A massive hurricane just struck the Caribbean island of Jamaica. Aside perhaps from a few extreme pantheists who consider that consciousness exists in every part of the universe, nobody believes that the hurricane could have freely chosen to head in a different direction, at a different strength.
A tree falls in a forest, crushing a family enjoying a picnic. Only those who take the Lord of the Rings movies literally, where trees have the ability to talk and walk, would argue that the tree bears responsibility for it falling, because it could have decided to remain standing.
On a nature show, I viewed the disturbing sight of a lion killing the cubs of the lioness who fell under his control after the lion defeated another lion and took over his territory and mate. The cubs were killed because they weren’t fathered by the new lion in charge. Again, I doubt that many people would claim that the cub-killing lion was guilty of murder because he could have used his free will to let the cubs live.
A man goes on a shooting spree, murdering dozens of people. After he was killed by police, an autopsy reveals a large tumor in a part of the brain responsible for impulse control. Almost certainly this would lead to a conclusion that the man wasn’t responsible for his actions, lacking free will.
So there’s a general consensus that weather phenomena, plants, animals, and certain brain-damaged people don’t possess free will. The question that needs to be answered by those who believe that humans with normal brains have free will is this:
What is different in the supposedly free-will capable human brain that is lacking in entities which don’t have free will?
I’ve never seen a good answer to this question. The reason, I’m confident, is that since free will is an illusion, believers in it are incapable of explaining a phenomenon that doesn’t exist.
Now, some people probably would say that reason is the missing ingredient. But this makes no sense. Reason is determined by causes, chains of logic, solid arguments. Anything determined by causes obviously isn’t free. The same argument applies to emotion, intuition, or any other manifestation of the human mind. Things just don’t pop into being in the mind, they arise from causes.
Sam Harris explored this territory in his little 66 page book, Free Will. He writes:
Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we have no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.
Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.
If a man’s choice to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity, which is in turn the product of prior causes — perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of bad genes, an unhappy childhood, lost sleep, and cosmic-ray bombardment — what can it possibly mean to say that his will is “free”?
No one has ever described a way in which mental and physical processes could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom. Most illusions are made of sterner stuff than this.
The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present. As we are about to see, however, both of these assumptions are false.
But the deeper truth is that free will doesn’t even correspond to any subjective fact about us — and introspection soon proves as hostile to the idea as the laws of physics are.
Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference) and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds. A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write.
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“our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them”
No. Sorry, Brian, but repetition, no matter how many times resorted to, cannot and will not substitute cogent argument, and directly addressing cogent critique.
That, above, is simply Sapolsky-esque incoherence. Sam Harris — whom I admire, every which way! — repeating it does not make it true. Only valid defense of that claim can do that.
———-
That brief portion, quoted above from Sam Harris, actually expands into not one but two eventualities. To wit:
(1) Our (actions) are determined by prior causes, and we are not responsible for them. [Examples of this category #1: Hurricanes. As well as human beings so mentally impaired as to be incapable of coherent mens rea.]
and
(2) Our (actions) are determined by prior causes, and we are indeed responsible for them. [Examples of this category #2: Human beings of sound mental health and capable of coherent mens rea. As well as AI — not the present day mimics, but AI advanced sufficiently to attain to or surpass human complexity and intentionality.]
(Like I’ve pointed out, Gawd knows how many times: The implicit premise P1, that assumes that one can be responsible for one’s actions if and only if one is able to act independently of prior causes, is a claim that needs to be defended, not simply assumed. Not only have I never, not once, seen such defense; but, on the contrary, I have, more than once, clearly shown this claim to be untrue.)
———-
Sorry, Brian. I did say I wouldn’t object again, but I simply couldn’t not do that. The only way I can do that is by withdrawing altogether. I cannot stay, and acquiesce through silence to what is clearly wrong, I simply cannot.
My sincerest apologies for disrupting your flow, and maybe ending up a pain in the neck: but I will not be gaslighted by fallacious appeal to authority, no matter which authority is trotted out. When it comes to philosophy, you and I are on equal footing with the scientist. What they say, and what you say, and what I say, they stand or fall basis the merit of what is said, nothing but that.
(If my critique, that I have telegraphed in brief in the section preceding, and that I have presented in much greater detail more than once in past threads, is clearly addressed not ignored nor sidestepped, and if it is clearly shown to be lacking: then I will be be happy to embrace this POV just as enthusiastically as you do, Brian. If, and only if.)
This as well, because goes into the heart of Harris’s argument:
“that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present”
“Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference) and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds.”
While the above is indeed a valid argument when it comes to free will; but it simply isn’t valid when it comes to apportioning or withholding responsibility (and therefore admiration, and praise, and censure).
The human organism, which is to say the human body-mind complex, it generates thoughts and actions. Whether consciousness of thoughts and actions precedes those thoughts and actions themselves, or whether consciousness follows them, is completely irrelevant. If the organism is not impaired beyond normal limits that might admit of mens rea: then the fact that we are an organism, a body-mind complex, that generates such thoughts and actions, is what is subject to admiration and praise (or blame and censure, as the case may be).
Responsibility, in human terms, vests not in free will, nor in conscious pre-determination of our actions, but in being possessed of “normal” body-mind equipment that is capable of coherent mens rea.
Again: Whether we are, in general terms, conscious of our actions before we act, that question, while it is a completely fascinating one, and a very important one: but it is a non sequitur in terms of apportioning or withholding responsibility.
I agree with the Sam Harris statement. We have been so conditioned by what we have done and what has happened to us in the past that (probably) any decision is influenced by so many factors. Or example, I’m only writing this because I did things a bit differently today, and have more motivation to contribute to Brian’s blog site. One of the RSSB gurus, Jaimal Singh, in a letter to his disciple, wrote that you could say that if a person had made such and such a decision instead of what they actually did do, that things would have worked out differently, but according to JSingh this is all false, as (and I almost quote here) every action or event takes its predestined course.
I’m uneasy with the doctrine of predestination as it implies we have no control at all, and it’s easy to think we therefore have no responsibility for our actions, which is clearly wrong in my view. So, the way I see it is that I should assume I do have some free will and am responsible for my actions, while being aware that I’m not a blank slate.
Oh, hi Graeme.
No no, I fully agree, myself, with the portion of Sam Harris’s statement that I’ve quoted, if taken stand-alone. (All except the second clause of in the quote right at the top of my first comment.)
We’ve discussed this free will issue in great detail here over the years, thanks to Brian’s many substantive posts on this subject. And it is fully clear, basis that extensive discussion here, that we don’t have free will, in the sense that everything we do is a function of prior causes (well with some randomness thrown in as well, given QM), with no leeway anywhere for truly spontaneous “will” that is free of such. Further, it does seem, basis neuroscience research, that our consciousness is a post-hoc thing: that is, awareness of what we’re doing actually seeps into our consciousness after we’ve done it. These are both very interesting bits of scientific fact, that I’ve found out on here. And as far as those scientific facts, there’s no disagreement at all, as far as I’m concerned.
My comments were in context a specific nuance, that is the subject of a longstanding disagreement I’m afraid. Where I disagree squarely with the likes of Sapolsky, as well as the portions where people like Saltzman and Harris echo him — and with Brian’s endorsement of this POV — is when the fact of no-free-will is built on further, to arrive at a philosophical (specifically ethical) principle that holds that nothing us humans do is ever deserving of admiration or praise, or blame and censure, or regret. And this nuance we’ve gone into very great detail, discussed threadbare, over many threads; and I’ve very clearly laid out my reasons for saying that that ethical position does not follow, at all, and that it is so utterly wrong as to be incoherent. Like I said, that’s one point on which I disagree squarely with Brian, I’m afraid.
If you’d like to engage with that question, that nuance, then I suppose I could try to hunt out the links to those past discussions (but it’ll involve trawling through multiple threads for me to find them, not the easiest thing to do!); or else we could maybe simply revisit the question here. But fair warning: it might make for a very involved and lengthy comment discussion, if we do choose to explore this in detail all over again now.
(Very briefly: None of these people, Sapolsky, or Harris, or Saltzman, actually show how no-free-leads no-responsibility. They simply assume it, implicitly, without ever defending that (hidden, implicit) claim: which makes their moral/ethical argument a circular one, a textbook logical fallacy. And what’s more, going into the claim in some detail clearly shows that the assumption does not actually hold up, at all.)
———-
But agreed, your shorthand solution does seem adequate: your position that you describe, that one knows one lacks free will, but one acts nevertheless as if one did possess (limited) free will. …Of course, that position is obviously not internally consistent. And that inconsistency can indeed be addressed, and resolved, by digging deeper. …But as a shorthand rule of thumb, I think it works well enough, absolutely!👍 …Including in repudiating, at this superficial and admittedly mutually inconsistent surface level, no less than via a more in-depth examination, the contention that we bear no responsibility for our acts and deserve neither admiration nor blame for anything we do.)
There is no free will in the natural world. Only we humans allocate free will to ourselves by courtesy of our evolved ability to think abstractedly.
The concepts of free will and the self, go hand-in-hand. The ‘self’, my identity or what I call ‘me’, ‘myself’, comes into the picture by cutesy of my personal history. Without the recall of this history (the accumulation of years of experiences and information), no self-structure could be formed.
The self structure, which is thought to be a separate entity independent of the physical body, is believed to have the capacity to freely will its thoughts and actions. It is close to the idea of a soul where this ‘me’, or ‘I’, generates thoughts, feelings and actions distinct from the physical organism.
It does seem that we freely will, yet with observation, it can be seen that what we call free will is really limited choices derived from our conditioned histories, histories that are bounded by the information we have accrued in our lifetimes.
We can, though, change what we think and how we act through exposing ourselves to other sources of knowledge and information. This is the closest we can ever get to something like free will; even so, such choices are always bound by the information our brains hold and regurgitate as memory.
There is no evidence I can see that such choices emanate from anything beyond what our brains store as information.
“What is different in the supposedly free-will capable human brain that is lacking in entities which don’t have free will?”
There are definitely levels of personal freedom to act as we wish.
That is built upon our level of awareness. The more aware we are of what we are doing and its effect on ourselves and others, the more freedom we have to act differently, to see alternatives, or create new ones we like better, and to now act in those new ways that didn’t exist before, at least to us. That is an expanding level of freedom.
The more ignorant we are of who we are and our effect upon others, and the effect of our conditioning upon us, the less aware we are of options, the less we understand our capacity to create options, the less freedom we have, and so we act reactively. There is little “will” in such actions and little freedom.
We gain freedom, Paradoxically, through self-discipline, through the acts of will that may not come easily to us at the time, but which earn for us much greater freedom, as we choose such actions. Deferred gratification for a higher cause. These may be new choices for us. Before we didn’t realize how important they were, how valuable they were. Now we realize we have built a great foundation, and standing upon that foundation of our own acts of will, we have greater freedom. And with that, greater responsibility. And we enjoy the wealth of those choices we have begun making, which encourages us to continue down that path of personal freedom.
“Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference) and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds.”
“Spontaneously” is the dishonest resignation to the fact that one doesn’t actually know.
“cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds.”
Confusing brain with mind in order to make a claim about mind.
There has not been found a locus of conscious thought in the human brain.
That suports a different statement of fact supported by neuroscience : The locus of consciousness isn’t in the physical brain as we know it today.
The history of science again and again demonstrates the foolishness of trying to conclude a cause when the science isn’t advanced enough to do so. Invariably such conclusions were proven wrong.
And to claim there is no cause is to withdraw from rational scientific thinking. This crazy behavior, that one is scientific right up to the point they resign from science, makes no sense.
If you are going to be a scientist, go the whole damn way, right up to that pedestal upon which sits the golden crown etched with the words, “I DONT KNOW STOP LISTENING TO ME.”
And that platform also bears the crystal tablet of Truth etched by God Himself which we who cost to start the crown must also carry. It is emboldened with the words. “LET US LOOK WITH OPEN MIND INTO THE AWESOME MYSTERY TOGETHER”
The question of free will and whether we could have chosen differently than we did probably rests on the type of brains we have. It could all come down to the difference (for example) between psychopathic brains and (if such a thing exists) normal brains.
It is thought that the brains of psychopaths are genetic, related to the brain’s physiology. And, whether such types become heartless killers or heartless leaders of business, politics, science, etc., depends on one’s formative years. Some of the past and present business and world leaders fit into this category. They probably have no choice but to act out their genetic/behavioural tendencies.
Psychopathic types cannot actually help being the way they are, seeing nothing wrong with attacking anyone who criticises them or stands in their way and manipulating people, rules and laws to achieve their ends. They literally have no choice but to act out their agendas, only variations in how they achieve them. The normal or average person who doesn’t have the neurological patterns of a psychopath and who feels empathy and remorse does seem to have a wider field of options at their disposal.
Again, free will is unnecessary. It is the biological and psychological choices that rule thought and action – and within that framework, choices arise.
Some things are predestined and some things aren’t. Why is that a hard to understand? Can’t you chew gum and walk at the same time? Walking might be a necessity but chewing gum is a choice.