thoughts on determinism

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“An Argument For Compatibilism”
Jason Streitfeld
from the Specter of Reason website

If a choice is evitable, it means that it was not the result of deterministic forces. It was, in essence, random or uncaused. That means it was not caused by our beliefs or desires, or mental states of any kind. At least, not necessarily. It was the accidental or random outcome of some processes.

This may well be be even more difficult to wrap one’s head around. Clearly we live in an either/or world in which interactions appear to be anything but random and uncaused. Distinctions are made between correlation and cause and effect but a “human condition” governed by “evitable” choices would be…what exactly? Things just “happen” out of the blue for no discernable – discoverable – reason at all? Well, maybe in your neighborhood, but it doesn’t appear to be that way at all in mine.

Even using the expression “in essence, random and uncaused” would be random and uncaused. As would be our “beliefs or desires of mental states”.

Huh? Would someone explain that further please.

Yet, if the action were a random or accidental outcome, we would not be able to claim responsibility for it unless we were already responsible for the decision to act on that random outcome. To deserve responsibility for an action (according to indeterminists), there must be some causal relationship between our action and our beliefs and desires. It cannot all be random.

No, really, instead of demonstrable evidence that brings us closer to the conviction that human autonomy exists only at a minimum, the evidence seemed to suggest that, on the contrary, the outcome of our behaviors were actually dependent more on a maximum of random or accidental encounters. Which would be harder to wrap your head around? And what if it turns out to be that the “human condition” combines both in such a way that we can never know for certain the degree to which we are responsible for the behaviors we choose?

And then into this moral and political quagmire introduce the components of my own thinking here.

Dennett has discussed this in great detail in, for example, his paper, “On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want.” He develops a two-stage model of free will…What he concludes is that we can imagine a scientifically respectable scenario in which human beings have the ability to make rational choices which are not inevitable, which do in fact involve a degree (however large or small) of random processes. The idea is that the construction of our beliefs and desires can entail a large degree of randomization, while the choosing of our actions and judgments can be deterministic.

But what he can’t conclude definitively is whether his conclusion itself was only as it ever could have been. Or the extent to which in coming to it, he was embedded in an unfolding reality that included “random or accidental outcomes”. Any more than you and I can know beyond all doubt all the factors involved in posting on this thread.

He can only take this particular “intellectual contraption” to the hard guys conducting actual scientific experiments with the human brain in order to determine more substantively – rigorously, phenomenologically – what the final determination is most likely to be “here and now”.

Leaving aside altogether [for now] the things that most intrigue me philosophically: morality here and now, immortality there and then.

Wow. Could there be a God, a Heaven and a Hell, a reincarnated soul, a Nirvana. But all that too just being some murky intermingling of determined and random interactions?

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“An Argument For Compatibilism”
Jason Streitfeld
from the Specter of Reason website

The point…is not that incompatibilists are correct. It is rather the opposite: Even though we can imagine a scenario in which rational agents make choices from among a variety of randomly-generated options, the making of the choices is still deterministic. It is still a result of forces outside the agent’s control, whether or not we introduce non-deterministic elements into the system. So there is no reason to say that it is not “really” a choice in the deterministic universe. Either it is a choice in both scenarios, or it is not a choice at all. Dennett has shown that, even if we give incompatibilists (of a certain stripe) what they say they want, they still have no basis for denying compatibilism. Free will is just as compatible with determinism as it is with indeterminism.

Okay. For those here who subscribe to compatibilism, please explain, beyond intellectual contraptions like the one above, the point being made as it is applicable to, say, me typing these words and you reading them. How do you understand determinism and free will in a way different from how I do. The way that I do revolving around the assumption that even in defending compatibilism there was never any possibility of your not defending it.

What on earth do I keep missing here?

The issue, then, is not whether we make choices, but whether we do so in a way which gives us moral responsibility. The question comes down to whether or not our choices are sufficient to make us morally responsible for our actions. That, I believe, is where the problem of free will needs to be resolved. For now, let’s take “morally responsible” to mean “deserving of punishment or reward.”

And that is exactly what I focus on as well. Moral responsibility in a world in which it is assumed that, unlike components of nature that lack the capacity to choose, we do in fact opt for these things instead of those.

Thus, given human biological imperatives, if the sex act is performed, one of the possibilities is a pregnancy. And once a new life is created in a particular womb, it goes through what it must go through in order to slide down out of the vagina and out into the world of new born babies. And none of us to my knowledge while in the womb chose to do the things that were needed to be done to bring all of this to fruition in a birth.

And, once we are born, there are any number of things that we do that are basically beyond our control. Others do things to and for us instead.

But eventually we reach the point where we begin to make a distinction between “I” and others. We choose things because we become aware that choosing different things results in different consequences. But how much of this is demonstrably autonomous? And then further we reach the point where we choose things that are judged by others as either the right thing or the wrong thing to do. Or is this too all just a manifestation of a wholly determined universe.

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“An Argument For Compatibilism”
Jason Streitfeld
from the Specter of Reason website

Let’s imagine a God’s eye view, but without the supernatural baggage. Let the term “God” refer to any being powerful enough to create human beings, know whether or not they are morally responsible for their actions, and punish or reward them for their behaviour. Let the term “soul” refer to that aspect of a person which is capable of being morally responsible and which God rewards or punishes. God rewards or punishes according to rules, the source of which is irrelevant for our purposes. Also, God rewards or punishes by measuring ultimate causal determination. (Notice that I am intentionally avoiding any supernatural or theological language here, for the sake of coherence.)

What does it mean to speak of a coherent frame of mind here when God is introduced into the assessment? And if this God can create the human species, know whether they are naughty or nice and then reward or punish them accordingly, how on Earth is the “supernatural” part dispensed with. I must not be understanding his point.

My point though revolves around the extent to which this God is seen to be omniscient. Once He becomes all-knowing, we get into the age old debate in which human autonomy itself is somehow reconciled with that.

Things get all twisted into any number of imagined assumptions regarding His knowing here. Some claim He knows everything that we do but the act of choosing itself is still our own. Then I drag that frame of mind into the individual choosing in the is/ought world as “I” embodied in dasein. And then hundreds and hundreds of both genetic and memetic variables get thrown into the mix. Each mix then embedded in a particular context construed in a particular way. Parts of which are readily communicated and parts of which are not.

Imagine God creates two people, Person A and Person B. Person A follows God’s rules, but Person B does not. The question I want to consider is, what could justify God’s decision to reward Person A and punish Person B? That is, what could justify God’s decision about ultimate causal determination?

This is not intelligible to me. How does one really discuss God, given any degree of “supernatural” power, until one grasps reality going back to the existence of existence itself. Either an ever-existing God created the Universe, then us with or without autonomy, or…or what? What’s crucial for me of course is that a God, the God is able to create rules that we are free to obey or not obey and then depending on what we choose of our own volition, He will either reward or punish us. On both sides of the grave.

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“An Argument For Compatibilism”
Jason Streitfeld
from the Specter of Reason website

When we want to determine if a person has moral responsibility–remember, this just means whether or not a person can be deserving of reward or punishment–it is a mistake to frame it in terms of whether or not they are the ultimate cause of their choices. If there is moral responsibility, it must be understood in different terms.

Again, what on earth is this supposed to mean?

Joe is a rabid carnivore. He meets Jane who is a rabid vegan. Jane is convinced that eating animal flesh is immoral. That those who do so deserve to be punished and never rewarded. She’s even willing to go so far as to endorse laws that punished the eating of animal flesh as a crime. Now how is moral responsibility to be understood here by the compatibilists? If both Joe and Jane think, feel, say and do things because their brains are wholly in sync with the laws of matter, the ultimate cause of the behaviors they choose would necessarily be in sync with the ultimate cause of others reacting to those behaviors as either deserving to be rewarded or punished: with nature itself.

Unless of course in a manner that no one yet understands, “nature itself” [b]re the world of quantum interactions[/b] is able somehow to “choose” different outcomes.

Whether or not a person is deserving of punishment or reward could be a psycho-social matter, a matter to be decided by human roles and relationships.

And psycho-social matters in a wholly determined universe…how exactly is that not just another manifestation of the only possible reality? Same with human roles and relationships.

What are the compatibilists arguing here that I keep missing? And how would you determine that your own explanation in and of itself is or is not “beyond your control” in the manner in which we react to that expression in a world where human autonomy does in fact exist.

…people can hold themselves morally responsible, but they are doing so as self-aware agents capable of taking up a moral attitude towards themselves. It is a complex psychological phenomenon, and it is not resolved by appeal to questions of fundamental causality.

Of course what is this but another “general description intellectual contraption”…a world of words that, in no way shape or form, is connected to any substantive empirical evidence derived from actual human experiences, or from any data collected as a result of conducting experiments.

Anyone here able to link us to this sort of thing? Something that settles this age old debate conclusively.

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“An Argument For Compatibilism”
Jason Streitfeld
from the Specter of Reason website

I do agree that many people want free will from a God’s-eye view and by appeal to ultimate causality, and they will not be easily satisfied by the psycho-social foundations of free will I have described.

This observation alone encompasses just how problematic discussions like this can become. He says that he agrees but he may well be saying that only because he was compelled by his brain compelled by the laws of nature to say it. Just as we say we are choosing to read his words only in assuming that it was within our own autonomous capacity to choose not to. And then when, compelled or not, we bring God into the discussion that just adds another convoluted layer. After all, if an omniscient God is just another inherent manifestation of a wholly created universe…what then? Or, if, instead, an omniscient God created the universe and then created us to be autonomous how is what we choose to do not already known by God Himself. How here is free will squared with His omniscient nature?

And, again, in reflecting on all of this how is the mind of the compatibilist qualitatively different from the mind of the determinist? What, given the compatibilist perspective, would be any different? In particular, in regard to human interactions down here on Earth.

I have not altered the definition of “free will” or the definition of “moral responsibility.” All I have done is shown that the foundation for moral responsibility people think they want is an impossibility. People are mistaken about what could make them deserving of punishment or reward. It cannot be ultimate causality. People might therefore conclude that there is no such thing as moral responsibility. They might say that, if God doesn’t exist, nobody is morally responsible for anything. And, indeed, it would seem that there cannot be free will if there is no moral responsibility. However, the way forward is not to simply claim that there is no free will.

These points are embedded in an argument for compatibilism. When all I want to know is how on earth in a determined universe points that could only have been made are somehow in sync with the idea that peacegirl and others raise in distinguishing between choosing to raise them and “choosing” to raise them. I see this as embedded necessarily in the the psychological illusion of free will embedded necessarily in how the human brain must function.

The way forward is to explain why morality does make sense from a psycho-social point of view–why people should invest in their sense of moral responsibility. Of course, you cannot argue that people should embrace moral responsibility without begging the question. But what you can argue for is a coherent picture of the way moral responsibility actually works. If a person can be convinced that moral responsibility does make sense in psycho-social terms, then they will have made room for belief in free will, and no definitions will have been altered.

The way forward [for me] is to explain how the past, present and future move as they do when a distinction is made between hard determinism and compatibilism. What changes in regard to what actually does happen?

And why focus on morality and moral responsibility if one is only ever able to make that the focus in the only argument that one is ever able to make. Isn’t that why? If you argue for a coherent picture going all the way back to what brought into existence the laws of matter themselves isn’t your argument going to be just another inherent component of that?

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From chaos to free will
A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so
George Ellis at the aeon website

The French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) believed that the Universe was a piece of machinery, and that physics determines everything. Napoleon, who had read up on Laplace’s work, confronted him about the conspicuous absence of a creator in his theory. ‘I had no need of that hypothesis,’ came the reply. Laplace might have said the same thing about free will, which his mechanistic universe rendered superfluous.

Of course it doesn’t matter what he might have said, only whether he could have said something entirely different. And then the extent to which, if he could have, we can determine definitively how to demonstrate this.

What is or is not superfluous in regard to matter unfolding into the future?

Since Laplace’s day, scientists, philosophers and even neuroscientists have followed his lead in denying the possibility of free will. This reflects a widespread belief among theoretical physicists that if you know the initial values of the variables that characterise a physical system, together with the equations that explain how these variables change over time, then you can calculate the state of the system at all later times. For example, if you know the positions and velocities of all the particles that make up a gas in a container, you can determine the positions and velocities of all those particles at all later times. This means that there should be no freedom for any deviation from this physically determined trajectory.

Come on, we all know the toppled domino here that brings all of this into question: the evolution of matter into biological life into a central nervous system into a brain into a mind into an “I” actually able to convince itself that any number of things it chooses to think and feel and say and do excludes all of the things it freely chose not to.

This is where scientists and philosophers have been spinning their wheels now going back to the very first mind that tried to grapple with it all the way to the final explanation.

In philosophy it’s called an antimony: “a contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that are in themselves reasonable”. Like the one where existence is infinite or it is not. Or the one where existence had a beginning or it did not.

In science, on the other hand, beliefs are tested “in the lab”. Actual experiments are conducted with the human brain in order to pin down the empirical relationships between the chemical and neurological interactions. And here the assumption on their part may or may not be that they are going about this of their own free will.

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From chaos to free will
A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so
George Ellis at the aeon website

Consider, then, that everything we see around us – rocks and planets, frogs and trees, your body and brain – is made up of nothing but protons, electrons and neutrons put together in very complex ways. In the case of your body, they make many kinds of cells; in turn, these cells make tissues, such as muscle and skin; these tissues make systems, such as the heart, lungs and brain; and these systems make the body as a whole.

And then the considerably more problematic part: brains evolving into minds evolving into self-conscious minds evolving into you and I grappling to come up with a definitive understanding of whether or not the understanding itself is only as it could ever have been.

Really, is it any wonder than that, given some explanation for the existence of free will, one of the first things that the minds of mere mortals will do is to invent Gods. Let Him be the explanation. Then we are left only with reconciling human autonomy with the fact that most insist that their own God is omniscient.

It might seem that everything that’s happening at the higher, ‘emergent’ levels should be uniquely determined by the physics operating beneath them. This would mean that the thoughts you’re having at this very moment were predetermined at the start of the Universe, based on the values of the particle physics variables at that time.

It might seem or it must seem? Isn’t that the question? And yet try as most of us might [including myself] to wrap our heads around the reality that typing these very words or reading them is really just another manifestation of nature on automatic pilot, it just seems ridiculous. We invent words like “visceral” to connote a sense of certainty that goes beyond simple explanation. We just know we have free will.

After all…

Now you might be forgiven for doubting whether William Shakespeare’s sonnets, Winston Churchill’s speeches and the words in Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time (1988) really came into being in this way. And you would be right to doubt: there are many problems with the skeptics’ position.

True, but there are also “many problems” noted for those on the other side as well: debate.org/opinions/does-free-will-exist

Let’s call these “conflicting assumptions”.

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From chaos to free will
A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so
George Ellis at the aeon website

At very small scales, quantum theory underlies what’s happening in the world. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle introduces an unavoidable fuzziness and an irreducible uncertainty in quantum outcomes. You might know the value of one variable, such as a particle’s momentum, but that means you can’t accurately detect another, such as its position. This seems to fundamentally undermine the allegedly iron-clad link between initial data and physical results. However, this is controversial, so I’ll set it aside for now, as important as it is. Instead, I’ll focus on key aspects of causation that occur in the molecular biology of neurons in the brain.

So, will there ever be a time when it doesn’t have to be “set aside”? A time when the world of the very, very large and the world of the very, very small fit together seamlessly in an actual extant “theory of everything”. And then the part where the theory can be translated into an explanation for how the human mind fits into it given our day to day interactions? To be or not to be free?

In fact, it’s that very fuzziness sustaining all the uncertainties that allows us to voice all manner of conflicting assumptions generating all manner of conflicting conclusions. You might not be correct but no one is able to establish that you are wrong. Compelled or not.

One of the most astounding discoveries of the previous century was that biological activity at the micro level is literally grounded in the physical shape of biological molecules, particularly DNA, RNA and proteins. This discovery became possible only when X-ray crystallography had progressed to the point of allowing us to determine the extraordinarily complex detailed structure and foldings of these molecules.

On the other hand, as MA noted on another thread, “if humans are made out of molecules, and if molecules can’t speak, neither can humans” is nonsense. And yet it clearly seems to be the case that somehow we go from the fact of being constructed out of non-conscious atomic and sub-atomic particles to a very much conscious “I”.

Doesn’t the whole matter of determinism then revolve around how on earth to explain mind itself? Matter becomes mindful. How? Why? The very fact that matter can now ponder matter itself “ontologically” and “teleologically” seems, well, almost surreal to some.

Or, to others, attributable only to God. In particular, their God.

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From chaos to free will
A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so
George Ellis at the aeon website

The structure of…molecules is truly the secret of life, as Francis Crick and James Watson exclaimed when they discovered the double helix structure of DNA, helped by the work of Rosalind Franklin. This deservedly led to huge public excitement about how DNA molecules encode our genetic inheritance. However, it is the structure of other molecules – proteins and associated messenger molecules – that in fact makes things happen at the cellular level. DNA is important only because it codes for the proteins that do the real biological work.

Okay, but what of the “structure of molecules” when the brain configures into mind configures into “I”? What of these molecules when, as most intrigues me, one “I” comes into contact with another “I” and fierce conflicts erupt over which set of behaviors will be either rewarded or punished?

What of DNA and proteins and messenger molecules then? Where does nature’s code end and our own autonomous free will begin when, say, the conflict becomes entangled in politics such that attempts are made to encode human behaviors through the law? Behaviors actually able to be enforced.

Here’s how remarkably mechanical it gets on the biological level:

For example, haemoglobin in blood cells transports oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body. Rhodopsin in the eye absorbs light and turns it into electrical signals. Kinesin and dynein are motor proteins that transport materials from one place to another in a cell. Enzymes speed up chemical reactions by such huge amounts that they essentially turn them on and off. Voltage-gated ion channels serve as biological versions of transistors, while ligand-gated ion channels allow messenger molecules (‘ligands’) such as neurotransmitters to convey information from one cell to another in the brain. And so it goes. And all this functioning follows from the details of the complex shapes of these proteins.

And it all unfolds such that, to the best of my knowledge, none of the biological “players” here have the slightest inkling as to why they do this instead of that? How then are the dots connected here between biological imperatives and any one particular “I” using these laws of nature to “instruct” the body – their own – to choose one thing over another?

This means that, to link physics and biology, we need to look at the theory that underlies molecular shape. And that theory is quantum chemistry, based in the fundamental equation of quantum physics: the Schrödinger equation. In quantum theory, the state of a system is described by what’s known as its wave function, which determines the probabilities of different outcomes when events take place. The Schrödinger equation governs how the wave function changes with time. For example, it governs the process of quantum tunnelling, which in turn underlies important physical effects such as how the Sun generates energy via nuclear fusion, photosynthesis in plants, and flash memories you use to store data in computer USB flash drives.

Yep, here we go again. Making an attempt at an explanation by noting the manner in which material interactions on the quantum level are often indeterminant. Surreal even. At least in terms of pinning down definitively why and how relationships unfold as they do – as they must – “down there”. What of cause and effect when the “viewers” themselves somehow determine the outcome? We can only imagine that consciousness itself is explainable in regard to all of the pieces still missing when biologists and physicists either agree or disagree with respect to what is actually happening in a brain derived from DNA derived from matter containing who knows what combinations of these guys: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle

And that’s before we get to how all of this fits into a definitive understanding of dark matter and dark energy.

What of “I” there?

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From chaos to free will
A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so
George Ellis at the aeon website

The confounding thing for free-will skeptics is that all outcomes don’t depend only on the equations and the initial data. They also depend on constraints. An example is an apple under the influence of gravity, such as the one that Isaac Newton watched fall to the ground from a tree at Woolsthorpe Manor. That was its unconstrained motion.

Again, if you are a free will skeptic isn’t this “confounding thing” no less only what it could ever have been? Either from inside your head, inside the heads of others or wholly in sync with nature going back to the explanation for nature’s existence itself.

Thus, once we admit that we are all stuck here until “I” itself is understood definitively, these “intellectual assessments” can only be but one more component of what seems to be an inherently problematic examination itself. Unless, of course, I keep missing something here that makes my own ambiguity/ambivalence go away.

And what might that be?

Constraints would become but one more domino toppling over in a causal chain that includes all of the dominos in all of the material interaction that there ever were, are now or ever will be. Sure, one can speak of them in assessments such as this as though one might have “chosen” not to have spoken of them at all [or spoke of them differently], but nothing in the assessment itself is an actual outlier given what would seem to be a seamless intertwining of all matter in sync with the laws that compel them over time and across space.

Now suppose Newton had suspended the apple from a branch of the tree by a string attached to its stalk. It would thereby have been turned into a pendulum, because the string constrained its motion. Instead of dropping to the ground, it would have swung back and forth in a circular arc under the branch, with its state of motion determined uniquely by its initial position and velocity. Consequently, the motions of all the billions of atoms that make up the apple would then also be determined by the string. It would make each of them also move in a circular arc under the support. This is how constraints shape outcomes.

Okay, suppose he had done that. So what? Given the assumptions of those who suppose that all interactions – from what Newton did then to what we are doing now – are at one with the only possible reality. What constrains everything that everyone of us think and feel and say and do are the laws of matter. If…if those laws are no less applicable to the human brain configured into mind configured into consciousness configured into “I”.

Yes, given the laws of physics, the apple on the string would behave differently from the apple not on a string and just falling to the ground. But how is this applicable or not in turn to Newton either tying the apple to a string or not tying it?

And it’s not like the atoms involved in either context get together to decide this.

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From chaos to free will
A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so
George Ellis at the aeon website

So what determines which messages are conveyed to your synapses by signalling molecules? They are signals determined by thinking processes that can’t be described at any lower level because they involve concepts, cognition and emotions in an essential way. Psychological experiences drive what happens. Your thoughts and feelings reach ‘down’ to shape lower-level processes in the brain by altering the constraints on ion and electron flows in a way that changes with time.

Higher level processes in the brain “reach down” to the lower level process. The macro-brain and the micro-brain somehow in tandem. But we still don’t have a full grasp of how these interactions unfold insofar as “I” become more or less the commander-in-chief. And as often as not when descriptions of this is brought down to earth they revolve around what unfolds only in the either/or world.

To wit:

For example, suppose you’re walking down the street, and just in front of you a terrible accident happens – smashed-up cars, people injured, blood everywhere. You react with horror: sympathy for those who’ve been hurt, fear that they will die, a guilty sense of relief that it didn’t happen to you. These are all mental events that take place because of the way your brain functions at the psychological level, based on some combination of past experience and innate responses. None of those qualities – sympathy, fear, guilt – occur at the ion or synapse level. These high-level mental operations act down to alter the shape of ion channels, and so change the motions of billions of ions and electrons in your brain. In an intricate causal dance between levels in your brain, those thoughts are able to occur because of the underlying spike chains, but it’s their essentially psychological nature – what it means to recognise an accident, which thoughts flow through your mind as you decide what to do, what it feels like to experience the shock of seeing the event – that causes what happens. Physics enabled what took place in your head and body, but didn’t determine it; your mental interpretation of the event did.

But how do we go about determining beyond all possible doubt if our mental interpretations are merely, as of yet, not fully understood manifestations of physics wholly in sync with the material laws of matter?

Yet this basically crunch time for all who take an interest in grappling with their own choices. But: Given the mind-boggling nature of interaction between the billions and billions of bits of matter all the way down to the “ions and signaling molecules and synapses”, who but the neuroscientists themselves have access to anything that could lead only to the least uninformed leap of faith here.

And then the fact that, depending of the context in which the terrible accident above occurs, there may be those who do not feel “sympathy, fear or guilt” at all. For whatever personal reasons they may actually take satisfaction from it. And feel positive emotional and psychological states. Or see the whole thing as just “entertainment”.

The part where, free will or not, there’s no way to pin down how one ought to react to it.

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There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

For centuries, philosophers and theologians have almost unanimously held that civilization as we know it depends on a widespread belief in free will—and that losing this belief could be calamitous.

Unless of course someone – everyone – loses it only because nature, in unfolding only as it must, compels this to be the one and the only reality. But how exactly would philosophers or theologians come to know this if they can’t be entirely certain that what they came to know was as a result of being able to freely choose to know something else.

It still comes down to what the “hard guys” tell us based on the conclusions they come to utilizing all of the tools available to them through the “scientific method”.

But!

You know the rest.

Our codes of ethics, for example, assume that we can freely choose between right and wrong. In the Christian tradition, this is known as “moral liberty”—the capacity to discern and pursue the good, instead of merely being compelled by appetites and desires. The great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant reaffirmed this link between freedom and goodness. If we are not free to choose, he argued, then it would make no sense to say we ought to choose the path of righteousness.

Yet here even Kant falls back on the “transcending font”: his own “deduced” Creator. And, for most in the “Christian tradition”, this Creator is said to be omniscient. He knows all but somehow He does not know what we will freely choose. Because, if He did kn ow, how then would we truly be free to choose it?

And we are still back to assuming that the things we think up in regard to God and religion and ethics are examples of what we actually have no way in which to confirm beyond the assumptions themselves. Somehow, viscerally, intuitively, we just know these things.

And that’s before we get to the part where the behaviors we link “freedom and goodness” to are determined and then demonstrated to be ours and not theirs.

Today, the assumption of free will runs through every aspect of American politics, from welfare provision to criminal law. It permeates the popular culture and underpins the American dream—the belief that anyone can make something of themselves no matter what their start in life. As Barack Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope, American “values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will.”

There you go. A leap of faith to free will. Just the thought that next week’s election here in America was “fated” going back to whatever brought into existence matter and the laws that govern it is simply beyond our grasp. Perhaps literally. It’s just that some are able – compelled or not – to shrug it off and to nestle comfortably in their own set of assumptions about “I”. Not to mention all of us who go about the business of living our lives from day to day not giving a single thought to these complex “philosophical” conundrums.

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There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

The sciences have grown steadily bolder in their claim that all human behavior can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect.

Bolder is one thing, pinning down that there is absolutely no doubt that you are reading this only because you were never really free to choose not to read it, another matter all together.

In fact, how do we untangle ourselves from the conundrum itself? You’re a neuroscientist or someone able to do research on the brains of dead people. You’re poking around and performing all of these experiments. But what constitutes the part – that eureka! moment – when it finally becomes clear that it is only because you freely chose to do what you could have freely chosen not to do.

It’s like the human consciousness equivalent of figuring out why the universe is something and why it is this something. Or whether existence has always been around or actually started given a particular set of conditions.

This shift in perception is the continuation of an intellectual revolution that began about 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species. Shortly after Darwin put forth his theory of evolution, his cousin Sir Francis Galton began to draw out the implications: If we have evolved, then mental faculties like intelligence must be hereditary. But we use those faculties—which some people have to a greater degree than others—to make decisions. So our ability to choose our fate is not free, but depends on our biological inheritance.

Then, for some, cue God. Or some manifestation of the universe which they believe is “out there” able at least to provide an explanation. Meanwhile God or No God we continue to be stuck in antinomies…going around and around in circles trying to sort out – scientifically, philosophically, spiritually – what exactly it means to be dependent on our “biological inheritance”.

Wholly dependent? Compatibly dependent? Or “free at last!”?

Galton launched a debate that raged throughout the 20th century over nature versus nurture. Are our actions the unfolding effect of our genetics? Or the outcome of what has been imprinted on us by the environment? Impressive evidence accumulated for the importance of each factor. Whether scientists supported one, the other, or a mix of both, they increasingly assumed that our deeds must be determined by something.

The either/or world rendition of “conflicting goods”. Both sides can make reasonable arguments that the other side can deflect but never entirely make go away.

[iambiguous]

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

Uh-oh?

Right, like this settles it. Consider: if, out of the blue, I type, “the green hornet on Maple street stole the only copy of the document definitively establishing the Christian God as in fact the Devil”, was that only as a result of whatever set into motion the laws of matter going back to…where and when exactly?

We know that changes to brain chemistry can alter behavior—otherwise neither alcohol nor antipsychotics would have their desired effects. The same holds true for brain structure: Cases of ordinary adults becoming murderers or pedophiles after developing a brain tumor demonstrate how dependent we are on the physical properties of our gray stuff.

Then it ever and always comes down to how far this can be taken. Up to and including everything we think, feel, say and do? After all, look at all of those who are afflicted with brain tumors that don’t become murderers and pedophiles. And what becomes particularly unnerving for most is the idea that they are themselves murderers and pedophiles…but it’s all beyond their control. Unless of course you think it is all in your control and you murder someone or rape a child and someone comes along and tells you that you aren’t really responsible because there is no way you could have not murdered someone or raped a child.

Clearly, this gets all tangled up in what we think we know and what we’d like to believe is so given a particular set of circumstances.
[/quote]

[iambiguous]

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

Of course the difficulty here revolves around conducting an experiment embedded in a demonstration in which all of these steps are explained in the manner in which, say, we explain the functions of a human heart:

[b]"* Pumping oxygenated blood to the other body parts.

• Pumping hormones and other vital substances to different parts of the body.
• Receiving deoxygenated blood and carrying metabolic waste products from the body and pumping it to the lungs for oxygenation.
• Maintaining blood pressure. the human heart functions"[/b]

How do we do the same with the human brain such that in the end we are able to demonstrate that the demonstration itself is or is not only as it every could have been. With the heart it’s like explaining the functions of an automobile engine. With the brain it’s like explaining the capacity of the brain to explain itself.

Or, rather, to the extent that [compelled or otherwise] my own explanation here is actually reasonable. And what can then be the comfort embedded in the conclusion that if it is not I cannot really be held responsible for getting it wrong. Not if I was never able not to get it wrong.

The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. But it left some room, at least in the popular imagination, for the possibility that we could overcome our circumstances or our genes to become the author of our own destiny. The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

This is clearly as good a description as any of where we are stuck. And, of course, we would seem to have no definitive capacity to disentangle ourselves from the conflicting sets of assumptions in order to know in, say, a comprehensive epistemological sense which assessment is the right one.

I merely muddy the waters all the more by introducing my own set of assumptions: that even given some measure of autonomy “I” in the is/ought world is embedded in and derived from all manner of variables that are are beyond our understanding and control. “I” is largely an existential contraption rooted subjectively in dasein. And that in turn it seems reasonable to construe “I” here as “fractured and fragmented” such that any particular individual’s value judgments are, at least in some sense, “illusory” even given free will.

[iambiguous]

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

This research and its implications are not new. What is new, though, is the spread of free-will skepticism beyond the laboratories and into the mainstream. The number of court cases, for example, that use evidence from neuroscience has more than doubled in the past decade—mostly in the context of defendants arguing that their brain made them do it. And many people are absorbing this message in other contexts, too, at least judging by the number of books and articles purporting to explain “your brain on” everything from music to magic. Determinism, to one degree or another, is gaining popular currency. The skeptics are in ascendance.

Here again however those on both sides of the debate will use this [however true it actually is] to bolster their own claims. The advocates of free will scoff that this is just further proof of how so many refuse to shoulder the responsibility for their own behaviors. Beyond blaming society for all the shit that comes their way, they can even blame their own brains. Either way, they certainly do not deserve to be punished for the things they do. Then it’s just a matter of how much wiggle room they are willing to allow for some autonomy. Like for example regarding all of the good things that they do.

Then there are those who really do believe science and “popular opinion” confirms that it’s all “beyond my control”. Some are even willing to go so far as to include the good that things they do too. The important thing though is that the punishment not be too severe. At least for those here who are in turn willing to accept that in meting out punishment not everything is compelled by nature.

On the other hand, there are still plenty of folks around hell bent on assuming that Donald Trump, Joe Biden and their followers are fully and wholly responsible for flushing American down the toilet.

This development raises uncomfortable—and increasingly nontheoretical—questions: If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible? And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it?

Whether the belief in determinism spreads or not the actual gap between what is believed and what is able to be established as autonomous belief still remains the crucial unknown. It’s like the belief in God and the actual existence of God. Or the belief in the matrix and the actual existence of the matrix. Or the belief in a conspiracy and the actual conspiracy itself. Only with determinism the gap can’t possibly be more fundamental. It’s not about what is believed but the nature of belief itself.

[iambiguous]

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

First of all, let’s step back.

Here’s a man writing an article on free will in The Atlantic Magazine. A magazine that I subscribe to. He seems to be convinced that we really don’t have free will. The science, he notes, seems rather certain about it. So somehow billions of years ago a Big Bang resulted in stars exploding…producing all of the heavier elements that somehow configured into living matter that somehow configured into self-conscious thinking matter that created the internet that allows us to communicate about determinism here and now. And all of this is entirely embedded in “immutable laws of matter” such that none of it could never have not happened.

Don’t even pretend to think you know if this is true. Well, unless, of course, one way or the other you can demonstrate that it either is or is not.

Does this?

In 2002, two psychologists had a simple but brilliant idea: Instead of speculating about what might happen if people lost belief in their capacity to choose, they could run an experiment to find out. Kathleen Vohs, then at the University of Utah, and Jonathan Schooler, of the University of Pittsburgh, asked one group of participants to read a passage arguing that free will was an illusion, and another group to read a passage that was neutral on the topic. Then they subjected the members of each group to a variety of temptations and observed their behavior. Would differences in abstract philosophical beliefs influence people’s decisions?

See the problem? If in fact human autonomy is entirely an illusion wholly subsumed in the only possible reality there can ever be given the immutable laws of matter, it makes no difference what any of them [any of us] think, feel, say or do…they [we] were never able not to think, feel, say and do them.

Same thing:

Yes, indeed. When asked to take a math test, with cheating made easy, the group primed to see free will as illusory proved more likely to take an illicit peek at the answers. When given an opportunity to steal—to take more money than they were due from an envelope of $1 coins—those whose belief in free will had been undermined pilfered more. On a range of measures, Vohs told me, she and Schooler found that “people who are induced to believe less in free will are more likely to behave immorally.

Or, again, is this all me? Is a point being made here that I keep missing? And how on earth do I go about determining if I am missing it because I am free not to miss it or if I was never able to not miss it until one day I am in fact free not to miss it, get it, and my whole frame of mind here changes.

[iambiguous]

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

It seems that when people stop believing they are free agents, they stop seeing themselves as blameworthy for their actions. Consequently, they act less responsibly and give in to their baser instincts. Vohs emphasized that this result is not limited to the contrived conditions of a lab experiment. “You see the same effects with people who naturally believe more or less in free will,” she said.

Again, how surreal this can all become! We don’t have any way to determine if in fact, beyond all possible doubt, we do have free will. But if tomorrow a team of scientists published a paper that caught the attention of the media around the globe…a paper that did claim to establish beyond all doubt that we do not have free will, how might different people react to it? What would change? What could change?

There doesn’t appear to be any definitive way in which to demonstrate such a proof. So one of us might conclude that she is not morally responsible and do what she assumes she could never have not done anyway. But she might do it to someone still convinced that we are morally responsible. And here we are grappling to come to a conclusion about what exactly it all amounts to. For example, for all practical purposes.

In another study, for instance, Vohs and colleagues measured the extent to which a group of day laborers believed in free will, then examined their performance on the job by looking at their supervisor’s ratings. Those who believed more strongly that they were in control of their own actions showed up on time for work more frequently and were rated by supervisors as more capable. In fact, belief in free will turned out to be a better predictor of job performance than established measures such as self-professed work ethic.

Which just takes us back to whether or not Vohs and his colleagues were or were not compelled by nature to measure whether these day laborers were or were not compelled by nature to believe they either did or did not have free will. Based on whether their supervisors were or were not compelled by nature to rate them as they did. Then you just keep going farther and farther back in time until you come to an ontological understanding of existence itself. Or God.

Though sure if we really do have free will but you or others are able to convince you that we don’t, to what extent can we be held responsible for doing things that we honestly and sincerely believe that we had no choice regarding.

[iambiguous]

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

Another pioneer of research into the psychology of free will, Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, has extended these findings. For example, he and colleagues found that students with a weaker belief in free will were less likely to volunteer their time to help a classmate than were those whose belief in free will was stronger. Likewise, those primed to hold a deterministic view by reading statements like “Science has demonstrated that free will is an illusion” were less likely to give money to a homeless person or lend someone a cellphone.

Okay but who is going to do the study that pins down once and for all whether the students with a weaker belief in free will were never able to not have a weaker belief in free will. Any more than those primed to hold a deterministic view were in fact wholly primed by the immutable laws of nature themselves.

More to the point [mine] why don’t the authors of articles like this point that part out? Perhaps because the universe was set into motion such that they were never ever free to point it out?

Further studies by Baumeister and colleagues have linked a diminished belief in free will to stress, unhappiness, and a lesser commitment to relationships.

I would imagine just the opposite. Assuming we have the free will to believe that we do not have free will – or a greatly diminished free will – would seem to suggest that we either have no moral responsibility for the things we think, feel, say and do, or very little responsibility. Wouldn’t that tend to make things less stressful in that we could merely note that it wasn’t like anything could ever have been any different. Or that only a very small number of things could have been. Same with relationships.

So, what am I missing here?

They found that when subjects were induced to believe that “all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules,” those subjects came away with a lower sense of life’s meaningfulness. Early this year, other researchers published a study showing that a weaker belief in free will correlates with poor academic performance.

Huh?

If they came to conclude that life is essentially meaningless then, in a wholly determined universe, even this is something that they could have not concluded.

Then this whole thing about a “weaker” belief? In what sense? That if someone who believes this gets a cee or a dee on their report cards there is some possibility that they have gotten a higher grade if they could figure out a way to know for sure how much if it either is or is not “beyond their control”?

[iambiguous]

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

Few scholars are comfortable suggesting that people ought to believe an outright lie. Advocating the perpetuation of untruths would breach their integrity and violate a principle that philosophers have long held dear: the Platonic hope that the true and the good go hand in hand.

On the other hand, if I believe that the assumption I make about lies in the is/ought world is merely a manifestation of determinism, than the fractured and fragmented sense of reality that I feel is as well. But what troubles most about the assumption I make that, with regard to moral and political value judgments, truths and lies are merely the embodiment of a particular accumulation of variables encompassed subjectively in political prejudices, is unthinkable and/or profoundly disturbing in a world where we do have free will.

Why? Because you can pat yourself on the back for having freely chosen one set of behaviors rather than another. But than I come along and suggest that this actually resolves nothing. What does it really matter if both sides in the abortion wars are able to select behaviors of their own volition, if that volition is merely entangled in this:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has wrestled with this dilemma throughout his career and come to a painful conclusion: “We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth” about free will.

If what we afford for people is of our own choosing then in regard to what?

I would merely tap him on the shoulder and say, “The truth? Given what set of circumstances”? In a world where, say, it can be established that both the Israelis and the Palestinians possess free will.