Alex,
Following a suggestion by Just Looking Around, I am forwarding to you, and expanding on some comments I made in your video of your talk to Dorset Humanists. I will also be publishing this letter at my blog. It will be convenient for me to tackle the issues I have in chronological order relative to your talk. Further, I will not be able to tackle all the issues I have for reasons of space and time. Thus I believe Hume is likely wrong about the Is/Ought gap (although it can only be bridged by a prior commitment to rationality as the maximizing of coherence between facts, values and actions, without a prior commitment to specific values beyond that view of rationality); and I am certain that Hume is wrong about the problem of induction, which in the end reduces to the rather pointless and impractical claim that the only form of knowledge is that gained by strictly deductive methods.
1) FREE WILL
Starting with your definition (and the consensus definition of the room), having free will means that:
[10:25] "You can't control what your desires are; but if you desire to do something, you can still choose not to do it."
As a working definition of free will, that is week on several grounds. Firstly, as a matter of common observation we can have multiple, contradictory desires at the same time. In that case, even if of necessity we always choose to act on the strongest desire, we end up 'choosing' to not act on the weaker, contradictory desires we have at the same time. In that case we would have free will according to your working definition, but it would clearly not be a case of free will in that our will is always determined by our strongest desire (according to our hypothetical).
You can strengthen the definition by phrasing it in terms of your "strongest desire". You then face the problem, however, that if you take "desire" to mean "A strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen." (Oxford) then as a matter of common experience, we do not always act to satisfy our strongest feeling of wanting something. Our willingness to satisfy those felt desires are often subverted by our beliefs about what we ought to desire, or ought to do regardless of our felt desires. We can use a non-standard definition to overcome that problem, so that our beliefs as to what we ought to do are also considered desires, and the strongest desire is determined by, not the strength of our feeling in favour of that outcome at a particular time, but by the actual outcome of each apparent potential choice. Doing so, however, merely renders the claim that "when we act consciously, we always act on our strongest desire" into a tautology for our 'strongest desire' at any given instant is just the desire we choose to act on (by this definition). Your further argument suggests this is exactly what you have done, of which more later.
My final criticism of your working definition of free will is that it is far from clear that we cannot choose our desires. In fact, we cannot choose them in the instant (or at least I cannot). But what we can do is by shaping our choices, change the relate strength, frequency and even types of our desires. This is the fundamental practical principle of cognitive behavioural therapy, and it works. Given this, I would argue that we act on a desire that we have shaped and strengthened by our past choices, and if those past choices were acts of free will, then even acting on that desire is an exercise of free will.
Given these criticisms, I will now provide a working definition of 'free will' that escapes these problems. To begin with, a choice is free if and only if it is a choice between two or more alternative actions or beliefs which is an outcome of our properly functioning mind, and where the outcome is not determined by external physical states alone, or by physical and mental states prior to the commencement of consideration of the choice alone. This definition of a 'free choice' asserts that if an act of free choice exists, then some internal process of our properly functioning mind determined the choice (possibly alongside other factors), where that process was part of the act of considering the choice. It makes no assertion as to the nature of the mind, and in particular has no dualist commitment.
Given this definition of free choice, we have free will if and only if at least one of our actual choices is a free choice on the above definition. We can expand on that idea by grading our freedom on will based on the percentage of our choices that are free choices by the above definition, or which are based on habits developed by such free choices where the action based on the habit would be our free choice were we to given the situation in which we act by habit full consideration. Were we to do so, IMO, we would find that humans in general have a limited free will. Many of their choices are not free, but some are. Further, we can so shape our lives to maximize our free choices as defined above, and to maximize our reliance on freely shaped habits were we do not have time for full consideration, or are acting in obviously like situations to those in which we shaped the habit.
2) DESIRE AND ACTIONS
You state [11:12], "So, whatever conscious actions you make, you'll only ever do so because you desired it."
In defense of that proposition you do not cite psychological studies, or interviews of people regarding their thought processes leading up to decisions. Instead you discuss two test cases - a conflicting desire between going to the gym or staying in bed; and a conflicting desire between going to work and staying in bed. In each instance, you merely assert that if you decide to take the (presumably) less pleasant option, it can only be because the desire for some ancillary consequence of that option (good health or an income) is stronger than your desire for the (presumably) more pleasant alternative. But that is merely to restate your thesis. In consequence, as an argument in favour of your thesis it is strictly circular.
I have already broached this issue in my discussion of the working definition of free will, so will not canvas it further. It is necessary, however, to point out that at this point your argument is simply circular.
I will, however, note that on my account of free will, if you have an initially stronger desire to stay in bed, but then in the process of decision making, your properly functioning mind brings in other considerations which, if combined with your initially weaker desire makes the overall motivation for the action satisfying it stronger - that still counts as a free choice. Thus your argument here together with the claim that we have no choice about our desires is not enough to refute free will, contrary to your claim around [16:00].
3) ARE PHYSICAL DETERMINISM, OR RANDOMNESS THE ONLY OPTIONS?
Your present a case that all physical events are either fully deterministic, or to the extent they are not determined, are random. You merely assert this to be the case, without considering of alternatives. In fact, deterministic functions can interact with randomness in ways where the outcome is neither determined nor strictly random.
The simplest example of this is the interaction of randomness with chaotic systems. Chaotic systems are, by definition deterministic. Although small variations in initial conditions can produce large changes in outcomes, the process from one to the other is fully deterministic. Typically in such systems, however, not all potential outcomes occur with equal frequency. An example of this is found in strange attactors. In the case of a dynamically evolving system defined by a strange attractor, random perturbations of the system will switch the evolution from one deterministic path to another (until the next perturbation) so that the outcome is no longer deterministic but will have the same range of potential paths as the original deterministic system. The randomly disturbed system, however, will likely have a different statistical distribution of paths than the deterministic system, where the distribution is not uniform (ie, where not all potential outcomes have equal probability). Arguably this is still random in some sense, but mathematically it is less random than an outcome with a uniform distribution.
More interesting are systems evolved by genetic drift, founder effects, and natural selection. Given time and the right conditions, such systems will consistently produce ecological systems which are local maximums in increasing entropy (or alternatively put, maximize the efficiency of consumption of available low entropy energy sources; but the specific components of the ecological systems (ie, specific species) will vary greatly. The system, therefore, produces a non-random outcome in terms of a high order description but is not deterministic.
This example is particularly interesting both because it produced human brains, and because large parts of the human brains is composed of neural nets, where the training of neural networks similarly produces non-deterministic and non-random outcomes from given inputs.
4) UNTOUCHABLE FACTS
The notion of untouchable facts ([30:00] forward) is unhelpful. Firstly, the notion of the untouchability of facts propagating forward in time is false if quantum mechanics, which includes an irreducibly random component, is true.
Even if we suppose that not to be the case, the total description of the universe at its origin is reducible to a very few facts. According to Martin Rees in a famous book, it reduces to just six numbers. Suppose those numbers to be specified to 10^31 significant figures. Then each number has just under 103 bits of information, and the total information content of the universe would be 618 bits of information. For comparison, there are approximately 1.5 billion significant bits of information in the human genome. Now arguably, the precise values of the six numbers may be irrational, and hence require an infinite number of bits to specify. However, another way of saying that is that the precise configuration of those six numbers is infinitely improbable. That in turn means that no naturalistic explanation of human existence, and of our actions is possible other than by invoking infinite worlds - which is in general a very inelegant 'explanation' (though Lee Smollin's evolving universes is relatively elegant). It follows from this that any physical theory that makes all facts untouchable is likely also to lack explanatory power (as it will either be premised on an infinitely improbable event, or need to invoke infinite worlds).
5) CONCLUDING REMARKS ON FREE WILL
To conclude my comments on free will, I would like to make two observations.
The first is that any view that does not allow for the existence of free will thereby makes consciousness redundant in their theory. and redundant because it plays no role in that views theory of how decisions are made. As a direct consequence of that, consciousness will be unexplained by that view. That is unfortunate because all theories ultimately are an attempt to explain consciousness. That is a consequence of our not having direct epistemic access to the external world. Because of that, the external world is not foundational in terms of epistemology. It is something we must argue exists as an explanation of direct conscious experiences. As such, it represents a very convincing explanation, but if in turn our further explanation of the nature of the physical world undercuts it as an explanation of consciousness, the correct response would be to reject that further explanation in favour of one that does not undercut consciousness.
The second remark is that often in discussing free will people start talking incoherently. For example, as materialists, they talk about the 'self' as though it is somehow independent of the physical body or brain, as though it could view brain activity from the outside and change it. To the extent that such incoherent phrasing is necessary to their argument (and it appears necessary to yours) their argument is inconsistent, and therefore invalid. It is not that their conclusion does not follow, but that once you allow a contradiction into your premises, all conclusions follow.
6) A PARENT'S LOVE [44:33]
You provide two counterexamples to the claim that "there is only one thing in itself that is desired, and that is pleasure". The first is that of a soldier throwing themselves on a grenade to save their companions; while the second regards the wishes of a parent for the good fortune of their children. Regarding the former (and this is also true of the later), you 'refute' the counterexample by asserting without evidence supposed facts about the underlying thoughts of the soldier as they sacrifice themselves. Your only evidence that these are what their thoughts are is your theory. You certainly do not provide any interviews with people in like circumstances or the like to show your supposition has any relation to actual fact.
This problem is compounded in the case of a parent's artificial choice. There you suggest that, "because with the position of omniscience you grant the parents before this situation begins, they know what's actually going to happen. ... That pleasure in making the right decision, in being a virtuous person, in that instance when they have to make the decision outweighs the pleasure that they think [they'll] see from living a life just thinking that their children are doing well."
We can suppose this to be true (though both you and I think it unlikely), but we can easily modify the scenario to account for this possibility by modifying the outcome so that all through their children's prosperous life, they will think their children are suffering, and will suffer for the rest of their lives, and that that suffering is entirely the parents fault. In that case, it is obvious that any momentary pleasure they take from choosing good for their children will be outweighed subjectively by a lifetime of thinking their children will suffer throughout their lives because of a choice by themselves. That is because in each conscious moment, their displeasure at being responsible for their children's suffering (as they believe) will be as great as their pleasure in the moment when they actually choose (and thereby grant) there children well being. So their subjective total displeasure will be the same as their momentary pleasure in any instant times the length of their life believing they are the cause of their children's supposed suffering relative to the period over which they were granted omniscience and made their choice.
Even in this amended scenario, I believe, the vast majority of parents would choose the well being of their children even though they would know their choice to result overwhelmingly in a greater sum of displeasure than pleasure in their life, while making the opposite choice would have the reverse effect to the detriment of their children.
Now you can reasonably respond here that my belief has the same evidentiary value as your hypothetical rebuttals of these counterexamples, and you would be correct. These scenarios are just "intuition pumps", and intuitions are not evidence. However, despite your argument, your intuitions actually align with mine on these cases. I know that because you claim the likely choice of most parents in the original scenario, and according to your opinion are irrational. But it is not rational to think that most people will make an irrational choice in a hypothetical scenario. By suggesting the choice is irrational, you are also suggesting that most people presented with that choice would know that they would personally suffer more from choosing the good of their children. And as you also think most people would choose the good of their children, it follows that you either believe that some people would knowingly choose a total life span reduction in their pleasure for the good of their children or that your beliefs on this hypothetical are inconsistent.
No comments:
Post a Comment