thoughts on determinism

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The Free Will Pill
Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it?
From Philosophy Now magazine

Considering Choice

I have two major ethical concerns about a free will drug. The first is that it could further stratify an already highly stratified society, exacerbating social and economic inequalities. The inequality of access to technology and medicine is a serious problem already in our current world, and barring a massive global redistribution of resources, we could find ourselves in a position where the few had enhanced free will and the many did not.

As usual, a part of me must acknowledge that, given some measure of free will on my part here, I am not understanding his point.

He must be assuming that he himself has some measure of free will in order to note this here and now given the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, a free will pill has not yet been invented.

Instead, he seems to be presuming that we do not have autonomy now but that somehow in the future nature will compel the human species to invent a free will pill. And some [more privileged] will be compelled by nature to obtain this pill giving them the free will that the underprivileged will not have access to?

So we will live in a world there some can afford to acquire free will giving them an advantage over those not able to afford it?

I’m having difficulty grasping how for all practical purposes this plays itself out in particular contexts.

Creating this genuine metaphysical difference between people might lead to other divisions too. Since the notion of free will is inextricably linked to moral and criminal responsibility, one consequence might be that some people came to be held more fully responsible for their actions than others.

Okay, John buys and sell stocks after acquiring free will pill. Jane and thousands more like her buy and sell stocks the old-fashioned way: as nature compels them. Meanwhile those throughout the economy who manufacture, market, sell, and/or purchase the commodities that encompass the economy are as well, either in possession of the free will pill or are not.

Same for the is/ought world. Some take the free will pill and argue of their own volition that buying and selling stocks embodies moral or immoral behavior. Meanwhile the majority of folks unable to afford free will argue only as they are compelled to given that their brains are still wholly in sync with the laws of matter.

A little help here please. How in more detail might the free will folks go about reconfiguring the old adage, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” when capitalism intertwines the autonomous and the compelled in this brave new world.

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Free Will Is An Illusion, But Freedom Isn’t
Ching-Hung Woo says freedom is compatible with choices being determined.

Basically the standard argument:

We commonly think it obvious that a person facing multiple alternatives can choose any of them, and that the outcome is decided by free will at the moment of decision, rather than being already determined by earlier causes. All the events in the world, however, obey the law of physics, including those that happen inside a brain. If all events in the brain unfold according to classical physics, then free will in the above sense does not exist. This is because classical physics is deterministic: the state of the world at any moment is the inevitable consequence of its state at an earlier moment. Hence the alternatives are only apparently available to the decision-maker, as in fact only a single alternative is destined to be the one chosen.

But somehow this argument is then made to be compatible with freedom. Which makes no sense to me at all. And yet lots and lots of very intelligent people are able to make them compatible. So I’ve got to accept the possibility that the problem is me. In other words, there is just some snag in my thinking here – technical or otherwise – that stops me from reconciling what seems to be well beyond reconciling altogether.

Unless of course the snag is in their thinking.

Then the shift to the quantum world:

In quantum physics the so-called probability amplitude evolves according to deterministic laws but the transformation from many possible outcomes to one actual outcome takes place purely by chance. The statistical distribution for such chance events follows strict rules, but the outcome of an individual chance event is unpredictable and cannot be controlled by will. Thus any decision is either the predictable result of earlier causes (which may include quantum chance events) and is not free from determinism, or is itself a quantum chance event and is not willed. Either way, the free will we commonly take for granted is absent. What then is the freedom to choose that we so cherish and which politicians like to invoke at every opportunity?

Here of course all bets are off. Cause and effect? Going all the way back to how the world of the infinitely small is intertwined in the world of the infinitely large?

Either we are understanding the quantum world only in the manner in which nature compels us to, or we do have some measure of autonomy in grappling with it…but are still [no doubt] years and years away from understanding everything there is to know about it.

Pick one, right?

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Free Will Is An Illusion, But Freedom Isn’t
Ching-Hung Woo says freedom is compatible with choices being determined.

Choice Under Determinism

One thing we can’t avoid noticing is that we have the experience of making choices. In fact, each choice consists of two stages. In stage one we conceive alternatives, and in stage two we are aware that we have picked one of them. Often the option picked is the one whose consequences we prefer over the consequences of its alternatives, but the comparison of consequences is not always done consciously. Furthermore, both genetic predispositions and past experiences play a role in forming an individual’s preferences, so the causative factors leading to the making of a choice are complex.

Complex, or too complex? And what of those who are willing to acknowledge that the complexity leaves them no choice [if there is an actual autonomous choice at all] but to take a subjective leap to one or another conclusion. And then to behave accordingly.

Instead, most of us ignore the gap between what we think we know here and all that can be known and simply embrace a set of assumptions that permit us to go about the business of living our life as though what we think is true really is as far as we need go. And that clearly works because there is no one around able to convince them that there is in fact only one correct way in which to think about it. And that their way isn’t it.

The genes do their thing and the memes are what they are…depending on when and where you are born, who you either meet or do not meet, what you either experience or do not experience. Out in any particular world in which, like everybody else, you are shaped and mold existentially given a particular confluence of variables derived from a particular constellation of contingency, chance and change.

The conclusion is that although we do experience choice-making – that transition from stage one to stage two – this doesn’t imply the absence of determining causative factors.

That’s not the point though. The main consideration here is the complexity. The convoluted uncertainty embedded in all these factors that “I” aggregates into any one particular “sense of reality” from moment to moment. Most merely assume that their own understanding of this need be as far as they go. Others however are able to convince themselves that how they understand it is in turn how others are obligated to understand it as well. Only a very, very few become ineffably and inextricably fractured and fragmented in a swirl of ambiguity, confusion and uncertainty.

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Free Will Is An Illusion, But Freedom Isn’t
Ching-Hung Woo says freedom is compatible with choices being determined.

…how can I be responsible for the consequences of such free choices, when the chains of events that cause them were determined outside myself, beginning long ago?

Cue “compatibilism”. Which, try as I might, I am never able to reconcile with the manner in which I construe the existential relationship between determinism and value judgments “for all practical purposes”.

I’m not arguing that they are wrong, only that, so far, I am not able to grasp why [or how] on earth they are right. And even here I can only presume that [somehow] I do have the capacity to choose this. But if that is the case there is no need to speak of compatibility at all.

But: I do know where they will then take the exchange. To the argument that peacegirl comes back to time and again:

The answer is hinted at in the word ‘responsible’

Ever and always it comes down to how you have come to understand the meaning of that word even though from my frame of mind you come to understand it ever and always as nature compels you to.

Something happens. Something happens because of the behaviors that I chose. I am therefore responsible for what happened because had I not chosen the behaviors that I did it would not have happened.

That is compatibilism?

…although many aspects of my being pull me in different directions and argue with one another during the making of a difficult decision, there is a relatively stable center that I identify as my self, and this recognition means that I can take or own the responsibility for each decision that’s made by me, even through or after the competition of all these factors. This is an appropriate expediency, since the detailed tracing of all the responsible factors is practically impossible.

Again: Huh?

It makes no difference how complex the intertwined factors are. It makes no difference that I am not able to untangle them in order to assess cause and effect in any particular context. It matters [to me] only that I either had some capacity to choose these behaviors autonomously or I did not.

This was explored in the film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button:

[b]A woman in Paris was on her way to go shopping.

But she had forgotten her coat and went back to get it. And when she had gotten her coat the phone had rung and so she had stopped to answer it and talked for a couple of minutes.

And while the woman was on the phone Daisy was rehearsing for that evening’s performance at the Paris Opera House.

And while she was rehearsing the woman was off the phone had gone outside to get a taxi.

A Cab comes to a stop she moves to get it but somebody gets there first, the cab drove off and she waits for the next one.

Now this taxi driver had dropped off a fare earlier and had stopped to get a cup of coffee.

He picked up the lady who was going shopping who had missed getting the earlier cab.

The taxi had to stop for a man crossing the street who had left for work five minutes later than he normally did because he forgot to set his alarm.

While the man, late for work, was crossing the street making the cab wait Daisy, finished rehearsing, was taking a shower.

While Daisy was showering the taxi was waiting outside a boutique for the woman to pick up a package which hadn’t been wrapped yet because the girl who was supposed to wrap it had broken up with her boyfriend the night before and forgot to.

When the package was done being wrapped the woman was back in the cab but the taxi was blocked by a delivery truck.

All the while Daisy was getting dressed.

The Delivery truck pulled off and the taxi was able to go while Daisy, the first to be dressed, waited for one of her friends who had broken a shoelace.

While the taxi was stopped, waiting for a traffic light, Daisy and her friend came out of the theater.

And if only one thing had happened differently…if the shoelace hadn’t broken or the delivery truck had moved moments earlier or the package had been wrapped and ready because the girl hadn’t broken up with her boyfriend or the man had set his alarm and got up five minutes earlier or the taxi driver hadn’t stopped for a cup of coffee or the woman had remembered her coat and had gotten into an earlier cab…

Daisy and her friend would have crossed the street and the taxi would have driven by them.

But life being what it is, a series of intersecting lives and incidents out of anyone’s control, the taxi did not go by and the driver, momentarily distracted hit Daisy and her leg was crushed.

Her leg had been broken in five places and with therapy, and time, she might be able to stand, maybe even walk.[/b]

Of course Daisy’s leg was no ordinary leg. It was the leg of a world renowned dancer. And now, because of these “intersecting lives and incidences out of anyone’s control”, her life was forever changed.

And this works the same for all of us, of course. We think we are free to go about the business of living our lives autonomously. But how exactly is this point to be determined?

In a large sense our intertwining lives are akin to countless balls on a gigantic pool table. We zig and zag, caroming into each other in ways no one can truly grasp. Yet we can potentially create havoc in another’s life simply by stepping back into our apartment to retrieve a coat.

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Free Will Is An Illusion, But Freedom Isn’t
Ching-Hung Woo says freedom is compatible with choices being determined.

The nature of the self is obviously complex. Some people have a narrow sense, and some an expansive sense, of the responsible self, and even the same person’s self-perception may change over time. Or for example, a drug addict caught in a crime may claim “My habit made me do it!” In so saying he’s treating his habit as if it’s not a part of him. However, in pondering his responsibility, the jury ought to take into consideration whether his habit was formed with his knowledge or without it (it might sometimes be a result of taking medicine his doctor prescribed). In other words, the jury should assign responsibility for the crime not just on the basis of whether the recent criminal act was itself a completely uncoerced choice, but also on whether some past free acts of the accused contributed to him being in a state where he committed the present crime.

Right, another so-called example of arguing that a drug addict has no free will, but is still the embodiment of freedom. Even though in viewing his addiction as a part of himself, this reflects the fact that in a wholly determined universe he lacked the free will not to.

Then we’re back to the aliens in that part of the universe where free will prevails, observing a drug addict compelled by nature to tell the court his addiction is not a part of the “real me” and the jury in turn being compelled by the laws of matter to either believe that this is true or not. Finally, the judge being compelled by her brain matter to pronounce the only sentence she is able to if the man is found as he was ever able to be found. In this case guilty.

And if his addiction was caused by a prescribed medication from his doctor, what here is not destined to unfold given the assumptions that the hard-determinist are themselves compelled to believe?

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Free Will Is An Illusion, But Freedom Isn’t
Ching-Hung Woo says freedom is compatible with choices being determined.

Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that Frenchmen were never freer than when France was under the Nazi occupation. How so? Well, the occupation created opportunities for defiance, and whether to risk defiance or not is a significant choice; hence Frenchmen were freer in the sense of possessing a richer menu of significant choices. The wiggle room allowed under coercion, however, is not always large enough for a choice to be meaningfully called ‘free’. Sophie’s choice, in William Styron’s novel of that title, was to sacrifice one of her children or the other to the gas chamber. Reasonable people would regard the alternatives offered to her by the Nazi doctor as not much of a choice at all, and absolve Sophie of any responsibility for the death of the non-chosen child.

Wiggle room? What possible wiggle room could there be in a world where these very real Frenchmen and Styron creating the fictional character Sophie were never able to not choose what nature compelled them to choose.

What does it mean to absolve anyone of anything if everything that anyone ever does is “set in stone” by the immutable laws of matter?

Ever and always: What are the compatibilists saying here about “freedom” in a determined universe that I keep missing? What am I but compelled to presume that I am compelled to keep missing.

How were Nazis and the French Resistance, Nazis and the very real Sophies at the camps not interchangeable in a universe where the Big Bang is said to have set into motion these laws of matter? Again, unless in a way not fully understood, the matter we call the human brain is somehow the exception. Re God or re the very nature of matter itself in a No God world.

Adopting the absence of coercion instead of the absence of determinism as the essence of freedom gets us out of a conflict with the prevalent scientific worldview. Nonetheless, this notion still captures the importance of freedom – as a condition that enables a person to be true to himself, and also as a criterion for judging whether it is fair to hold a person responsible for their actions.

Right, like we are any more free to adopt the absence of coercion than the absence of determinism. We may think “in our head” that we have gotten out of the conflict, but that is only another manifestation of the psychological illusion of freedom. At least insofar as I have come [compelled or otherwise] to construe hard determinism.

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Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

One of the main trends of recent academic culture has been to take freedom and autonomy away from human beings. I don’t mean that professors armed with guns have been locking up their intellectual opponents; I mean that from sociology to philosophy, from psychology to neuroscience, a common theme has been to try to show that our ‘free will’ is either severely limited or non-existent, and that we have much less control over our own lives than we’d like to believe.

No, it’s not a main trend, some insist, but the only possible trend. In fact “trend” itself is a misnomer. It implies one path chosen over another in a world where all paths are derived from and lead to the same explanation.

You know, if that is the only explanation.

On the other hand, given some degree of human autonomy, the path I am on will almost certainly never trend. After all, it’s the path suggesting that what many deem to be their own “free choice” in regard to moral and political value judgments, is really more a profoundly situated existential “self” rooted in dasein.

Which is more perturbing, right?

It was one of the central beliefs of behaviourist psychology. You might feel as if you are free, making your own decisions and choices, but in reality everything you do, or think, or feel, is the result of environmental influences. Your behaviour is just the ‘output’ or response to the ‘input’ or stimuli which your brain has absorbed and processed. Freudian psychology also emphasized the lack of free will. It suggested that your conscious self is just one small facet of your whole psyche – the tip of the iceberg – and that its activity is determined by your unconscious mind, which includes instinctive and other automatic biological drives beyond your conscious control.

On the other hand…sigh…wouldn’t the “central beliefs of behaviorist psychology” not in turn be but a necessary component of the laws of matter? Or was B.F. Skinner the lone exception?

You think that you are free. You feel that you are free. Your gut instinct tells you that you are free. But any and all of these identity fonts are just manifestations of the forces that set into motion existence [and then self-conscious existence] itself.

And here everything comes down to whether or not we have the capacity to grasp that of our own free will. As a species on this planet. With or without an existing God.

And then the part where the conscious mind gives way to the subconscious mind gives way to the unconscious mind gives way to most primitive of all brain functions.

I know: let’s not go there. Really, to go there introduces all the myriad factors that makes it harder and harder to be, among other things, an objectivist regarding the behaviors that you have convinced yourself that all other rational and virtuous human beings are, like you, obligated to embrace.

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Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

…existentialist philosophy and humanistic psychology emphasised human autonomy, asserting that choice is one of the defining characteristics of human life, even if it isn’t necessarily a positive faculty. According to Søren Kierkegaard, the sheer extent of our freedom may induce a state of disorientation and dread, and we make our choices “in fear and trembling.” Similarly, Jean-Paul Sartre believed that the freedom to choose courses of action without fully controlling or even knowing their consequences contributed to human anxiety. In his famous phrase, we are “condemned to be free.” And in reaction to behaviourism and Freudian psychology, humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers asserted that human behaviour is not necessarily determined by our past and present experiences, since we always have the capacity to make choices based on our assessments of current situations.

Of course Kierkegaard, Sartre, Maslow and Rogers were in the same boat back then that we are in now. Having to assume that what they thought or felt about human autonomy – along with everything else – involved some measure of free will. They chose of their own volition to think what they did rather than opting for something else. On the other hand, it is also true that, to the extent we are free, this freedom in and of itself can become something that, in any particular context, we’d like to, as Erich Fromm once suggested, “escape”. And, indeed, who knows how many embrace determinism today as a way to absolve themselves of all responsibility.

Period.

But: how do we go about determining here if nature itself is not determining everything?

However, in sociology, there was a movement towards the denial of autonomy. Theorists argued that your sense of self is a ‘social construction’ and that people are necessarily formed and exist inside a nexus of social influences which determine their lives. Linguistic theorists also argued that our view of reality is created through and limited by our language. We cannot see beyond the assumptions in the framework of the semantic and grammatical structures we have absorbed from our parents and our cultures.

My point however is that even to the extent this is not true, there are so many thousands upon thousands of variables that go into the making of “I” from the cradle to the grave, there is no realistic possibility that any one individual can pin them all down and configure them into a rational explanation as to why they believe this and not that.

I merely note how much more problematic this is in regard to “I” acquiring moral and political value judgments in the is/ought world. Here, even to the extent determinism is able to be demonstrated as not a factor socially, politically and economically, “I” is no less an existential contraption.

As for language, same thing, Given a world where human autonomy does exist, there is only so far that ones family and ones community and ones historical times can go in sustaining self-serving semantic structures relative to the either/or world.

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Einstein’s Morality
Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics.

People who meet this logic for the first time tend to become alarmed – what happens to our vaunted freedom if we have no free will? There is actually no need to be alarmed if we distinguish between two kinds of freedoms: a freedom from prior causes, and a freedom from coercion.

Here we go again, he thought. He being me of course. Is this what folks like peacegirl are aiming to communicate to me? My point then being that we distinguish them only as we were ever able to distinguish them. Given that the human brain is just another necessary component of the laws of nature.

The idea of ‘absolute free will’ supposes that our choices are not determined by prior causes; but few of us actually think of freedom in that way. Rather, we feel a loss of freedom when we are coerced, that is, when we are forced to do something or be in a certain state against our values.

Is anyone at all actually foolish enough to believe in “absolute free will”? This would seem to entail one comprising the only entity in the universe. You and nothing else that could possibly impact on what you think, feel, say and do. On the other hand, in a wholly determined universe as some [compelled or not] posit it, feeling a loss of freedom is just another inherent manifestation of the psychological illusion of freedom.

There are certain likes and dislikes that a person regards as characterizing him. This set of values may change with time, but they are stable in the immediate term. Hence it makes sense to redefine ‘free choice’ as a choice compatible with a person’s self-affirmed set of values.

As though “I” over time and the immediate “I” are somehow two different entities in a universe where “I” is of, by and for nature inside and out. From the cradle to the grave. And then all the way back to star stuff.

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Einstein’s Morality
Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics.

Einstein showed by his words and actions that he accepted this qualified usage of the language of free will: the individual freedom that he championed throughout his life against authoritarianism fits the description of ‘freedom from coercion’.

Providing of course that nature itself is not seen to be “coercing” everything that has ever been described by anyone at all. And what is most intriguing here is the word “coerce” itself. How can one think of it without imagining some entity able to actually do the coercing? And that would seem to entail a reason to. And that would seem to suggest some purpose behind the reason.

Matter ontologically is one thing. Matter teleologically…is that something else altogether?

The conundrum then comes to revolve for some of us around how and why and when matter was able to reconfigure itself into being conscious of all this in and of itself. It’s like trying to imagine the machines creating the terminators with an intelligence different from the intelligence behind the human minds creating the films.

It is interesting that Einstein’s colleague and biographer Abraham Pais wrote in Subtle Is the Lord: the Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (1982) that if he were to give a one-line description of the man, he would say that Einstein was the freest person he had ever met. Pais went on to explain that he meant Einstein appeared closest to being the master of his own destiny. Clearly this notion of freedom refers to being free from coercion rather than being free from prior causes. In short, Einstein valued individual freedom, but did not lose sight of the transient and limited nature of the self.

Back again to this mysterious distinction between nature either coercing or not coercing me to type these words and nature, embodied in my brain, either compelling or not compelling me to type them based on the necessary components embedded in prior causes inherently embedded in the laws of matter.

Where is this distinction pinned down definitively?

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Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

Gene Theory & Neuroscience

Modern genetics and neuroscience often deny our autonomy in a much more direct way. According to geneticists such as Richard Dawkins, we – our bodies and minds – exist as ‘carriers’ for our genes, to enable them to survive and replicate. Everything we do is determined by and is on behalf of our genes. Our behaviour is either the result of our own instinctive – and therefore unchosen – desire to increase our reproductive success, or else is the instinctive result of traits selected and developed in our ancestors because they provided some survival advantage.

Here what interest me is the gap [if there is one] between Dawkins making his argument and being compelled to acknowledge to himself that he was never able to not make it other than as nature compels it to be made. Or if, instead, there is some component of reality inside his brain/mind that allows him to imagine that this is not the case. After all, what is the point of bringing up our ancestors here when they just like we are all necessarily inherent components of the laws of matter.

So the reason why some of us feel driven to gain success in fields like politics and creativity, is because success makes us more attractive to the opposite sex, and so increases our reproductive possibilities; or, for example, according to Steven Pinker, the reason we find lush countryside landscapes beautiful is because for our ancestors such vistas represented a plentiful supply of resources to foster their survival, so nature selected those who were drawn to such landscapes.

Stuck again. To me, this is expressed as though [somehow] we do have some degree of autonomy in making attempts to be attractive to the opposite sex. Otherwise even the argument articulated by Steven Taylor above in regard to this is just one more intrinsic element encompassed in matter doing its thing as the laws of matter compel it to. How in fact can anything we think, feel, say and do escape/transcend its innate, organic destiny? And our ancestors found vistas as they did because their ancestors did going back to the earliest humanoids going back to the first instance of life on earth going back to the manner in which lifeless matter became living matter going back to when and where and how and why matter came into existence itself.

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Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

In much neuroscience, brain activity – that is, the behaviour of neuronal networks and brain chemicals – play a similar causal role to genes. Your moods, your desires, and your behaviour, are determined by the levels of various brain chemicals such as serotonin or dopamine, or by the automatic activation of neuronal networks which predispose you to certain traits or impulses. If you feel depressed, it’s because of a low level of serotonin. If you are psychopathic, it’s because areas of your ventromedial prefrontal cortex are less active than normal. If you are a Born Again Christian, it’s because you have a smaller than normal hippocampus. (The latter two are actual neuroscientific hypotheses.)

On the other hand, the part where we are stuck still revolves around the extent to which these natural interactions explain everything that we think, feel, say and do. Ah, but at least we live in an age where we have accumulated an enormous amount of actual knowledge about these brain functions. And yet the more we know, the more frustrating it is in having to acknowledge all that we don’t know yet. For many, this then thumps into the psychological components of “I” that refuse to accept anything less than that which allows them to insist that what they think they know is what all the rest of us should think we know too.

These versions of both contemporary gene theory and neuroscience are what might be called ‘can’t help’ approaches: we ‘can’t help’ being depressive, psychopathic, religious, racist, polygamous (if you are a male), and so forth, because our genes have programmed us to be so, or because we have been biologically burdened with the brain chemistry or neural networks associated with that behaviour.

Yep, that’s the way some see it. But then for folks like me, they were never able to not see it that way. Only folks like me are the first to admit that how we think we see it may or may not be how it actually is. And then the depressing acknowledgment that, in turn, we will tumble over into the abyss that is oblivion. None the wiser.

And, really, how to wrap your head around that?!

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Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

Harnessing Free Will

What is the root of these assaults on our autonomy? Why do intellectuals and scientists feel such a strong impulse to show us that we are powerless, controlled by forces beyond our own control?

Some intellectuals, some scientists. Just as some intellectuals, some scientists insist on supporting the opposite conclusion. The impulse however is either more or less under our control. Or is only the illusion of control.

Perhaps it’s an unconscious desire to abdicate responsibility. Perhaps the modern world has become so complex and stressful that scientists and philosophers feel an impulse to retreat from responsibility, to pretend that we have no control over the chaos.

There’s no getting around this for some. We just don’t know if there was literally no getting around it for them. But who hasn’t wished for something like this to explain away a set of circumstances that are pulling them down…that they can then just explain aways as “beyond my control”?

I wouldn’t go so far myself, but a conspiracy theorist might argue (and some already have) that this autonomy-denial is a form of oppression – an attempt by the intellectual elite to keep us down, convincing us that we are powerless so that we won’t challenge their authority.

How about the political and economic elite? It is always in their interest to sustain any and all habits that inhibit citizens from actually exercising their political and economic will. And, in the end, don’t we have to roll the dice [compelled or not] and act as though we do have some measure of autonomy. It’s maddening [for some[ not to know for certain, but there it is: the human condition.

More rationally, the rash of free will denial may be related to the desire to prove that there is no ‘self’. Free will is, of course, one of the strongest features of the self. If you believe that inside our mental space there is ‘no one there’ – that our sense of self is ‘just an illusion’, which itself is a mere side-effect of neurological processes – then you have to believe that the self’s free will is an illusion, too.

All I can come back to here is that only utter fools [in an autonomous world] would/could manage to actually think themselves into believing that the either/or world self is just an illusion.

Of course there is a self here. It eats and drinks and has sex and plays sports and goes to school or work and interacts with others in countless ways that clearly revolve around a substantive and substantial Me.

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Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

Yet no matter what the motivation, one is tempted to reply to these assaults on free will in the same way that the eighteenth century author Doctor Johnson responded to George Berkeley’s arguments that matter was a mental phenomenon: he shouted “I refute it thus!” as he kicked a stone.

Like that definitively refutes Berkeley’s assumptions. Or, “I think therefore I am”. Like that necessarily excludes someone in a Sim world being programed to think that. Nothing is really either established as true or refuted as false until everything and anything is agglomerated into an explanation for existence itself. Yet even here someone convinced that they are cognizant of this may well be compelled to by someone or something beyond his or her grasp.

Johnson could have used the same method to illustrate the denial of determinism and his capacity for free will. It’s difficult for anyone to persuasively argue that we don’t have free will when our everyday experience is that there are always a variety of choices of thoughts and actions in front of us, like a pack of cards spread for us to pick from, and we feel we have the freedom to choose any of them, and to change our minds at any point. After all, whenever you read a book or listen to a lecture claiming that there is no such thing as free will, you’re free to close the book, or to throw a rotten tomato at the lecturer.

This merely takes me back to dreaming. I don’t know about your dreams but in mine “I” am utterly convinced I am confronted with a “variety of choices of thoughts and actions in front of me”.

Last night I dreamed myself back into to a set of circumstances involving an old childhood friend, Roger Rasnake. We were involved in some construction project that we were working on for free. I then insisted that we ought to be paid for what we did. Back and forth we went while continuing to work. Everything was vividly real including my confrontation with others in my family.

Yet the whole “experience” was created entirely in my brain, by my brain…for my brain?

Though, sure, there must be an important distinction between my “I” in that dream and my “I” here and now choosing to types these words rather than others.

But who out there in science, in philosophy, in theology has actually been able to demonstrate it such that there is no other possible explanation but free will in the human species.

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Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

One of the problems is that scientists, and philosophers, often tend towards absolutism. Geneticists may argue that behaviour is completely determined by our genes; neuroscientists that behaviour is completely determined by brain activity; social constructionists and behaviourists may argue that social and environmental forces completely determine our behaviour, and so forth. But in my view, it’s more sensible to be democratic than absolutist: it’s likely that all of these factors have some influence on our behaviour. They all affect us to some degree. But none of them individually, nor all of them together, are completely dominant.

Of course one might note that arguing “all of these factors have some influence on our behaviour” is in itself just another attempt at an all-encompassing explanation. But the fact that so many of us do seem compelled [naturally or not] to fit everything into one overarching account speaks volumes regarding how the brain seems to function. And that makes sense. We go about the business of doing so many different things it’s got to provoke us from time to time into thinking about the existence of something that fits everything together into what in some mental capacity is thought to be an ontological and teleological TOE.

It could be God, it could be nature, it could be something that no one has [so far] even thought of as existing at all.

I believe the same is true of free will. The conscious self is not an authoritarian dictator; but it isn’t a slave either. Rather, our free will is another factor or force amongst this chaotic coalition of influences.

Then back to this: He [like you and I] have no way in which to determine beyond all doubt that the “conscious self” either embodies or does not embody merely the illusion of free-will. Does nature dictate everything we think, feel, say and do? Or did nature’s matter actually succeed in evolving into an autonomous capacity to question its own existence?

This part:

The upshot of that is that no matter what social and environmental forces influence me, no matter what genes or brain structure I’ve inherited from my parents, I’m in here too, and I can decide whether to kick the stone or not, and, generally speaking, how I react to the world.

Sure, maybe. But what is this but one more presumptuous assertion that it is so. How does this particular author go about producing the hard evidence necessary to convince the world that there could be no other explanation?

Or, that, even should someone seem to accomplish this, that this too is not only as it ever could have been?

How would we ever be able to detach ourselves from something we a clearly a part of in order to gain that distance said to be crucial in establishing that much sought after objectivity.

[iambiguous]

Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

Freedom Strikes Back

Interestingly, some popular neuroscientific ideas about the limitations of free will are being contradicted by neuroscience itself. For instance, recent research has shown that rather than being fixed, our brain structure is very flexible, and continually changing: the brain is not hard-wired but soft-wired. The relatively new field of neuroplasticity shows that practicing habits or behaviours brings real physical changes to the parts of the brain associated with those activities. For example, if you begin to learn to play the piano, you will develop more neural connections, and perhaps, through the process of neurogenesis, even more brain cells themselves, in the parts of the brain associated with motor activity – the motor cortex and cerebellum – and musical perception – in the temporal lobes. Or if you meditate regularly for years, you will develop more ‘gray matter’ in the areas associated with attention, concentration and compassion – in the frontal lobes. So in this sense, rather than being completely controlled by our brains, we have control over them.

Once again, though, for some, they might point to this in exchanges here to bolster their contention that human brains are capable, on some level, of freely choosing this rather than that. But all they can do is to fall back on their own “experts”, knowing that in all likelihood there are “experts” on the other side claiming just the opposite.

Every morning you would get up, Google “neuroplasticity” – google.com/search?source=hp … JD_3GHfFUA – and note the latest.

On the other hand, if these folks ever do come to a definitive conclusion that, beyond all doubt, human beings are able of their own volition to embody options, wouldn’t it be talked about everywhere on every scientific and news media outlet?

So: Do we really have control over our brains here or is that too merely the brain “tricking” us into believing that this is the case. Why? Because that is still the only option available to the brain itself as matter inherently in sync with its own laws.

That complex relationship between the brain precipitating experiences and than the experiences themselves precipitating changes in the brain:

The field of epigenetics shows that the genetic structures we inherit from our parents don’t remain fixed throughout our lives either, but are altered by our life experiences, so that the biology we pass on to our children will be different from that we inherited. For example, experiments training mice to develop an aversion to a particular smell have shown that this aversion was genetically passed down to their offspring, who became two hundred times more sensitive to the smell than other mice. This new behaviour is reflected in changes to both the genes and brain structure of the mice. Similarly, in human beings, studies show that twins exposed to very different environments and experiences show striking differences in their DNA in later life. Or, in a Swedish study of the descendants of a population which endured famine in the Nineteenth Century, it was found that the men had inherited a much stronger than normal resistance to cardiovascular disease, whilst those women descended from women who had been exposed to the famine while in the womb had a shorter than average life span.

Sure, you can start with nurture and work back to the nature, or start with nature and work back to nurture. But how is it determined “once and for” what 1] first set it all in motion at birth and 2] what then sustains it all the way to the grave.

There may well be a team of scientists out there that have in fact been able to fuse the two approaches into an utterly irrefutable answer.

If so, link me to them.

[iambiguous]

Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

Increasing Free Will

I would argue that one of the most important tasks of our lives is to develop more free will and autonomy. In fact, a primary way to develop positively and begin to live more meaningfully is to transcend the influences of our environment to become more oriented towards who we authentically are.

See how this works? The author merely assumes that his own premises here are by default the starting block. We actually are free to develop more autonomy! You merely cherry pick the science and – presto! – you too can be more authentic.

As for the influences of our environment, don’t they go all the way back to the day we are born? Don’t they cover years and years of hard-core indoctrination in the family, the community, the state, the culture, the historical parameters of “I”?

And who then gets to decide which set of behaviors best exemplify a positive development toward a more meaningful life?

With or without autonomy, “I” is a profoundly problematic vantage point

As humanistic psychology suggests, we have innate potentials and characteristics that are independent of external factors, even if this aspect of us may be so obscured from us that we can barely see it. To humanistic psychology, our task is to allow that part of us to express itself more fully – which often means overriding adverse cultural and social influences.

Or, perhaps: As humanistic psychology is compelled to suggest, we have innate potentials and characteristics that are independent of external factors, even if this aspect of us may be so obscured from us that we can barely see it.

And this cries out for a context in which explore all the factors this might include, Again, even assuming some measure of autonomy. After all, what can possibly be more complex than human psychology at work in interactions revolving around identity, value judgments and political power? And, at this intersection, “adverse cultural and social influences” are all over the map. God or No God. Liberal or conservative. Nature or nurture.

The same thinking applies to genes and brain chemistry too. They may predispose us to certain types of behaviour, but we can resist those influences, to control and even re-mould our behaviour. It’s by no means easy, but we can overcome our programming.

And how does he actually demonstrate this? Well, he doesn’t of course. He doesn’t cite an experience that he had in a particular set of circumstances. He doesn’t note a clear-cut distinction between memetic and genetic influences. He doesn’t expound on how exactly he managed to resist these influences in order to remold his own behavior so as to override the adverse cultural and social influences that curtailed him before.

Let alone examine this pertaining to actual behaviors that clash in regard to conflicting goods. It’s all just contained in a world of words.

Like this one:

We don’t have to blindly follow the environmental, genetic and neurological instructions we were born with. We can with resolve increase the quotient of autonomy with which we were born, to the extent that it becomes more powerful than our genetics, neurology, or the environment.

A classic approach of the “serious philosopher”.

[iambiguous]

Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

Paths To Autonomy

Perhaps many people do seem to be largely the products of their environments and biological inheritance. But I would argue that whatever the term ‘greatness’ means, it is usually manifested by those who have exercised their autonomy to a considerable degree, to significantly free themselves from external influences. These are usually people who have used their strong will-power to harness their autonomy and self-discipline to expand themselves and develop a high level of skill and expertise, to actualise their innate potential, and so become more than the sum of their influences.

And then around and around and around we go. If you take your intellectual leap to free will then you are convinced that you have of your own volition “exercised your autonomy”. If you take your intellectual leap to determinism then nature has compelled you to believe psychologically that you have of your own volition “exercised your autonomy”.

Then what? Then the link to one or another scientist that is either compelled by nature or not to confirm what you are either compelled by nature or not to believe is true.

Either the determinists are compelled or not to refute the arguments of the free will advocates, or the free will arguments are compelled or not to refute the arguments of the determinists.

As though someone out there has finally pinned this down once and for all. And, as though, in turn, that isn’t embedded in whether or not, if someone has, we are even aware of it.

And that’s before we get to all intelligent life on other planets that sans worm holes we will never, ever hear the arguments of.

Now, how is that not the boat [existential or otherwise] that we are all in?

[iambiguous]

Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

As we move through childhood, with the help of our parents, we hopefully begin to control our impulses and desires. For example, we learn that we can’t have everything exactly when we want it, and so learn to delay gratification, developing self-control. As we need less care and attention from our parents, we exercise more autonomy, learn to make more decisions for ourselves and to follow our own interests and goals. In this sense, human development is a process of becoming less bound by biological and environmental influences and gain more free will and autonomy. And ideally, this process should continue throughout our lives.

Ever and always it is merely assumed that this reconfiguration is not wholly configured by the laws of nature themselves. In fact, some are compelled by nature to get really, really fierce in insisting that their own life is shaped and molded wholly in accordance with their own autonomous behaviors. The ubermen among us in particular mock those who insist that they were never able not to mock those who were never able not to believe that their own lives are considerably less remarkable because they were never able not to be.

These exchanges can get really, really surreal, really, really fast.

But, even assuming volition, we are then confronted with that which our free will and autonomy does in fact pursue out in the world with others in shaping those biological and environmental influences. How ought they be shaped and molded given that this is something that is more or less in our command.

And these exchange are often not only surreal but, at times, downright vicious. Not only am I free but I use my freedom in the pursuit of those behaviors that are the obligation of all rational and virtuous men and women to pursue in turn.

So, which is worse…being enthrall to the laws of nature or to the laws of those objectivists who set out to shape and mold the world [and everyone in in it] to their own moral and political specs.

[iambiguous]

Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”

Spiritual development can also be seen as a process of gaining increased autonomy. For example, many Eastern spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism or yoga, place great emphasis on self-discipline and self-control: control of our own behaviour, so that we no longer cause harm to others; control of our desires, so that we no longer lust after physical pleasures; control of our thoughts, so that we can quieten the mind through meditation, and so on. In some traditions, spiritual development is seen as a process of ‘taming’ the body and mind, and this is, of course, only possible through intense self-discipline, requiring self-control.

Again, what am I missing here? As though somehow the “spiritual” facet of human interactions is exempt from the laws of matter. The Buddha teaches self-discipline and self-control. And, surely, the Buddha himself was exempt from the laws of nature.

And certainly God is.

It always comes back to the psychological sense – here manifested in religion – that [somehow] I just know that what I am thinking and feeling and saying and doing is under my control. Sure, contingent on both genetic and memetic variables that are, in some crucial respects, beyond my control, but… but never completely beyond my control.

And that may well be the case. I certainly have not reached the point where, at times, I don’t have significant doubts about my own recent turn in the direction of determinism. Viscerally, it just does not seem possible that I am not of my own volition [whatever that means] typing what I do here. But it’s that I can’t know this beyond all doubt that is always there exasperating me.

Although it can sometimes occur suddenly and spontaneously, the deep serenity and intensified awareness of spiritual awakening is usually the culmination of a long process of increasing our innate quotient of personal freedom to the point where our minds become the dominant influence. When spiritually awakened people are referred to as ‘masters’, this could easily refer to them as being masters of themselves.

Right, like he can go to the scientists who study this empirically and experimentally, using the rigors of the “scientific method”, and say, “Okay, give me the definitive argument I can use to prove that a ‘spiritual’ quest does in fact demonstrate the reality of free will among our species.”

Really, who cares how long the introspective process is when there are folks on both sides of the debate who have gone down that path and come to different conclusions.

Disciplines like Buddhism are just more intent and intense in focusing in on the ego in ways that other religious denominations are not. But that doesn’t make either the intention or the intensity of the pursuit any less necessarily exempt from whatever brought matter into existence and then laid down the law regarding what it can or cannot do. Only to the extent that the human brain is shown to be the one exception to the rule, does autonomy become more plausible. Spiritually or otherwise.