thoughts on determinism

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In Defense of Compatibilism: A Response to Edwards and Coyne
written by Ben Burgis at the quillette website

Re Edwards vs. Coyne above:

In his response, Coyne makes several good points. He understates the potential downsides of abandoning our belief in moral responsibility, but he’s on firmer ground when he argues that, although we have good reason to wish that something is true, this isn’t a good reason to believe that it is true. Moreover, we may not be any more able to force ourselves to believe something that we know defies the available evidence “than a tiger could force itself to turn vegetarian.”

Then, given the surreal nature of this discussion itself, could not the reason we wish that something was true not in turn be derived from the objective fact that nature and nature alone compels us to believe what we do is true about free will and moral responsibility?

We’re ever and always like the inhabitants of flatland speculating about that other dimension but never able to actually grasp it. To experience it. We take a leap to free will in wondering whether or not the leap itself is just another manifestation of the only possible world that, like tigers, human beings inhabit.

How do we extricate ourselves from this dilemma when any extraction itself might be just more of the same one size fits all embodiment of the only possible reality?

Coyne does not, however, question Edwards’s assumption that a kind of human agency and determinism are incompatible. In fact, he explicitly affirms it. Thus, both articles exclude the possibility that, as I’ve argued elsewhere, we don’t have to choose between the benefits of believing in human will and moral responsibility on the one hand, and forming our beliefs on the basis of evidence on the other. That’s a shame because—in academic philosophy, at least—the question of whether agency and determinism are compatible is what the quarrel is about.

Please. Tell me me don’t need a context here.

Bring this argument to another Mary out there “faced”, faced or “faced” with an unwanted pregnancy. How can her human “agency” not be incompatible with determinism…other than in defining the meaning of determinism such that “in your head” they are compatible.

If both our “choice” and the evidence we “collect” to demonstrate it are subsumed in the laws of nature, where’s the part about moral responsibility come in?

And, yeah, in “academic philosophy”, where almost everything revolves around how the meaning of words like determinism and free will and compatibility are defined into existence, not much can’t be presumed to be true about how they interact up in the didactic clouds.

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In Defense of Compatibilism: A Response to Edwards and Coyne
written by Ben Burgis at the quillette website

Hume and Later Compatibilists

David Hume was exactly the kind of Enlightenment philosopher who regarded belief in empirically baseless but attractive claims the way that a tiger might regard a plate of tofu. Hume argued against belief in Heaven and Hell, for example, at a time when that sort of thing could land a person in serious trouble. Nevertheless, he argued that we have free will.

But then how are we not back again to the part where everything can only come down to the assumptions we make about the fundamental relationship “I” and “all there is”?

Hume argued that we have free will but he was no more able to fully demonstrate that in fact this is true [philosophically, scientifically] than the rest of us. How could he have determined beyond all doubt that his own thinking and feeling was not just another inherent manifestation of the laws of matter compelling his brain to believe that his thoughts were not just embodied in the psychological illusion of free will?

Coyne and Edwards both seem to think that the kind of “free will” we’d need to be held morally responsible for our actions is “contra-causal free will.” In other words, if we’re truly free, then our decisions can override a physical chain of cause and effect. Hume didn’t think we have this kind of freedom.

Back to Mary. What would Hume argue here? If her decision to abort her unborn baby/clump of cells does not override the physical chain of cause and effect then what in her mind – soul? – makes it justified to hold her morally responsible? What allows for the existence of moral responsibility at all in a world where everything we think, feel, say and do is embedded in the only possible reality embodied in the physical cause and effect that are nature’s laws having evolved into the human brain?

In Chapter Eight of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (“Of Liberty and Necessity”), he argued that, even when we don’t know everything about what led Person P to decide to perform Action A instead of Action B, we shouldn’t jump from that premise to the conclusion that there isn’t a coherent cause-and-effect explanation. Hume compared human psychology to clockwork. When a clock stops working, a peasant might only be able to report that “sometimes they stop working,” whereas a trained clockmaker would be able to find the tiny grain of sand that got caught in the gears. Nevertheless, Hume thought, as long as P picked A because he preferred A rather than because, for example, an assassin threatened to shoot him if he picked B, P chose A of his own free will. In other words, Hume thought that the freedom we need to be responsible for our actions is freedom from coercion.

This is all just another rendition of peacegirl’s “greater satisfaction” delusion. If, in fact, it is a delusion. If you prefer A rather than B only because your brain is hard-wired by nature such that you were never able to prefer B rather than A, then your satisfaction here is no less subsumed in the only possible reality.

Though, sure, I keep missing the point here that the compatibilists are making. I will always acknowledge that possibility. Given a free will world here on planet Earth among the human species.

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In Defense of Compatibilism: A Response to Edwards and Coyne
written by Ben Burgis at the quillette website

What about a kleptomaniac who steals a bauble to satisfy his compulsion, or a heroin addict feeding an addiction? More fancifully, what if a mad scientist were to implant a chip in P’s brain that caused him to have an overwhelming desire to do A? In each of these scenarios, coercion isn’t present, but P doesn’t seem to be in control of his actions in a way that makes him responsible for them—or, at the very least, he seems to have diminished control and hence diminished responsibility.

Back again to how, given free will as I understand it, one understands the meaning of coercion here. How is it determined where the line is to be drawn between the more deep-seated brain components autonomically bent on compelling certain behaviors in us and the part of “I” that is said to have the actual capacity to beat all that back and not choose to steal or to use heroin? How can that not also be profoundly different for each of us? As for the chip in the brain how “overwhelming” is the desire.

On the other hand, given the manner in which I understand the meaning of determinism, nothing that revolves around stealing or drug use or having chips implanted in your brain is not coerced by the laws of matter. Instead, the mystery here still revolves more around how matter was actually able to evolve into living matter evolving into the human brain. And, really, who knows, there may be life forms on other planets that are to us what we are to chimps.

Many post-Hume compatibilists would say that in order to be responsible, P must be free not just from coercion but from other factors such as addiction, compulsion, and manipulation by brain implant. Nevertheless, they do not claim that P must be placed entirely beyond the influence of genetic and environmental factors to be responsible.

Again, as much as I try to grapple with this sort of thinking above in regard not to P but to Mary “choosing”, choosing or “choosing” an abortion, it just doesn’t sink in. As long as I construe all factors to be intertwined in the only possible reality then any assessment like this is, as well, no less subsumed in it.

Unless of course someone does succeed in explaining to me how their own brain, no less the embodiment of the laws of matter than mine and Mary’s, does “hold” her responsible.

This part in particular:

“Nevertheless, they do not claim that P must be placed entirely beyond the influence of genetic and environmental factors to be responsible.”

Pertaining to Mary, what exactly are they claiming then?

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In Defense of Compatibilism: A Response to Edwards and Coyne
written by Ben Burgis at the quillette website

Responsibility and Punishment

The compatibilist conceptions of free will that have been discussed so far might strike some readers as silly and uninteresting redefinitions of free will. Coyne has certainly suggested as much elsewhere. According to this critique, “humans have free will if you define ‘free will’ in a compatiblist way” might be equivalent to saying, “God exists if you define the sum total of all material things that exist as ‘God.’” Any atheist worth his salt would respond to this by saying that in that sense God exists, but who cares? This simply isn’t the “God” whose existence is disputed by atheists.

Yes! Defining free will and determinism and compatibilism into existence. You make an argument about Mary aborting her unborn baby/clump of cells and then insist that the truth of the argument is predicated entirely on how you define the meaning of all the words in it. Then if Mary asks if she is choosing an abortion of her own volition you ask her if she agrees with what you insist your own definition of the words used in the argument are and must be. And, if she doesn’t, the discussion of the actual abortion itself is put aside until there is a firm commitment on the definitions.

This objection misses the point. The argument about whether to use the phrase “free will” to describe (a) freedom from coercion, (b) some more sophisticated compatibilist definition of freedom, or (c) contra-causal freedom might indeed be a matter of different thinkers talking past one another. Even the semantic argument about which one of these accounts best fits what ordinary speakers mean when they use the term is a matter of relatively limited interest. The question of which of these kinds of freedom is necessary for moral responsibility, however, is an extremely interesting question.

Interesting perhaps but first we are back to figuring out whether we are “free”, free or “free” to connect the dots between freedom and moral responsibility.

As though determinism as I “understand” it does not include defining things.

So, in regard to confronting Mary, unsure if she is able to freely opt to choose either abortion or birth, what do the compatibilists here among us “tell” her?

Pick one…

(a) freedom from coercion,
(b) some more sophisticated compatibilist definition of freedom, or
(c) contra-causal freedom

…and explain to Mary why you did.

If, as I understand determinism, the unborn baby/clump of cells [which above I called Jane] is aborted she was never going to not be aborted if in fact Mary “chooses” to abort her. And if Mary was never able to choose not to abort her, how can she be held morally responsible?

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In Defense of Compatibilism: A Response to Edwards and Coyne
written by Ben Burgis at the quillette website

To see why it matters whether people are ever morally responsible for their actions, think for a moment about criminal punishment. The idea that at least some criminals deserve to be punished only seems to make sense if those criminals are morally responsible for their crimes.

My point though [expressed over and again] is that what matters far more is that we cannot seem to pin down with any degree of finality whether what we think matters here in and of itself is merely the embodiment of the psychological illusion of free will imparted to us by a brain wholly compelled by the laws of matter sustaining the only possible reality or in fact it matters precisely because we can choose among actual options that it either does or does not.

And then the part where, given human autonomy, some insist others deserve to be punished for behaviors that still others insist they should be rewarded for. And the part where those like me argue that what we come to believe others deserve is not within the reach of philosophers or ethicists but instead is embodied only in subjective points of view rooted in dasein and ever subject to change given new experiences in a world awash in contingency, chance and change.

The philosopher Derk Pereboom, a skeptic about free will, has argued that we can justify punishing violent criminals even if we don’t believe them to be responsible for their crimes. He uses the analogy of quarantining plague victims. It’s important to isolate them from the general population for the sake of public safety even though they don’t “deserve” to be locked up.

Here we go again. Yes, we can “choose” to justify punishing violent criminals. But only in the same way that men and women “choose” to become violent criminals in the first place: because they were never able not to. What’s deemed important or not important is no less subsumed in the only possible world.

The laws of nature that caused the plague are the same laws that cause some to get infected by it that cause others to isolate them. How, in a wholly determined universe, does anyone or anything become an exception?

That’s that part that [compelled or not[ eludes me.

Instead, arguments like this…

The problem with this line of thought is that it doesn’t seem to be capable of making sense of some of the most important modern ideas about how criminal justice systems should work. Consider Blackstone’s maxim that it is better for 10 guilty persons to go free than for one innocent person to be sent to prison. This is the moral calculation built into the “innocent until proven guilty” standard. But would we apply a parallel standard of evidence to quarantining plague victims? It’s hard to imagine a public health official reasoning that it’s better for 10 plague-ridden individuals to go around spreading the disease than for one uninfected person to be placed in quarantine. The idea that criminal punishment isn’t like this—that it is categorically wrong to punish the innocent—seems to rely upon a moral distinction that disappears when we say that no one is responsible for their actions.

…are made given what I presume to be the frame of mind that those who embrace free will would propose. Nothing is not made sense of other than as it can only be made sense of. Whether it’s human interactions involving crime or the plague doesn’t change that for me. The is/ought world of human value judgments is just another manifestation of the either/or world to nature. All the dominoes fall wholly in sync with nature’s “design”.

And yet clearly I have to acknowledge there are many very, very intelligent people who are able to think of compatibilism in a different way. So I would never rule out that the problem here is my own inability to grasp what they do about determinism.

Unlike, say, the objectivists here among us.

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In Defense of Compatibilism: A Response to Edwards and Coyne
written by Ben Burgis at the quillette website

Frankfurt and Fischer

Even if we (a) accept that we live in a deterministic universe and (b) think that it’s implausible that no one is ever responsible for their actions, it is still possible to reject compatibilism. After all, if it’s literally impossible for individual P to take option B, given all the previous links in the relevant chains of cause and effect, it might seem obviously wrong to say that P “was free to” do B.

Yeah, that’s how [compelled or not] I think about it. Nothing is not compelled by the laws of matter if the human brain is not somehow an exception to the material laws of nature. On the other hand, I would not argue that it can’t be an exception. And thus that we do in fact possess some measure of autonomy given this [so far] inexplicable exception.

Then the compatibilists weigh in…

This line of thought has led compatibilist philosophers like Harry Frankfurt and John Martin Fischer to slice up their conceptual categories in a more cautious way. Frankfurt and Fischer are willing to concede the semantic issue and grant that if determinism is true, we can’t have free will understood as the freedom to do otherwise. They argue, however, that in a completely deterministic world, we’re still free to exercise the kind of control necessary to be morally responsible.

Sigh…

Here we go again. Their brains being compelled to argue this no less than all the rest of us being compelled to choose behaviors that others are compelled to call immoral that still other are compelled to hold them responsible for.

Where’s the “control” come in here? And how is it different from the control that those who embrace the real deal free will world use to justify punishing immoral acts?

Any thoughts?

Again, however, only in reference to something concrete like Mary aborting her unborn baby/clump of cells.

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In Defense of Compatibilism: A Response to Edwards and Coyne
written by Ben Burgis at the quillette website

In a famous paper, Frankfurt defends this distinction [above] with a hypothetical example. His original example has spawned a whole literature in which different philosophers have used similar examples—generally called “Frankfurt cases”—to debate his ideas. One of my favorite of these “Frankfurt cases,” suggested by Joshua Spencer, a philosopher who agrees with Frankfurt and Fischer’s version of compatibilism, takes the classic Grandfather Paradox for time travelers and turns it on its head.

Suppose that Martin is a time traveler; he travels in a machine that can transport him to various points in earth’s history. During one of his many trips, Martin rescued a man from plummeting to his death. Let us suppose the man rescued was a high-wire walker who was working without a net in a very desolate area with no one nearby. Martin arrived in his time machine just in time to see the man fall from his wire, head first toward the ground. Luckily, Martin quickly found a button labeled “Emergency Safety Net Release.” Martin pressed the button and an emergency safety net was deployed across the field underneath the high-wire walker. The walker landed safely in the net and walked away from the situation unscathed. If Martin had not pushed the button and released the emergency safety net, then the high-wire walker would have fallen to his death.

As it turns out, this high-wire walker was Martin’s grandfather at a very young age. At the time of his fall, Martin’s high-wire walking grandfather had not yet met Martin’s grandmother and he had not done anything that would have preserved his gametes for posterity. So, since Martin’s grandfather would have died without any progeny, it is clear that (1) if Martin had not released the emergency safety net, then Martin would never have existed. But, of course, it’s not possible for Martin to do anything if he never exists. In particular, (2) it’s not possible for Martin to do otherwise than release the emergency safety net if he never exists.

Despite the fact that Martin wasn’t free to do otherwise, Spencer thinks, Martin seems to deserve our praise for saving this man (especially since he didn’t know the high-wire walker was his grandfather). Martin would not deserve praise had he depressed the button by stepping on it without realising, even though the outcome would be the same. The difference is that, in the scenario Spencer described, Martin was in control—even though he wasn’t free to do otherwise.

I’m sorry but what on earth does any of this tell us about compatibilism and moral responsibility? Especially given the fact that, even in accepting a world where Martin is free to choose to go back in time to assure his own existence, no reputable scientist has come forward to suggest something like this is actually possible. What important point then am I missing here in regard to “I” in the is/ought world?

I’m still of the opinion that, given determinism as I understand it, nothing is unfolding here that was ever able to not unfold: the author writing this article, me reading it, me commenting on it here in my own here and now, you reading it now in your own here and now.

Any and all “Frankfurt cases” would seem no less subsumed in the only possible reality.

Again, for me it’s not whether, as Spencer thinks, “Martin seems to deserve our praise for saving this man…”, but whether Spencer ever has the option to think otherwise. Similarly, it’s not whether Martin depressed the button with or without realizing it, but that he was only able to realize what the laws of nature compelled his brain to realize.

Truly, what I wouldn’t give for that sci-fi machine Maia and I discussed that would at least allow me to think and to feel what the compatibilist arec getting at here. It just makes no sense to me at all in a wholly determined universe.

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In Defense of Compatibilism: A Response to Edwards and Coyne
written by Ben Burgis at the quillette website

Fischer’s idea is that, even in a deterministic world where we aren’t free to do otherwise, we have “guidance control” over our actions just so long as we’re appropriately ‘reasons-responsive’—that is to say, we understand reasons for and against possible courses of action and we’re at least somewhat moved by such reasons. Building on Fischer’s idea, Ryan Lake argues in his doctoral dissertation, No Fate But What We Make: A Defense of the Compatibility of Freedom and Causal Determinism, that the reasons that move us must be our reasons in order for us to be exercising the guidance control necessary for moral responsibility.

Okay, but then the part where neuroscientists and those studying the human brain experimentally, are able to put together a pile of evidence that demonstrates exactly how this unfolds in the brain just before an action is undertaken by an actual flesh and blood human being in an actual everyday situation. So that we no longer have to rely on the philosophical/intellectual speculations and/or definitional logic of those like pood, obsrvr524 and peacegirl’s author here.

If that demonstrable proof has already been provided for us, please link it to me here.

A way to finally know for sure that even in a causally determined universe “the reasons that move us must be our reasons in order for us to be exercising the guidance control necessary for moral responsibility”.

Oh, and, of course, the manner in which that might be explained to Mary before she aborts Jane. Or to Jane if she isn’t aborted.

Or forget abortion, make it about property rights:

To get a better sense of Lake’s idea here, think about property rights. If I find a precious stone on a beach that no one has laid claim to, it’s fine for me to take possession of it. If I find the same kind of stone in a friend’s pocket, it would be wrong of me to take it without asking. In both cases, the stone comes from outside of me. I didn’t make it. The difference is that in the first case, I’m the only person with a claim to it.

Again: how on earth is this distinction to be construed as demonstrable proof that compatibilism really does reconcile a causally determined universe with moral responsibility?!

To wit…

How would anyone go about proving that making such a distinction is not in and of itself but an inherent component of the only possible reality? You find a precious stone on the beach because you were never able not to find it. You take a precious stone out of a friend’s pocket because you were never able not to take it.

Similarly, if the mindless operation of natural laws playing out through a complex combination of genetic and environmental factors results in my weighing the pros and cons of a possible course of action in a certain way and coming to a particular decision, the reasons that motivated me are my reasons. If a mad scientist’s chip in my head brings about the same result, they are not. In both cases, my decision is determined by factors outside of me, but only in the first case do I have a unique “claim” on my reasoning.

Ever and always it comes come to how [compelled or not] we construe the mind here. If the mind is the brain is just more matter necessarily in sync with the laws of all matter, both the genetic and the environmental factors are, in turn, necessarily subsumed in that. They are “my reasons” only because I am the particular agglomeration of matter that nature and it’s laws are acting through.

Only to the extent that scientists or philosophers or others can demonstrate why and how human brain matter, unlike any other matter, actually did acquire the capacity to choose among options, can we finally know for certain that we really can be held morally responsible for our choices.

Until then, sure, take your own intellectual leap. But don’t consfuse that with hard proof that you are right and everyone who disagrees with you are wrong.

The mad scientist would be no less the embodiment of nature.

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A Neo-Humean Perspective: Laws as Regularities
NORMAN SWARTZ
SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY, CANADA

Introduction

I was seven or eight years old. In Hebrew school we had just learned the Aleph-Bet and were, haltingly, beginning to sound out words. As we spoke the ancient text, our teacher translated: “… And God said: ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light. …” Here was magic; here was the supernatural; here was the creation of the universe. I resonated to the story. I was filled with wonder, far more than had ever been elicited by any fairy tale my parents had read to me. I pictured in my imagination the majesty of it: God speaks and Nature obeys.

But I did not believe the story that was unfolding. I was certainly enraptured by it; but I was not seduced by it. I reveled in the imagery while harboring a conviction, one that would strengthen in the ensuing years, that it was false

Here, of course, regularities abound. But they revolve around descriptions of reality that all children are indoctrinated to believe down through time historically, and across the globe culturally. And then each of us as individuals have our own unique personal experiences as children. Thus we encounter our own collection of regularities that other children know almost nothing about.

Which can then explain many of our “failure to communicate” moments here and now.

But: what is almost always assumed by most of us? That all of this unfolds in a world where human beings have somehow acquired the capacity, as they grow into adults, to freely choose to sustain these regularities or opt for others instead.

God and nature and mere mortals. What here is the most rational collection of regularities that the philosophers among us can pin down in order to pin down further the extent to which human autonomy exists. If it exists at all.

So, aside from whether a child continues to believe what he or she is indoctrinated to believe when they are wholly dependent on their family and community, or instead, as an adult, acquires a completely different set of beliefs, what to make of the determinism debate?

The fable of Genesis is one of the most enduring of Western Civilization. It is so much a part of the fabric of our collective thinking that in its modern-day guises it is all but invisible. But parts of the biblical Creation-myth do persist. The fable survives, even in the thinking of many persons who believe that they have divested themselves of any shred of a theistic or supernatural cosmology, persons who are certain that they have adopted a thoroughgoing materialistic naturalism.

Why? Perhaps because, given the real deal free will world, even though we acquire new regularities throughout our lives, the very first ones hammered into our heads through years of indoctrination are always going to be around in our brains…if only on a subconscious or unconscious level. The subterranean dasein we truly have only so much control over.

And why should our new understanding of regularities themselves be any less complex and convoluted?

The myth [of Genesis] has been secularized for consumption in the twentieth century. Few scientists ever invoke God in their explanations of events in the world. But if God Himself has dropped out of the picture, His Words remain and retain their primeval role. The principal difference is that now those Words are called “physical laws”. Just as the background radio hiss in the universe is the remnant of an ancient Big Bang, the theory that physical laws govern the world is the remnant of the ancient supernatural theory that God spake and Nature obeyed.

Yes, “regularities” described as a manifestation of God’s will, have, over time, as science became considerably more adept in explaining the physical world around us than religion, reconfigured in the minds of most into physical laws.

Ah, but than [for me] there is still the part where these physical laws come up short in explaining regularities pertinent to the matter we call the human brain. In fact, with God and religion, it’s all considerable more perspicuous for millions: God created it and that included free will.

Okay, so where is the final, definitive scientific explanation for human autonomy? Again, if it even exists at all.

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A Neo-Humean Perspective: Laws as Regularities
NORMAN SWARTZ
SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY, CANADA

Physical Laws and Scientific Laws

Physical laws are the ‘real’ laws of Nature. These laws are true independent of human beings coming to learn their truth. The law of the constancy of the speed of light, for example, has nothing to do with human beings having learned it to be true. It is true – and would have been true – even if human beings had never discovered its truth, indeed even if human beings (or any other sentient creatures for that matter) had never existed in this universe.

Even here though “the gap” between what scientists think they understand about these laws and all that can be/must be known about them going back to the complete, definitive understanding of existence itself doesn’t go away. Then the part where Hume himself makes that crucial distinction between correlation and cause and effect.

The cosmos? Last night on the Science Channel they aired a segment on the Underground Marvels series in which they discussed an old goldmine being used by scientists to probe the existence of neutrinos. Part of the dark matter and dark energy that comprises 95% of the universe. 95% of it, but that we still know practically nothing at at all about it. We can’t observe it, study it, experiment with it…only note it’s actual impact “out there”.

Anyway, it was noted that if you took all the atoms in the universe, there would be a billion times more neutrinos. So, does that have anything at all to do with the human brain’s capacity to think freely? Or, again, simply shrug off that truly weird and mysterious “stuff” as immaterial to your own TOE?

Physical laws have at least five properties. They are: (1) true (for all time and all place); (2) universal or statistical generalizations; (3) purely descriptive (i.e. free of any terms naming specific items in the universe); (4) conditional; and (5) contingent (i.e. not necessary [logical] truths).

Anyone here care to translate that for Mary when confronted with an unwanted pregnancy? Anyone able to note for her whether Jane had any chance at all of not having been aborted if in fact Mary aborted her?

Being believed or being known is not a defining property of physical laws. What properties beyond these minimal five properties are necessary for a proposition’s being a physical law is the area of contention between the Regularity Theory and its rivals. According to the Regularity Theory these five properties are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for a proposition’s being a physical law. Rival theories – which I here wish to reprove – argue that additional properties are necessary for a proposition’s being a physical law, that is, these competing theories argue that the list, just given, of five properties is not sufficient.

We’ll need an actual context of course. The part where Regularity Theory meets the minds of those like you and I grappling to figure out how and why anything at all that we think, feel, say or do does go beyond being merely a “proposition”. How the acts that we choose are manifestations of these physical laws…plus. Plus whatever happened when matter did configure into the human brain all those eons ago.

Next up: scientific laws.

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A Neo-Humean Perspective: Laws as Regularities
NORMAN SWARTZ
SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY, CANADA

Scientific laws, in contrast, are human creations. These are statements adopted in our collective effort to explain, predict and control the world.

Here too though you react to this depending on how [compelled or not] you think about determinism. If you think as I do, then the contrast made by the author between physical and scientific laws is an inherent, necessary manifestation of the only possible reality. Thus author was never able to not make this distinction.

Scientific laws – with few exceptions – are understood to be [1] not literally true, i.e. to be false. Nearly all scientific laws – as pointed out by Scriven and, far more extensively, by Cartwright – are false: not just possibly false, but actually false, and moreover known to be false.

Define understood? Given your capacity to define it freely?

True or false given what particular contexts? If, assuming some measure of human autonomy here, we ascribe scientific laws to that which scientists think they understand about the laws of nature then, sure, who really knows how wide “the gap” is here? On the other hand, given what science has been able to explore regarding the laws of nature, we do have things like computers, smart phone technology and hundreds of other technologies and engineering feats that seem applicable to everyone around the globe.

(Cartwright writes colorfully that the ‘laws of physics lie’. Literary license understood, we know that she means that the [scientific] laws of physics are false.) In addition, scientific laws are understood (2) to be approximations to the truth, ‘idealized’ reconstructions, or instrumental tools; and (3) to be held only tentatively, always subject to the possibility, and in many instances the actuality, of refutation, abandonment, and replacement.

True enough in the sense there is Newton’s take on the laws of physics and then Einstein’s take on them. And, given this…

“It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe.” nasa

…who knows who might come up with another great leap forward a couple hundred more years into the future. Not only that but 200 years from now who knows what might be known that shifts the free will/determinism debate dramatically.

Will Regularity Theory itself stand the test of time? But that’s the beauty of embracing theoretical constructs like this here and now. You won’t be around there and then to see the verdict. So you can claim anything now.

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Trouble with Compatibilism
Marcus Arvan at The Philosophers’ Cocoon website

So I just finished reading Carolina Sartorio’s new paper in Phil Review, “Making a Difference in a Deterministic World”, and I’m puzzled. I’m not puzzled by the paper – which is clear and well-argued enough – so much as I am puzzled by the entire view it is concerned with: compatibilism.

Click.

And here I am again. Thinking that maybe this time I will read something that actually allows me at least to understand how compatibilists are able to square determinism with that which is of most interest to me in this debate: moral responsibility.

Here, in a nutshell, is Sartorio’s main thesis: even if everything in the universe is fully determined in advance, there is nevertheless a sense in which our actions can make a difference in the world.

Again, from my own [compelled or not] frame of mind, yes, clearly the things I do will make a difference in the world. It’s just that I can’t pin down if this difference was ever going to be other than what it must be given that my brain, wholly in sync with the laws of matter, was never able to not compel me act other than how it must act.

Sartorio’s argument then is that because “difference-making” is intuitively tied to moral responsibility, and compatibilists prior to her paper haven’t made adequate sense of how our actions can make a difference in a deterministic world, she has provided a better compatibilist account of how we can be morally responsible for our actions.

Right, like human intuitions are not in turn wholly subsumed in the laws of matter. But, sure, her argument might be the one that does allow me to grasp compatibilism more clearly. Though, once again, given my own understanding of determinism “here and now”, even a clearer understanding on my part is only ever what it could have been.

But of course here’s what puzzles me, and what seems to puzzle most of compatibilism’s opponents as far as I can tell: how compatibilism is supposed to be at all interesting, regardless of how we spell it out. After all, suppose I said to you: “All of your actions were determined billions of years ago. But, don’t worry, you can make a real difference in the world. I have a philosophical analysis of ‘making a difference’ that proves it!”

This point is basically my point as well. You “demonstrate” that determinism and “moral responsibility” are compatible in a “philosophical analysis”. As though an intellectual analysis is demonstration enough. Or that you can demonstrate further that the analysis itself is not in turn but an inherent component of the only possible reality.

This “rejoinder” however is less clear to me…

The obvious enough rejoinder seems to me to be this: “Well, of course. Surely there has to be a sense in which I can make a difference in the world. My actions are mine, after all – they belong to me – and there’s clearly a sense in which they do make a difference in what happens. If the laws of nature cause me to drink a Coke, then, indeed, I have made a difference in the world: there is one less Coke to drink. But so what? It’s one thing to say that there’s a sense in which I can make a difference in the world. It’s another thing to show that it is a sense worth philosophically caring about.”

Drink a Coke? One less Coke in the world?

So what indeed!

I’d be more interested in exploring the behaviors of someone who took a Coke bottle and bashed it over the head of another killing him. One less human being in the world.

[iambiguous]

Pereboom’s Four Case Argument against Compatiblism
John Danaher at the Philosophical Disquisitions website

I have recently been working my way through some of the arguments in Derk Pereboom’s book Free Will, Agency and Meaning in Life. The book presents the most thorough case for hard incompatibilism of which I am aware. Hard incompatibilism is the view that free will is not compatible with causal determinism, and, what’s more, probably doesn’t even exist. In previous entries, I’ve looked at Pereboom’s critique of non-compatibilist theories of free will. In this post, I want to look at his famous argument against compatibilism.

Here we go again…

What exactly is being argued here? Doesn’t it depend entirely on whether the author has either been 1] wholly compelled by the laws of matter to believe and to write here what he could not have not believed and written, or 2] on whether, in a manner in which he or no one [to the best of my knowledge] fully understands, lifeless matter configuring biologically into the human brain “somehow” resulted in at least some measure of human volition, will, autonomy.

I start then with that obvious assumption: the gap.

Meaning that, right from the start, a resolution to the quandary is beyond our grasp. Unless, of course, you have thought yourself into believing that your own resolution is in fact the optimal or the only rational one.

Still, the peculiar argument [to me] that swirls around those who, compelled or not, manage to reconcile a belief in causal determinism with human responsibility. Either moral or otherwise.

Very, very intelligent men and women have “come” to this conclusion so there is no way I can rule out the possibility that the problem is me. My own inability “here and now” to grasp their frame of mind.

[iambiguous]

Free will doesn’t exist. Compatibilism makes no sense.
Brian Hines from the Church of the Churchless website

I don’t believe in free will. I’ve got good neuroscientific company, which includes Sam Harris, author of “Free Will.”

Okay, so what are Paul and Sam and the neuroscientists saying here? That everything they think and feel and say and do in the way of examining and then passing judgment on free will and compatibilism is in itself but another inherent manifestation of the only possible reality?

That’s always the tricky part for me. Here he is defending Harris defending his assessment of compatibilism and, what, acknowledging in turn that they are in exactly the same boat as those who defend compatibilism are in? Neither of them able to actually opt to say something other than what they must say?

This part:

Reading a New York Times review of “Free Will,” I was reminded of how the have-it-both-ways notion of compatibilism doesn’t make sense to me.

Given how I understand determinism, there is no “have-it-both-ways” here. There is only how the free will advocates, the hard determinism advocates and the compatibilism advocates must “have it” given that their brains – all their brains – are hard-wired into the laws of nature such that there can be no exceptions.

Unless and until neuroscientists are able to demonstrate that in fact in regard to the matter that comprises the human brain, “I” is the exception.

Then bringing these abstractions out into the world of human interactions revolving around “my thing” here: connecting the dots between determinism, compatibilism and moral responsibility. And explaining your conclusions to Mary faced with an unwanted pregnancy.

[iambiguous]

Free will doesn’t exist. Compatibilism makes no sense.
Brian Hines from the Church of the Churchless website

Compatibilism claims that free will and determinism are compatible.

Huh? is my reaction. Harris’ also, according to the [New York Times review of Free Will].

"For quite a while now, philosophers and public intellectuals, including Harris’s friend Dennett, have tried to rescue something like the common notion of free will from the jaws of science and logic by embracing a position called compatibilism. Compatibilists believe that ‘a person is free as long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsions,’ Harris writes, and they ‘have produced a vast literature in an effort’ to salvage free will. ‘More than in any other area of academic philosophy, the result resembles theology,’ he continues, consigning it to what one assumes is, for him, the intellectual subbasement.

Again, here’s the part that always perplexes me…

Harris writes what he does about determinism, free will and compatibilism as though he did in fact have free will in the manner in which, say, the libertarians construe it. He speaks of [criticizes] those who produce “a vast literature in an effort to salvage free will” as though he was able to opt of his own volition to speak differently of them. Why doesn’t he pull back and note this: “okay, I’m making this point about the compatibilists but I recognize that I could never have not made it. Any more than the compatibilists could have opted not to think and believe and say what they do.”

There are no “outer and inner” compulsions given my own understanding of determinism. There are only the physical laws of matter embodied in the human brain such that both Harris and those he “disagrees” with are exchanging only the words they were never able not to exchange.

For some reason unrelated to my non-existent free will, I’ve never even been able to understand how compatibilists justify their position, much less agree with it.

Huh? What reason unrelated to his non-existent free will? That is the only reason there can ever possibly be for anything that he thinks, feels, says or does if his own human brain is not somehow the exception to the rule re the physical, material, phenomenological laws of nature. Going back to…to what exactly? Aside from “the gap”.

[iambiguous]

Free will doesn’t exist. Compatibilism makes no sense.
Brian Hines from the Church of the Churchless website

It just seems to me that if determinism rules the brain, and there’s essential zero scientific evidence to the contrary, then the only way to save a belief in free will is to redefine the term.

Cue iambiguous pulling out his hair…

If you were never able not to redefine free will other than as your brain compels you to, the belief that you “save” it is no less subsumed in this only possible reality.

Mary was never able not to abort Jane. John was never able not to redefine free will in order to “convince” himself that Mary is morally responsible.

To wit: Human brains are either “all in” here or science is able at last to demonstrate how when lifeless matter evolved into living matter the human brain somehow became the material, phenomenological exception.

This is what compatibilists do. They accept brain-based determinism, but somehow argue that if I can act on my fully determined motives without interference (mostly from other people, I assume), I’m free.

However, if I’m not free to choose what to do, what kind of freedom is that?

I’d like an explanation of that myself.

This, of course, requires that a mysterious “will” be something supernatural, since if “will” is an altered brain state, determinism still rules: my will is the result of some cause, which itself is the result of some other cause, and so on – all the way back to the big bang.

And, if not supernatural – God and the No God equivalent – the part where neuroscientists or others are able to probe the human brain and establish experimentally/empirically how nonliving matter configured into living matter configured in conscious matter configured into self-conscious matter with free will.

[iambiguous]

A Metaphysics For Freedom by Helen Steward
We exercise free will this issue as Les Reid defends A Metaphysics For Freedom.

‘The Road Not Taken’ is a poem by Robert Frost that describes a moment of choice. He has two woodland paths before him, and he chooses “the one less traveled by.” Quite possibly, Frost was thinking of his own choice of a life as a poet, but the general image applies to all the choices that we make. All through life we have decisions to make, choosing one path rather than another, and those choices give our lives their individual shape. The poem assumes that the future is a blank sheet on which we choose to write our individual life stories.

And, in a sense, this is what the free will/determinism debate comes down to. Deciding if all of the choices that we are confronted with – thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them over the course of a life – happen because one way or another they might not have happened if we had opted to go the other way. Or if “opting to go the other way” is merely the manifestation of an illusion that a wholly determined brain is “somehow” able to foist on us from the cradle to the grave. And for reasons that still completely baffle us. As though the experiences we have in the waking world are just another manifestation of the experiences we have in the dream world: the brain mechanism doing its thing going back to whatever brought into existence matter itself.

Like the Terminator hunting down Sarah Connor in its own rendition of the wide awake world.

Professor Ted Honderich could not agree less. In his book On Determinism and Freedom (2005), he argues that the notion of free will that lies behind all such talk of choices and responsibility is incoherent, and cannot be assimilated to the account of physical reality the sciences have arrived at. In particular, Honderich objects to the notion of origination: that is, to the claim that an action can originate from a deliberate, conscious choice without prior physical cause. He argues that any decision is instead in reality an event or series of events in the neural pathways of one’s brain, and that all such events are embedded within physical causal sequences.

You know what’s next here, right?

Professor Ted Honderich writes a book to dispute the free will advocates as though he himself had somehow freely opted to choose to do this in order to dispute the libertarians. How surreal it all quickly becomes.

The physical cause sequences that presumably can only include his writing the book. It’s as though Nature itself was this actual entity that gets some sort of kick out of putting infinitesimally tiny specks of existence like us in these labyrinthian “philosophical” quandaries. See how we’ll react. If how we react is not “somehow” itself an exception to the physical cause sequence rules.

[iambiguous]

A Metaphysics For Freedom by Helen Steward
We exercise free will this issue as Les Reid defends A Metaphysics For Freedom.
Book Review

Here we see the ancient problem of free will being brought sharply into focus because of the advance of neural science. Brain scan technology, for example, has progressed dramatically in recent years, and with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging we can now watch multi-coloured scans which reveal the shifting patterns of electrical activity in a conscious brain as its owner thinks thoughts and makes choices.

On the other hand, consider the gap between what neural science knows about the functioning human brain here and now and what it will know about it in, say, a hundreds years.

Then the gap between this and all that there possibly is to be known about the functioning human brain.

Of course this is the part some here refuse to truly consider at all. After all, if they did acknowledge this, they could not insist that favorite authors of theirs have in fact already figured out all there needs to be known about the functioning human brain and free will.

In any event, back to the present:

The implication, for Honderich, is clear: brains are made of chemicals, and their functioning depends on electric currents. Chemicals and electric currents follow predictable causal sequences: any event in the world of chemicals and electricity is part of a chain of physical causes and effects which unfolds inexorably until the event occurs.

But: this seems true only given all that neural scientists still don’t grasp about the mind-boggling evolution of matter into minds. So those on both sides of the debate can always cling to that to hold the opposition at bay. Instead, we are all reduced down to the assumptions we make about these things. Some are just more willing to live with that. Compelled or not.

Still…

So the notion that a conscious agent has in choice the ability to originate an event in the brain free of prior physical causal constraints does not fit with Honderich’s understanding of how the world works – which understanding, he says, is in tune with the scientific world-view. Honderich is thus, as the jargon goes, a determinist, not a libertarian. Libertarians say that free will is an obvious fact, and determinists say that free will is an illusion.

…it’s not looking good for the libertarians.

On the other hand, there are also those pesky compatibilists able “in their head” to square determinism with, among other things, moral responsibility.

For example, by defining the reconciliation into existence. Theoretically as it were.

[iambiguous]

A Metaphysics For Freedom by Helen Steward
We exercise free will this issue as Les Reid defends A Metaphysics For Freedom.
Book Review

A New Champion of Freedom

The debate between determinists and libertarians has been rumbling on for centuries. One can trace it all the way from Ancient Greece to Enlightenment Europe, through to our own time. The libertarian side of the debate, however, now has a new champion – Helen Steward, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds.

Think about it. A rumbling debate for centuries. And by minds that are almost certainly far more sophisticated than the minds that gather here. And yet there is still no clear winner. Instead, only “champions” on both sides of the spectrum.

Click.

You’d think that would tell those I construe to be fulminating fanatic objectivists here something crucial about their own conclusions. This: that if they really are convinced their own “definitional logic” assessments are the optimal or the only rational conclusion, they shouldn’t be doing that here.

They should be doing everything in their power to bring their theoretical constructs to those website discussion forums that offer them a greater chance of being recognized by those who can bring their conclusions to a much wider [and more influential] audience.

In her book A Metaphysics for Freedom (2012), Dr. Steward sets out a revised version of the libertarian position. She also fends off some recent assaults on libertarianism, extends its range to include animals, and corrects some fellow libertarians whose reasoning she finds flawed (including John Searle). The book is closely argued, but it is very readable, and Steward provides many useful examples to illustrate her points. I think her revised libertarianism is a significant development, and her arguments are both fascinating and compelling.

Okay, here is someone who has gone on to take her own conclusions to that broader, more influential audience. And yet her arguments seem not to be as “fascinating and compelling enough” to persuade philosophers and scientists around the globe that this centuries old conundrum has at last been resolved.

Steward also replies to several recent critiques of libertarianism, including Alfred Mele’s ‘Challenge from Chance’. According to Mele, libertarianism essentially means that Joe did A, but could have done B. However, Mele points out, there is no physical difference that itself makes the difference between Joe choosing A and Joe choosing B (if there were, the apparent choice would be physically determined). Therefore (he concludes), it can only be a matter of sheer chance whether Joe does A or B. Steward replies by elaborating the example. Joe is deciding whether to move in with his girlfriend or not. He weighs up the pros (many) and the cons (none), and decides A: to move in. Where is the element of chance or luck in that? Steward says that Mele offers a false model of deciding, and that his ‘no difference’ argument assumes too much.

Here we go again…

Given my own understanding of determinism, anything that Joe thinks, feels, says or does involves no element luck or chance because all elements of all his “choices” are inherently/necessarily embedded in the only possible reality.

Steward and Mele, like you and I, are only going about the business of toppling over onto each other as the laws of nature prescribe. Or, for some here, as the laws of nature compel them to describe it.

There is “physically determined” in regard to such things as volcanic explosions and “physically determined” in regard to moving into your girlfriend’s apartment.

And until it can be definitively determined if there is a difference between them, how are we to know if in fact there is?

Only it just gets all that more surreal because we have no way in which to grasp definitively if the demonstration of it itself is not also only as it ever could have been.

[iambiguous]

Human Freewill and Divine Predestination
Antony Flew untangles some confusion about David Hume, St Thomas Aquinas and the fiery fate of the damned.
Note: this was written in 2003. To the best of my knowledge, a year before Flew publicly rejected atheism.

Discounting journals of natural philosophy (i.e. physics) the first philosophical journal to be established in the UK was Mind, founded in the second half of the nineteenth century. To this day the annual philosophers’ jamboree in Britain is a Joint Session of the Mind Association, consisting of subscribers to Mind, and the Aristotelian Society, which publishes the papers presented to the Joint Session as a Supplementary Volume to its own annual Proceedings.

Mind continues to occupy a preeminent position among scholarly journals of philosophy. So there is surely some significance in the fact that the first item in the issue current at the time of writing, that of April 2002, is an article by Helen Beebee and Alfred Mele entitled ‘Hume’s Compatibilism’. It is remarkable that this article not only contrives to make no quotation from or reference to any work by David Hume but also manages to avoid mentioning any philosophical question which could possibly interest anyone other than professional philosophers.

On the other hand, given one take on determinism, who can really blame them?

It is even more remarkable that the relevant work of which mention is thus eschewed should be An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which has from its first publication generated wider and fiercer controversy than any of Hume’s other works. Beebee and Mele preface their article with the conventional Abstract:

“Humean compatibilism is the combination of a Humean position on laws of nature and the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. This article’s aim is to situate Humean compatibilism in the current debate among libertarians, traditional compatibilists, and semi-compatibilists about free will. We argue that a Humean about laws can hold that there is sense in which the laws of nature are ‘up to us’ and hence that the leading style of argument for incompatibilism – the consequence argument – has a false premise. We also display some striking similarities between Humean compatibilism and libertarianism, an incompatibilist view.”

Again, given this → click ← I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone can reconcile the human brain being but another necessary manifestation laws of nature and at the same time being compatible with free will.

For all practical purposes given the things we “choose” to think, feel, say and do, it’s a complete contradiction to me. Only I suspect that the part revolving around “for all practical purposes” may become irrelevant when “serious philosophers” tackle this up in the abstract/abstruse didactic clouds of epistemology.

And then the part where Hume noted that crucial distinction between correlating matter and matter, given “the gap” and “Rummy’s Rule”, that is pinned down decisively given the ontological – teleological? – understanding of cause and effect.

We shall see…