and the interpretations and assumptions behind them. It was a very good read:

      FREE WILL DEBATES: SIMPLE EXPERIMENTS ARE NOT SO SIMPLE

      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2942748/

      Last Month, Dr. Klemm had an interesting article in Psychology today that took a look at memorization and it’s role in free will and consciousness. Eddy Nahmias was also mentioned in the article.

      WHAT DOES MEMORIZATION SAY ABOUT FREE WILL?

      http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201404/what-does-memorization-say-about-free-will

      Also last month, Dr. Klemm released a new book: MENTAL BIOLOGY: THE NEW SCIENCE OF HOW THE BRAIN AND MIND RELATE. From the description:

      “The author focuses on how mind emerges from nerve-impulse patterns in the densely-packed neural circuits that make up most of the brain, suggesting that conscious mind can be viewed as a sort of neural-activity-based avatar. As an entity in its own right, mind on the conscious level can have significant independent action, shaping the brain that sustains it through its plans, goals, interests, and interactions with the world. Thus, in a very literal sense, we become what we think.”

      http://www.amazon.com/Mental-Biology-Science-Brain-Relate/dp/1616149442

      Finally, and on a side note, I noticed that last fall it was announced that Dr. Klemm is combining Neuroscience and Relgion into a new course he’ll be teaching. Since Dr. Mele’s BQFW project also had a Theology aspect, I thought I’d pass on this link since Dr. Klemm’s course also touches on the free will/religion issue.

      http://www.theeagle.com/news/local/article_04fa185e-0528-5af8-8864-edc034002d52.html

      I haven’t really seen Dr. Klemm get a tremendous amount of attention in the whole free will debate. So I posted these links in the event that there are posters here who haven’t heard of him or read any of his stuff. He’s quite an impressive fellow for being in his late 80s!

  55. James Laird says:

    twclark,

    When people wonder how indeterminism could possibly add to control, they’re probably imagining two thoughts interacting with one another inside a physical brain in an indeterministic manner, which obviously wouldn’t add to control. Perhaps we need to stop thinking about indeterminism in that respect, and instead, focus on how the initial emergence of our thoughts becomes free from the four fundamental forces of physics (4FFOP), thereby creating indeterminism.

    Let’s keep in mind that intelligence is an emergent property of human thoughts, and said intelligence exerts control, and therefore it’s reasonable to believe that even if the initial emergence of our thoughts has associated indeterminism, the interaction of our thoughts *isn’t* necessarily indeterministic.

    Okay, so how can we show that our thoughts emerge in a manner that’s not controlled solely by the 4FFOP?

    I think it’s reasonable to claim that neurons cause our thoughts to emerge, while at the same time, neurons aren’t solely responsible for the forces exerted *by* our thoughts. Our thoughts exist as waves of billions of neurons firing in a coordinated manner, and something new emerges at the wave level that isn’t simply a direct sum of preexisting forces – there’s new intelligence. To me, said intelligence effectively introduces indeterminism, and that’s the kind of indeterminism we’re looking for – it makes the connection needed to support the existence of ambitious free will.

  56. George Gantz says:

    Is it fair to say there is a modest determinism and an amitious determinism?  The modest determinist would say that yes, indeed, the univrse is deterministic, but you can still have the appearance of free will and, of course, this is modest free will, something the compatibalists would be comfortable with.  The ambitious determinist is one who would deny that there is no free will – the notion of a perfectly Newtonian clockwork universe, and many descriptions of the Minkowski block space-time, fall into this category – as does the Libet et al crowd.  I would also note that it is possible for the universe to be indeterminate, but without free will – in this case randomness would serve as the non-free-will causal mechanism.

    To be honest, none of this makes sense to me.  It would appear, from the perspectives of quantum physics, mathematical complexity AND our personal experience as conscious agents causing changes in the world around us, that the univrese is inherently non-deterministic, and we successfully practice ambitious free will in our lives most of the time.  Whether there will ever be a physical, emergentist explanation of consciousness that brings free agency with it is not known.  Such an explanation may never be known.  In fact, it may not even exist and we are destined to live forever with the paradox of non-physical causal explanations.   That, by the way, is where I put my own faith.

  57. twclark says:

    Al, thanks for your reply. You say ambitious free will involves a “kind of control a being exercises in doing something only if it is at no time determined that he will do it. This kind of control involves a kind of flexibility that the control we exercise in deterministic universes doesn’t.”

    I guess I don’t see what this sort of flexibility adds to control, since if the agent is at no time determined (by her motives and cognitions and reasons) to choose or act as she does, then at the time of the choice *she* doesn’t determine her actions and so can’t exert control or be responsible.  Or have I missed something?  Perhaps an example illustrating the control added by indeterministic flexibility would help. If it isn’t magical and is rational to want, seems to me such control should be specifiable in an everyday context.

    Re could have done otherwise: I’m not sure that we are only able to do what we actually do in a deterministic universe, since we can imagine counterfactual situations which may never happen in which we likely would do something that we never actually do. So although I’ve never done and may never do X, I’m still *able* to do X. What we aren’t able to do, according to the compatibilist, is transcend the causal determinants of action such that in an *actual* situation we could have done otherwise – I take it that’s what not having O-abilities amounts to. This might seem to some folks a denial of an important sort of freedom, but as I’ve suggested, I don’t think such freedom is coherent or would buy us anything in terms of control or responsibility. 

  58. James Laird says:

    Al,

    I’ve been thinking about the technical argument from your paper “Is What You Decide Ever up to You?”.

    In a predeterministic world (i.e., a world wherein the 4FFOP are solely responsible for controlling all activity), I believe agents have no O-abilities. However, in a deterministic world wherein life exerts new emergent forces that add together with the 4FFOP and are thereby part of what determines the path forward, I believe agents do have O-abilities.

  59. urimaoz says:

    As a scientist, I must admit my frustration with some of the comments posted here. Many philosophers (and those interested in philosophy) appear to discount contributions that science can make to philosophical debates, based on first principles or for other reasons. And this is reflected here. That is not to say that scientists (and those interested in science) do not hold similarly disparaging views of philosophers, for example claiming that they deal in opinions and belief systems rather than in facts, and do not base their argumentation on data. This is inline with Snow’s two-cultures argument.

    However, we must remember that philosophy and science both strive to arrive at the truth, though using different methods, and that the best science and philosophy rely on the foundations of logic and clarity. Neuroscience, a discipline that has only relatively recently been striving to study ever-complex concepts like free will and consciousness, could look to and be aided by the long tradition of analysis of these concepts in philosophy. This could potentially help neuroscientists clarify the concepts that they investigate and unearth and examine their implicit assumptions. Similarly, philosophers could do worse than learn about the results of empirical investigations and modeling efforts of concepts that they are analyzing. These could serve as boundaries for their discussions, and make them face some implicit assumptions too.

    From my experience, at least, it is difficult, time consuming, and often frustrating to reach across disciplinary boundaries, learn each other’s languages and try to interact at eye level; or it is at least more difficult than to snuggle up with the familiar jargon and agreed-upon way of thinking and implicit axioms of one’s own discipline. But cross-disciplinary discussions can be so fruitful that they are worth the effort. Neuroscientists like to point out that philosophers have had millennia to investigate high-level concepts like free will and consciousness, and have not managed to arrive at agreed-upon explanations. Philosophers often retort that scientists are spending a lot of empirical and modeling effort on what are, at best, naïve interpretations of these high-level concepts. So they end up with ingeniously and rigorously derived results that refer to concepts that are so off the mark as to be useless. While not guaranteeing success, if philosophers and scientists learn to work together, they may at least have a chance. Paraphrasing Tennyson “better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all”.

  60. Alfred Mele says:

    Jeff, thanks for the comments and the links to William Klemm’s work. He and I have exchanged e-mails about free will and science since 2010. We’re allies on the topic.

    James, in my opinion, Twclark is free to respond to your comment – even if there’s some indeterminism in the process that issues in the decision he makes about whether to respond.

    George, I think you meant to say that the ambitious determinist denies that there is free will. But, right, there are compatibilists, there are people who believe that determinism is true and there’s no free will, and there are people who believe that determinism is false and there’s no free will. Libet, by the way, believed in a limited kind of free will – freedom to veto an urge once one becomes conscious of it. This came to be known as “free won’t.” What you say on the positive side is opposed to Twclark’s view. You may be interested in the response I’m about to give to his latest comment.

    Twclark, you write: “if the agent is at no time determined (by her motives and cognitions and reasons) to choose or act as she does, then at the time of the choice *she* doesn’t determine her actions and so can’t exert control or be responsible.” I don’t know what it means to say that an agent doesn’t determine her actions. That’s probably part of the reason that I don’t see why an agent would have to determine an action in order for that action to be a free action. Consider a professional basketball player who is an excellent free throw shooter. He has a free throw success rate of 90%. He stands at the line with the intention of sinking his shot, and he sinks it – nothing but net. Now, he doesn’t have perfect (or complete, absolute, total) control over whether he sinks his free throws. So does he “determine” his sinking the free throw? And if he doesn’t determine this, do you see that as precluding his having freely sunk the shot? For my own part, I have no problem saying that he freely sank the shot, despite his lacking complete control over the success of his attempt.

    You might want to say that decisions are importantly different from free throws. And I agree. But can you tell me what it means to say that an agent determines a decision he makes and why his determining a decision is necessary for his freely making the decision?

    You also write that if the indeterministic control I have in mind “isn’t magical and is rational to want, seems to me such control should be specifiable in an everyday context.” Here, I’ll quote something from chapter 4 of my 2006 book, Free Will and Luck. It derives from material originally presented in a 1999 article of entitled “Ultimate Responsibility and Dumb Luck.” It features an imaginary spokesperson for a certain kind of libertarian view.

    Wilma reports that the thought of her actions as links in a long deterministic causal chain is somewhat deflating and that the truth of determinism is inconsistent with her life’s being as important and meaningful as she hopes it is.  The thought that she is an indeterministic initiator of at least some of her rational, deliberative, intentional actions, however, coheres with the importance and significance she hopes her life has. Wilma observes that independence is among the things that some people intrinsically value. Some people value independence, in some measure, from other people and from institutions. Wilma values, as well, a measure of independence from the past. She values, she says, a kind of independent agency that includes the power to make a special kind of contribution to some of her actions and to her world – contributions that are not themselves ultimately deterministically caused products of the state of the universe in the distant past. She values having a causal bearing on her conduct that she would lack in any deterministic world. She prizes indeterministic freedom as an essential part of a life that she regards as most desirable for her. The kind of agency she hopes for, Wilma says, would render her decisions and actions personally more meaningful from the perspective of her own system of values than they would otherwise be. Although Wilma emphasizes that this kind of agency is essential to the kind of meaningful life she prizes, she says that she is not claiming that it is required for freedom or moral responsibility. Wilma is not a traditional incompatibilist; rather, she holds that determinism is incompatible with the satisfaction of some of her deepest life-hopes. Her satisfying those hopes requires that she have ultimate responsibility for some of her actions.

    Some people might value the kind of agency Wilma values because they prize a kind of credit for their accomplishments that they regard as more weighty than compatibilist credit (see Kane 1996, p. 98). Wilma says that although she respects this attitude, she does not share it. Her personal concern is not with pluses and minuses in a cosmic ledger, but with the exercises of agency to which these marks are assigned. It is not credit that interests her, she says, but independence. More fully, it is independence as manifested in rational decisions and rational intentional overt actions. Wilma acknowledges that she values compatibilist independence, but she reports that she values indeterministic independence more highly – provided that it brings with it no less nonultimate control than she would have should determinism be true.  (She takes the problem of present luck very seriously.)

    Wilma is trying, she says, to understand why some people might not share her preference for libertarian independence over a compatibilist counterpart. She reports that she is keeping an open mind, and she urges us to do the same. Wilma hopes that we can understand why, other things being equal, she would deem her life more important or meaningful if she were to discover that determinism is false than if she were to discover that it is true.

    To be sure, Wilma may never know whether she has or lacks the agency she prizes, but that does not undermine her preferences. I hope that I will never know how my children’s lives turned out (for then their lives would have been cut too short); but I place considerable value on their turning out well.  There is nothing irrational in this. Nor need there be anything irrational in Wilma’s prizing her having a kind of agency that she can never know she has. (End of quotation.)

    Twclark, you might say that you don’t see how what Wilma wants would give her any more control than she would have in a deterministic world. Can you tell me how to measure the control Wilma would have over her behavior on the hypothesis that determinism is true of our universe and the control she would have over her behavior on the hypothesis that determinism is false of our universe on the same scale? Do you have a way of measuring amounts of control that would help to give us an answer? (On this issue, see the 2013 PPR paper of mine that I mentioned earlier.) Imagine that decision making works in basically the same way under both hypotheses – with one notable exception: on the indeterministic hypothesis, it sometimes happens that decisions are made that the agent was at no time determined to make. Does that help with the measurement task?

    • twclark says:

      Al, thanks again for your remarks. A few reples:

      Now, he doesn’t have perfect (or complete, absolute, total) control over whether he sinks his free throws. So does he “determine” his sinking the free throw? And if he doesn’t determine this, do you see that as precluding his having freely sunk the shot? For my own part, I have no problem saying that he freely sank the shot, despite his lacking complete control over the success of his attempt.

      I’d say what determined (caused) the shot to go through the hoop was his decision and intention to shoot, his shooting, and the other conditions that obtained at the time.  I agree he doesn’t have complete control over the success and agree that this doesn’t preclude his having freely sunk it.

      …can you tell me what it means to say that an agent determines a decision he makes and why his determining a decision is necessary for his freely making the decision?

      What we consider to be an *agent’s* decision is ordinarily determined by the agent’s character, motives, reasons, cognitions, etc., all of which constitute the agent as a decision-maker, such that we agree it’s the agent that determines the decision (it’s the agent that decides).  For an agent to decide it has to be the agent that determines the decision, and the agent acts freely just in case (on the compatibilist view) she isn’t coerced, in her right mind, and other standard compatibilist criteria for free action. Ordinarily we wouldn’t say someone freely made a decision unless she made it on the basis of her motives, reasons, cognitions, etc., and made it in accordance with criteria for free action. I’m sure there are counterexamples to this generalization, but it seems pretty commonsensical to me.

      Can you tell me how to measure the control Wilma would have over her behavior on the hypothesis that determinism is true of our universe and the control she would have over her behavior on the hypothesis that determinism is false of our universe on the same scale? Do you have a way of measuring amounts of control that would help to give us an answer?

      I guess one way to measure control is the estimated probability that what one decides to do actually eventuates. Most of the time for most everyday, non-heroic actions that probability approaches 100% (that is, I can usually do what I want) and it does so because of very reliable causal (deterministic) connections between decisions, intentions and action for most normal folks. Now, let’s add in the libertarian factor that sometimes an agent isn’t *determined* to make a decision, but nevertheless makes it. Once the decision is made, intentions and actions proceed as before, that is, deterministically, such that the agent still can be said to control her behavior. But the antecedent fact that she wasn’t determined to make the decision doesn’t seem to me to add to control, since control is a matter of having there be a reliable causal connection between a decision and intention and action. Nor does her not being determined to make the decision make it more *her* decision, since if she wasn’t determined to make it, she wasn’t determined by her character, motives, reasons, etc. to make it. She *just decided*, for reasons she can’t specify and which therefore she can’t coherently claim as her own, seems to me.

      The same set of considerations can be applied to the process of decision-making itself. I’m in control of that process just in case the decision is determined by my character, reasons, motives, etc. Adding in the libertarian factor –  to not be determined to engage in a decision-making process – wouldn’t add to the control I have in actually carrying out that process, nor do I see how it would make it more *my* decision-making process.

      All told, I see Wilma’s desire for (non-magical) contra-causal independence as irrational (a kind of egoistic hubris or ego-inflation, I guess) since I don’t see how it can add to her authorship or control of action. Nor do I see any evidence for this libertarian factor. Still, some (many? most?) folks think that ambitious free will is what they need to have to be free, dignified and responsible. It would be good to have an everyday example of how such free will adds to compatibilist control and responsibility. Perhaps those reading this can come up with one.

    • Jeff Johnson says:

      Dr. Mele,

      I’m very glad that you’re familiar with Dr. William Klemm and his work. Perhaps I’m mistaken about this, but I’ve often thought that perhaps his articles and contributions were being overlooked in the whole free will debate since I really haven’t seen him mentioned in forum discussions like this one. Good to know that you’re aware of him and his work. I have to say, this was an unbelievably cool and informative discussion here. I think that (as a group) we’ve made some progress here. Thanks so much for your time and for all the amazing work you’ve done on this issue!

      I’ll leave you with one more link I just came across. Have you heard of Aeon magazine? I believe it just started only about a year or so ago. In any event, here is a brand new article from there; it focuses on a social phenomenon sometimes mentioned in free will debates: the dynamics of crowd and mob behavior.

      The intimacy of crowds

      Crowds aren’t really crazed – they are made of highly co-operative individuals driven to shared interests and goals

      by Michael Bond

      http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/crowds-show-us-working-together-at-our-best/

  61. Alfred Mele says:

    BQO asked me if I’d be willing to extend the discussion again — this time through Monday. I agreed — freely. I’m going to a birthday party at noon tomorrow. So I might not resume blogging until Sunday.

  62. Alfred Mele says:

    Thanks for the reply, Twclark. I’d like to touch on a couple of things here.

    First, your answer to my question about what it means to say that an agent determines a decision he makes is framed in terms of the agent’s decision being determined by various things. So it doesn’t help me much, except that now I’m guessing that part of the meaning is that the decision is deterministically caused. Anyway, I can see that you want to put the emphasis on the agent in your reply, and I’d like the focus to be on determining. I think of agents as beings that act. I don’t have any theoretical use for deep selves or real selves or anything special that we’d be referring to when we move from saying “She decided to raise her arm” to “She decided to raise her arm.” (Note to readers: if you don’t see that “She” is italicized on your monitor in the second quoted sentence, this will make no sense.)

    I’ll illustrate with a dialogue.

    Ann: Al raised his arm.

    Bob: But did Al raise his arm?

    Ann: What? I just said he did.

    Bob: No. You said “Al raised his arm.” I’m asking whether Al raised his arm. It’s a different question from the one you thought I was asking. Can’t you hear the emphasis?

    Ann: How are the questions different?

    Al Mele (interrupting): If the questions are different, they should be formulated in a way that brings out the difference. Italics won’t do it.

    Second, about control . . . Let’s call any control available to agents in deterministic universes Type 1 control. It’s sometimes called “one-way” control. Why? For the following reason. If at t in deterministic world W1 an agent exercises control in A-ing, then in any possible world with the same past and laws as W1 the agent (or a counterpart) exercises control in A-ing. Part of what Wilma is hoping is that the control she has over her behavior isn’t restricted to Type I control. Part of what she’s hoping is that it’s sometimes the case that although at t she exercises control in deciding to A, there’s another possible world with the same past and laws in which that’s not what she does at t. She explained why she hopes for this. So I won’t go into that again.

    Let’s call the Type of control she wants Type 2 control. What is it? Well, if we had an analysis of control over a decision that is silent about determinism and indeterminism, we could say that the only differences between Type 1 and Type 2 control derive from the settings in which they are exercised – that is, a deterministic setting vs. an indeterministic setting. Then Type 2 control would be no more magical than Type 1 control (unless you think that, for some reason, decisions can’t be indeterministically caused by their proximal causes).

    Now, I myself am not an incompatibilist (about either free will or moral responsibility). So I don’t say that indeterministic decision making is required for free will or moral responsibility. But does the ability to exercise Type 2 control give agents something interesting that the ability to exercise Type 1 control doesn’t? Yes, when agents exercise Type 2 control at t in deciding to A, they could have done otherwise (setting aside Frankfurt-style cases), holding the past and the laws fixed; and this flexibility (which involves holding the past and the laws fixed) doesn’t exist in deterministic worlds, worlds in which only Type 1 control is possible.

    • twclark says:

      Thanks Al. Some further thoughts:

      I don’t have any theoretical use for deep selves or real selves or anything special that we’d be referring to when we move from saying “She decided to raise her arm” to “She decided to raise her arm.”

      I agree, which is why I point to the various characteristics and processes that constitute the agent – character, motives, cognitions, etc. – as the things that determine a decision.  

      But does the ability to exercise Type 2 control give agents something interesting that the ability to exercise Type 1 control doesn’t? Yes, when agents exercise Type 2 control at t in deciding to A, they could have done otherwise (setting aside Frankfurt-style cases), holding the past and the laws fixed; and this flexibility (which involves holding the past and the laws fixed) doesn’t exist in deterministic worlds, worlds in which only Type 1 control is possible.

      The question though is whether such flexibility is the *agent’s* flexibility, something that can be chalked up to them as discrete decision-making systems. Given Type 2 control, they could just as well have done something else given the past and laws and given the exact set of motives, cognitions, etc. , which obtained. But although they could have done otherwise, that capacity or ability isn’t something *they* as a decision-making system exercise, rather it’s a function of indeterminism. So it seems to me this doesn’t constitute an exercise of (additional) control for which the agent can be held responsible.

      We don’t ordinarily cite Type 2 control when explaining behavior. When asked why we decide and act the way we do, we cite our reasons, motives, deliberations, etc. , as determinants. We usually don’t go on to add that, given these exact factors, I could just as well have done something else. After all, why suppose I *would* have done something else given these factors?  That supposition in effect undermines the very explanation I just offered.  So the way I see it, it wouldn’t do us any earthly good, in terms of additional control, responsibility or intelligibility of human behavior, for the universe to be indeterministic such that I could have done otherwise in an actual situation. Which is why I think it’s irrational to want the world to be that way (whether it is or not is of course an empirical question). 

  63. James Laird says:

    Uri,

    Thanks for bringing up an important issue. In the future, I’ll be striving to utilize balanced language thereby helping to promote coordination across disciplinary boundaries. I’m with you – teams of people with diverse ideas who respect one another can develop far better solutions than individuals working alone.

    I believe neuroscience will eventually prove the existence of ambitious free will.

  64. shaun2000 says:

    I’m with Wilma. I’ll consider only contexts in which consideration of ambitious free will makes sense. George wonders if one of them could be introspection. I’m afraid all introspection is subject to being interpreted as determined. I have more faith in armchair speculation (“philosophy”) than urimaoz, since it’s had only a couple of centuries to take into account that we evolved. For me, that discovery changes everything. But speculation must reflect some part of the observable universe outside our experience. Here’s my context:

    I am conscious, can be genuinely creative, and have free will—“volition.” Since I am a product of the process of evolution, that suggests the process of evolution can “transact” somehow in “volition.” In practice, I can deal with that “transact” only by regarding the process of evolution as having “volition” similar to mine. I’ve no way of identifying evolution’s consciousness or free will, but I might be able to identify its creativity. To do that I have to be open-minded about the possibility it is creative, as I can be.

    But that option is foreclosed if I accept today’s scientific theory of evolution. Because that theory started out with the assumption that evolution has no volition, it accounts for evolution in terms of purely physical processes, and insists that all apparent creativity in nature is the result of these physical processes. Of course, that implies that I too must be purely physical. So to account for me having genuine free will, I must reject modern evolutionary theory and allow for evolution having volition. But then I’m letting volition loose as a process active throughout the universe. Am I prepared to do that? Yes, I am. I see no alternative. Whatever my conscious experience of having free will consists of, it is part of the nature of the universe.

    I see religion as consisting of intimations of that. But now we know we evolved, we can study it not through prophecy but through the study of nature, to start with by how creative nature is. That, I believe, is accessible to study.

  65. Alfred Mele says:

    Somehow I missed the latest post by Uri Maoz. Let me just say that I agree entirely with Uri. I’d like to quote something from my 2009 book, Effective Intentions, on this topic: “Scientific evidence is accessible to philosophers, and philosophical argumentation and analysis are accessible to scientists. Even so, some members of each group are dismissive of what the other group has to offer. After writing that “many of the world’s leading neuroscientists have not only accepted our findings and interpretations, but have even enthusiastically praised these achievements and their experimental ingenuity” and naming twenty such people, Libet adds: “It is interesting that most of the negative criticism of our findings and their implications have come from philosophers and others with no significant experience in experimental neuroscience of the brain” (2002, p. 292). Later in the article, he writes of one of his critics, “As a philosopher Gomes exhibits characteristics often found in philosophers. He seems to think one can offer reinterpretations by making unsupported assumptions, offering speculative data that do not exist and constructing hypotheses that are not even testable” (p. 297). (Incidentally, several years ago, when I asked Gilberto Gomes about his profession, he informed me that he worked in a psychology department.) This is not a one-way street. More than a few philosophers, after hearing a talk of mine on Libet’s or Wegner’s work, have suggested, on a priori grounds, that they could not have been right anyway. One moral of this book is that this dismissiveness is a mistake – on each side.”

    I’d like to add that the interaction among scientists and philosophers during the three Big Questions in Free Will conferences here was very productive and very cordial. We made progress together, and that progress is on display in the chapters – many of them by interdisciplinary teams – of Surrounding Free Will. I’m expecting to see more of the same in the Philosophy and Science of Self-control conferences that will be hosted here in the next few years.

  66. Alfred Mele says:

    Twclark, you are a die-hard blogger. Good on you, as my Australian friends say.

    Regarding Type 2 control, you write: “But although they could have done otherwise, that capacity or ability isn’t something *they* as a decision-making system exercise, rather it’s a function of indeterminism.”

    An agent with Type 2 control has the capacity to make a decision in a situation in which he could have done otherwise than make that decision (holding the past and laws fixed). He exercises that decision-making capacity of his. So far, so good.

    Now, you will say that this “doesn’t constitute an exercise of (additional) control for which the agent can be held responsible.” I’m open to looking at an argument for that claim. So far, I haven’t seen a convincing one. You can have a look at that 2013 PPR paper I mentioned for discussion of this point.

    You also write: “We don’t ordinarily cite Type 2 control when explaining behavior. When asked why we decide and act the way we do, we cite our reasons, motives, deliberations, etc., as determinants. We usually don’t go on to add that, given these exact factors, I could just as well have done something else.”

    We cite our reasons and the like as causes of our decisions. The causation can be indeterministic. Right, we don’t add “and I could have done otherwise than decide to A” to our explanation of our decision. But a libertarian will add that the decision isn’t (directly) free unless I could have done otherwise than decide as I did. It would be a mistake to think that everything true of a decision has to appear in the explanation of the decision.

    Here’s another quotation from your reply: “So the way I see it, it wouldn’t do us any earthly good, in terms of additional control, responsibility or intelligibility of human behavior, for the universe to be indeterministic such that I could have done otherwise in an actual situation. Which is why I think it’s irrational to want the world to be that way (whether it is or not is of course an empirical question).”

    Keep in mind that I’m not an incompatibilist. If a compatiblist says what you say here, I say “Fine. Stay where you are. I have a very nice compatibilist view for you. My libertarian view is for incompatibilists. I can see it’s not for you.” If someone who claims that there’s no free will because (1) compatibilism is false and (2) indeterminism doesn’t open the door to the possibility of free-will level control says what you say here, I say “Give me your best argument for (1) and your best argument for (2).” When we get to this stage, if I’m lucky, I’ve already published a critique of the argument offered.

    About irrationality, I’m going to quote something on that from chapter 4 of Free Will and Luck. It comes just before the “Wilma” material that I quoted in an earlier post.

    It might be difficult, indeed, to convert someone who does not value being an indeterministic initiator to soft libertarianism. Soft libertarians are not saddled with this burden; but just as a gambler might lead a risk-averse person to understand, in some measure, what the former finds attractive about gambling, a person who values being an indeterministic initiator might be in a position to explain to someone who does not share this value what he finds attractive about being such an initiator. At least part of what attracts a soft libertarian to indeterministic initiation, it is safely said, is that being such an initiator opens the door to robust alternative future possibilities. But even if that door is closed by a Frankfurt-style counterfactual controller, a soft libertarian may value being the kind of agent of whom it is false that his every thought and action is part of a deterministic causal chain stretching back to the vicinity of the Big Bang. He may value the ability to make contributions to the world that are not part of such a chain. And why might he value that ability? Here, it is best to let a libertarian speak for himself. Robert Kane writes: “what determinism takes away is a certain sense of the importance of oneself as an individual. If I am ultimately responsible for certain occurrences in the universe . . . then my choices and my life take on an importance that is missing if I do not have such responsibility” (1985, p. 178). (Notice that Kane uses “I” in the second sentence. At least one kind of libertarian would favor a relativistic version of the first sentence, too, wanting to leave it open that the claim there is not true of everyone.)

    Now, Kane in fact requires robust alternative possibilities (at some point in time) for moral responsibility. But there is no mention of that requirement in this passage. Furthermore, even if some people would not regard their choices and their lives as being any less important on the hypothesis that determinism is true than on the hypothesis that determinism is false, other people evidently share Kane’s sentiment. There need be no irrationality in this sentiment and no confusion at its source. People who hold the view expressed by Kane in the quoted passage might not confuse deterministic causation with compulsion or constraint, for example, and they might not conflate it with an external agency. When they carefully reflect on their values and “life-hopes,” they may find that they prize possessing the power of indeterministic initiation (in the actual world) as something that, when suitably exercised, gives their lives a greater personal significance or importance than would otherwise be the case. Given their own aspirations, indeterministic initiation matters to them. People with other life-hopes might be indifferent about it, or they might disvalue it.

    Soft libertarians need not claim that all reasonable, informed people would, after due reflection, value species of freedom and moral responsibility that are open to them only on the hypothesis that they are indeterministic initiators more highly than they value compatibilist freedom and moral responsibility. However, they do claim that, for themselves, some species of freedom and responsibility that encompass or require indeterministic initiation are more attractive than anything the compatibilist can offer. And, again, they contend that the attractiveness does not derive from confusion. If there is confusion here, the burden is on their opponents to uncover it. (End of quotation.)

    Shaun2000, I get a clearer vision of your view of things with each reply you make. It’s an intriguing view. My own approach to theoretical problem solving, is to get by with as sparse an ontology as I can.

  67. twclark says:

    Twclark, you are a die-hard blogger. Good on you, as my Australian friends say.

    Thanks Al, I appreciate your hanging in there too!

    It would be a mistake to think that everything true of a decision has to appear in the explanation of the decision.

    If type 2 (libertarian) control doesn’t or needn’t figure in the explanation of a decision (and I haven’t seen an explanation that includes such control thus far, only the claim that such control might exist), then it seems not to be a type of control at all. After all, if control is real and is exercised, one would want to be shown the role it plays in bringing about a particular decision. Absent a clear, everyday example of how indeterministic causation can be exercised by an agent in service to her goals (and no examples have been offered thus far), and absent evidence that such causation actually exists, I find the claims that it might exist and constitutes control unmotivated, except by the desire to be some sort of contra-causal controller (see below).

    …you will say that [exercising type 2 control] “doesn’t constitute an exercise of (additional) control for which the agent can be held responsible.” I’m open to looking at an argument for that claim. So far, I haven’t seen a convincing one.

    The argument, as suggested above and elsewhere in this thread, is that there’s no account on offer about how indeterministic causation can be harnessed by an agent on behalf of her agenda and therefore count as control she exercises. Since you think it’s a (live?) possibility (you have a libertarian view on offer) I think the burden is on you to provide at least a sketch of how it might work to non-philosophers using everyday examples. To believe in the possibility of something that isn’t clearly specified, especially something so central to our self-conception that has implications for individuals and society, seems to me unwarranted.

    I have all sorts of non-mysterious capacities I exercise on behalf of my agenda – to think, remember, anticipate, reason, move my limbs, etc. But what I don’t see any evidence for, or any account of how it might work, is a capacity to exploit indeterminism (should it exist) by what you call “indeterministic initiation” on behalf of that agenda, such that, given the exact set of motives and deliberations in an actual situation, I could have and might well have done something else and have it be *my* doing and not luck. Indeterminism would only mean, as far as I can tell, that that set of motives and reasons might not have resulted in what actually happened, but in what sense is that *control*? (not a rhetorical question). To me it seems like the opposite of control, introducing a disconnect between the agent’s motives and reasoning and the outcome. Intelligible connections between an agent and her actions that can ground claims of origination and responsibility have to be deterministic, seems to me.

    There need be no irrationality in this sentiment and no confusion at its source.

    I agree there’s nothing irrational (or rational) about the desire for the added importance conferred on agency by the idea that we’re not merely links in a deterministic causal chain; it’s just human psychology: libertarianism caters to egoism and radical individualism (so long as one doesn’t examine it too carefully). Also, under libertarianism we can blame people in way that isn’t available on a compatibilist understanding of agency. The malefactor really could have chosen otherwise in any and all actual situations, so bears ultimate originative responsibility and thus might deserve non-consequentialist retribution for his choices. This caters to our taste for punishment. All this is perfectly understandable, if not particularly ennobling, imo.

    What I think is irrational is to believe in contra-causal agency when there’s no good evidence for it and no clear account of how it works to add control or origination. One might continue to hold open the possibility that it exists, as do you, but without better specification and evidence I see no good reason to think it’s a *live* possibility worth taking seriously. But as is evident here, some (many? most?) folks want it to be the case that they transcend determinism, thinking this could add to their power, control and responsibility, and this drives belief in or hope for libertarian free will.  

  68. Jpipersson says:

    I have a few comments and questions.

    You’re right to ask what free will is. It’s not anything. The term has no scientific meaning. All science does is try to tell us how things work. It seems to me it is just another way of saying “Am I responsible for my actions.” I anwer that question “yes,” but that is a statement of value, not fact.  I know that many things I do are influenced by factors coming in from outside and I know that people are driven to do the things they do by intermal motivations of which they are not aware. So what?

    Do you think it really matters whether consciousness of an act happens a fraction of a second before or after the act is performed? I can’t see why it does. Do you really think that it has implications for whether or not I am responsible for my actions? Again, I don’t.

    In your argument, you have set yourself up for failure. You put a lot of emphasis on the fact that cognitive science has not demonstrated that free will does not exist. What is likely to happen is that more and more evidence will come in and you will have to retreat further and further. This has happened time after time in the history of science vs. philosophy and religion.

    I am an engineer with 25 years of experience. I have done most of the things I do on a regular basis many times.  When a new situation comes up, I often can tell from a cursory review how it will turn out. I’m not always right, and sometimes I am really surprised, but I’m usually pretty close. I make 10 or 15 decisions every day. I’ve learned that for most of them, it doesn’t really matter what I decide, as long as I make up my mind. I try to be aware of myself when I am making decisions. When I have to make an important one; I do research, think about it, talk to other engineers, and do calculations. But in my experience, the final decision is never conscious. It just pops into my head. Rational thought is input into the decision – just like my unconscious experience, judgement, values, fears, and other factors are.

    On the other hand, as would be expected, inexperienced engineers have to depend more heavily on rational thought because they don’t have the internal resources I do.  In 25 years, they will have. It would be ironic if an inexperienced junior engineer has more professional free will than I do.  

     

  69. shaun2000 says:

    Some implications of the free will debate for individuals and society that occur to me:

    Implication 1. Treating the issue as a debate makes no sense. If free will wins, that might have been determined. Or free will could lose through determinism being backed up by superior powers of conscious reasoning.

    Implication 2. The human species comes with two kinds of cognition, one powered solely by physical forces and so determined, the other powered in addition by processes operating only within conscious experience and partly free of physical determinism. Both sides are accurately reporting their experience of their own nature. No reason why they shouldn’t accept their difference and co-exist, without debate.

    Implication 3. Proof of truth is functional efficiency. We separate out partisans on the two sides, set them about their business, and see which kind of person functions better, those who think they’re determined or those who experience having free will. Superior functioning will tell us, better than a debate, which side has the better case and should prevail.

    Implication 4. We should separate the two sides as separate castes. They function better at different things–scientists and engineers function better by thinking of themselves as determined and creatives and social workers function better by thinking people have free will. But it’s hard to imagine either side relishing friendship with the other. Why would someone who experiences acting out of free will want to share confidences with someone who experiences being determined, or the other way round? We establish sumptuary laws so they can tell each other apart.

    Implication 5. Individuals and society hold two incompatible natural philosophies, with no common discourse. Since there is no umpire of a higher order, qualified to judge between natural philosophies, there is no logic to either one having to submit to the other. Either one uses force to vanquish the other, or they agree that both discourses adequately represent human nature, and treat them like separate languages. Or see answer 6 below.

    Implication 6. If human nature can encompasses such contradictory philosophies, that’s a sign that to understand it more fully we need to come up with a philosophy able to operate at a level deeper than either reason or conscious experience.

    Then I get stuck. Once I decide which implication I prefer, I’ll try to write about that.

  70. Alfred Mele says:

    Thanks again, Jeff. I appreciate your interest, your enthusiasm, and the references.

    Twclark, thanks for the new post. I’ll make a few quick points.

    You’ve used the expression “contra-causal” a few times. But, of course, there’s nothing contra-causal about my libertarian view. It’s a causal view. As I’ve said, I can’t make sense of uncaused actions – including decisions.

    You asked for a “clear, everyday example of how indeterministic causation can be exercised by an agent in service to her goals.” It’s really very simple, which makes me think that you’re continuing to look for something that I’m not talking about. So here goes. Imagine that, in the case of at least some decisions, the processes that cause them actually are indeterministic and it is at no point determined what the person will decide. Examples would be any actual decision actually produced by such a process. If my decision to have my washing machine repaired was produced by an indeterministic process in which it was at no point determined what I would decide, that decision is an example. I didn’t try to harness indeterminism. I just made my decision after gathering information. But if the process that caused my decision was an indeterministic process in which it was at no point determined what I would decide, then you have an example of what I’m talking about. Now, we don’t know that my actual decision is an actual example of this, because, for all we know, it was at some point determined what I would decide. But we don’t know that it isn’t the kind of example we’re looking for either.

    You mention “*my* doing something and not luck.” I’ve already weighed in on the *my* talk, but I have a pretty good idea what you’re talking about. For a proposed solution for libertarians to the problem of present luck, see chapter 5 of my 2006 book, Free Will and Luck.

    Jpipersson, I see you’ve taken advantage of our extension to join the discussion. Thanks.

    You wrote: “Do you think it really matters whether consciousness of an act happens a fraction of a second before or after the act is performed? I can’t see why it does. Do you really think that it has implications for whether or not I am responsible for my actions? Again, I don’t.” This reminds me of something I said early in this discussion. I’m going to find it and paste it in here, so you don’t have to look back for it.

    Found it! It’s in a reply I made on May 7. Here it is:

    I don’t see strong evidence for the proposition that we never become aware of our decisions until after we make them. But suppose that proposition is true. What then? Here’s a quotation from the article of mine I mentioned:

    The supposed fact that we are just a bit off in consciously detecting decisions leaves it wide open that the conscious deliberation that preceded the decision played an important role in generating the decision.

    A comment on a remark by David Rosenthal may prove useful in this connection.  Rosenthal writes: “there is experimental evidence that we come to be conscious of our decisions only after those decisions have been formed . . . ; so consciousness cannot play a role in determining what we decide even when our decisions are conscious” (2009, p. 246).  This is a non sequitur: No one should believe that consciousness of a decision we make plays “a role in determining” our making it – even if it is supposed that we are conscious of the decision right when we make it.  We should look for causes of decisions in things that precede them; and among the candidates to be considered for causal contributors in some cases are such things as conscious reasoning, conscious beliefs, and conscious desires. (End of quotation from a 2013 article of mine.)

    This morning my washing machine stopped working – after it filled up with soapy water and clothes, unfortunately. (This is a true story.) I wondered what to do, and I had conscious thoughts like the following. . . I should try to remember or figure out how long ago I bought the machine, and I should get online and see how long a machine like mine normally lasts. Then, after I reply to the blog comments, I should call Sears, and find out what it will cost to have a repair person look at the machine. Depending on the cost, I should get online again and see what new washing machines cost. And so on. Eventually, I’ll make a decision about whether to have this machine repaired or buy a new one. Suppose that my conscious information gathering and conscious thinking about pros and cons has an important effect on what I decide but that I make my decision a couple of hundred milliseconds before I’m conscious of the decision. What’s the problem? Being just a bit off on consciously registering the time of the decision is no cause for worry about free will. (End of quotation from earlier post.)

    Another comment you make, Jpipersson, is that “free will” has no scientific meaning. Maybe so. I quoted some definitions (or comments on the meaning) of “free will” by scientists earlier in this discussion. I wasn’t wild about the quoted thoughts. Anyway, if “free will” has a meaning that includes some necessary conditions for a person’s having free will at a time, it might turn out that the hypothesis that we sometimes satisfy certain of these conditions is subject to scientific tests. For the record, here’s what we said about free will in a lexicon coauthored by a pair of scientists and a pair of philosophers. The lexicon was designed to provide guidance for applicants for grants (in science and philosophy) from the Big Questions in Free Will project:

    Free action

    1. Compatibilist theories about: According to compatibilist theories about free action, any intentional action performed on the basis of informed, rational deliberation by a sane person in the absence of compulsion and coercion is a free action even if the action was deterministically caused.  (The preceding statement is about proposed sufficient conditions for free action.  It is not being suggested, for example, that free actions must be based on deliberation.)

    2. Incompatibilist theories about: According to incompatibilist theories about free action, acting freely depends on the falsity of determinism.  In at least paradigmatic cases of free action, the combination of the past – right up to the time of action – and the laws of nature leaves two or more options open to the agent.  The main difference between incompatibilist and compatibilist theories of free action concerns the openness just mentioned.  Theories of the former kind require it for free action, and theories of the latter kind do not.  Obviously, the claim that this kind of openness is necessary for free action does not entail that every action performed in the presence of this kind of openness is a free action; there may be additional necessary conditions for free action.

    Free will.  The ability to perform free actions or to act freely.  See Free action.

    The lexicon is available here, by the way: http://www.freewillandscience.com/wp/?page_id=63

    Here is something from an earlier reply of mine (May 8) that bears on your comment about responsibility: “About modest and ambitious free will and moral responsibility: typical proponents of these views of free will associate their views closely with moral responsibility. It’s this typical approach that I have in mind.” Suppose you let yourself be guided in your thinking about what “free will” means by the following thought: Whatever it means, beings that lack it aren’t morally responsible for anything. Would that make the material I just quoted from the lexicon more relevant to you?

    • twclark says:

      Al, you say that

      Imagine that, in the case of at least some decisions, the processes that cause them actually are indeterministic and it is at no point *determined* what the person *will* decide.  Examples would be any actual decision actually produced by such a process. If my decision to have my washing machine repaired was produced by an indeterministic process in which it was at no point determined what I would decide, that decision is an example.”

      So this means that if you have libertarian control, your decision to have your washing machine repaired wasn’t determined, even though it was caused. I guess I’m wondering how a decision-making process can cause a decision without determining it to be a certain way – that is, I have a problem imagining libertarian control per your example. Are there real-world examples you know of in which things above say the quantum level are caused to happen but not determined to be as they are by what caused them? 

  71. James Laird says:

    When a property emerges in nature, it’s caused by physical subcomponents, but the property itself doesn’t come from anywhere – it simply emerges. People generally don’t doubt the existence of new emergent properties, even though they don’t come from anywhere.

    When a property is caused by consistent forces, the nature of the emergent property is likely consistent. For example, when a large number of water molecules are combined together, the emergent property of “wetness” consistently appears.

    When a property is caused by inconsistent forces (e.g., from living subsystems), the nature of the emergent property is likely inconsistent (e.g., the forces exerted by a thought).

    If life is fundamentally indeterministic in nature (which I believe is true), then higher-level emergent properties caused by living subsystems are likely indeterministic in nature.

    So here’s where I’m going with this: The indeterministic control associated with ambitious free will, is likely an emergent property of life.

  72. shaun2000 says:

    I notice two forms of discourse in this debate. One involves use of the term “compatibilism.” Here, physicalism/reductionism is the assumed default, at issue is only how much free will can be “compatible” with it, with the clear implication, “not much.” The other discourse’s use of terms like “emergent” assumes the existence of capabilities that don’t manifest themselves at the physicalist/reductionist level. The debate is only peripherally about free will, it is really about the merit of Auguste Comte’s claim that scientists must always assume causation can propogate only upwards from a base in physics, maths and reason. This is the basis for modern Positivist science.

    The term “self-consciousness,” I’ve read, was introduced into English by British students of German philosophy around 1820, two centuries after the birth of modern science. I will make a bold and maybe vile claim–people today vary in how vested they’ve become in the conscious experience of being conscious. Those less vested can account for their experience with greater comfort in terms of reductionism, those more vested can account for themselves with greater comfort in terms of processes acting within consciousness, eg “emergent ” processes.

    In my 20s, after studying biochemistry, I became a physicalist (an epiphenomenalist) and I did regard myself as a robot, my consciousness being nothing more than a passive monitor reporting what my brain and body were doing. Switching to careers as a writer and designer in publishing then converted me to dualism, and I “realized” I could direct my body and mind through conscious processes. There was no aspect of conscious experience I could not refer to in speech or writing, both physical processes.

    Common everyday discourse reinforced my convertion from physicalism to a mind-body dualism. The arts and sciences both demand creativity. But scientists are paid and praised for their mastery of statistics and reason, and encouraged to judge themselves by impersonal standards of scientific integrity. On the other hand, people like me with professions in design and writing are praised and paid for how “creative” we are. We are encouraged to see what makes us special as something happening in consciousness.

    I conclude the issue of free will can be more fruitfully discussed in terms of historical trends, as in the replacement of enlightment thinking by romanticism, than in terms of logic and reason, as I see being attempted, with no success in my opinion, in this thread.

    After so gross a disparagement of the “compatibilism” side in this debate, is there an olive branch I can offer, to mend things? I’ve not found one. To me, it’s war. There can be no reconciliation. It’s creatives fighting on behalf of conscious creativity against an army of robots marching under the banner of “reason.” What will the verdict of history be?

  73. James Laird says:

    Twclark,

    You asked: “Are there real-world examples you know of in which things above say the quantum level are caused to happen but not determined to be as they are by what caused them?”

    There are an infinite number of different patterns that exist in reality. Patterns don’t exert forces, and yet they’re causal in nature.

    When a living system perceives of a pattern, the pattern causes a certain interpretation to come into existence, while at the same time, the pattern doesn’t determine the interpretation. Different decoders produce different interpretations.

    Here’s another example: If I throw a water balloon at someone, I’ll cause them to react, but I won’t determine what their reaction is. They may laugh or they may become angry.

    A more formal way of understanding this concept, is to say that entity A may cause entity B to come into existence, wherein entity A doesn’t determine all of the emergent properties associated with entity B. All causes have causes, but some causes may not be predeterministic in nature.

  74. Alfred Mele says:

    It’s been two weeks now – a scheduled week and then a full week of extra innings. This is my closing reply. So thanks to everyone for a lively discussion. It’s been fun. I’ll be submitting a brief “summary” in a couple of weeks.

    James, it’s good to see a fan of indeterministic control. Of course, I knew by now that emergence would be in your picture of it.

    Twclark, you asked: “Are there real-world examples you know of in which things above say the quantum level are caused to happen but not determined to be as they are by what caused them?”

     Here’s one, assuming that beta decay is undetermined. I’m pasting it in from my little book for students, A Dialogue on Free Will and Science:

    BOB: Think about hearing the click of a Geiger counter. If my physics friends are right, those clicks are caused by something that’s not deterministically caused – beta decay.

     ALICE: Is it important to know what beta decay is for our purposes?

     BOB: Not really. But it’s a kind of radioactive decay. It happens when an atom emits an electron or a positron. My physics friends tell me that this process is not deterministic – that the laws that govern it are just probabilistic. A particular atom may or may not emit a beta particle – that is, an electron or a positron – at a given time. Whether it happens or not at the time isn’t settled in advance, or so they say. And my point was that, if they’re right, then some undetermined events might cause things we can detect – like clicks of a Geiger counter.

     Will this do, Twclark? Assuming beta decay in undetermined, an undetermined micro-event is among the causes of some macro-events – namely, the click of a Geiger counter and a person’s hearing the click.

    Shaun2000, I’m a peace lover; I don’t like war. Also, I don’t agree with the way you divide up the combatants. There are plenty of people – including scientists and philosophers – who march under the banner of “reason” and fight on behalf of conscious creativity.

    Everyone, I noticed that the order in which posts appear on the blog isn’t always the order in which I see them. For example, sometimes, the morning after I posted a reply to all the new comments on my monitor, I noticed a comment or two showing up higher on the list than my reply. I believe your comments were posted based on when the moderator received them. My replies were to comments the moderator had already approved. So if I didn’t comment on a substantive post of yours, the omission wasn’t intentional.