Free will and good writing

Posted on February 13, 2014 by Richard Bowker

I’m probably more interested in free will than you are, presumably for reasons I have no control over.

I don’t believe in free will. Or, more precisely, I can figure out how it could possibly work. I read Daniel Dennett’s pro-free-will book Freedom Evolves, and I couldn’t really follow his arguments. I read Sam Harris’s anti-free-will book Free Will, and it seemed admirably clear. Is it clearer because Harris is a better writer, or because the case against free will is simply easier to make?

Now Dennett has published a rejoinder to Harris’s book, and Harris has published a rejoinder to Dennett’s rejoinder. Yikes! The heart of Dennett’s argument, I think, is that of course the naive folk interpretation of free will is wrong, but there is this other kind of free will that’s really real. This seems to me to be the kind of move that sophisticated religious people like Karen Armstrong make. Of course the Bible isn’t literally true; everyone knows that. Instead, atheists need to grapple with my own numinous, apophatic, transcendent view of God. Except this ends up being so numinous that there’s nothing to grapple with.

Similarly, Dennett’s view of the pernicious effects of an anti-free-will stance remind me of the “belief in belief” point of view that some smart people have about religion. Of course you and I know better than to take religion seriously, but we have to be quiet about this, because religion is necessary to keep the great unwashed from losing their morality.

Anyway, here is a taste of Harris’s prose:

Holding people responsible for their past actions makes no sense apart from the effects that doing so will have on them and the rest of society in the future (e.g. deterrence, rehabilitation, keeping dangerous people off our streets). The notion of moral responsibility, therefore, is forward-looking. But it is also paradoxical. People who have the most ability (self-control, opportunity, knowledge, etc.) would seem to be the most blameworthy when they fail or misbehave. For instance, when Tiger Woods misses a three-foot putt, there is a much greater temptation to say that he really should have made it than there is in the case of an average golfer. But Woods’s failure is actually more anomalous. Something must have gone wrong if a person of his ability missed so easy a putt. And he wouldn’t stand to benefit (much) from being admonished to try harder in the future. So in some ways, holding a person responsible for his failures seems to make even less sense the more worthy of responsibility he becomes in the conventional sense.

Jerry Coyne is another clear writer who is not afraid to speak his mind. Here is his utterly expected view of the debate. (He could not have written otherwise.)

Is blame worthy?

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Richard Bowker

I have difficulty wrapping my head around free will. It’s either me or free will, and I tend to think it’s the latter.

Most people, on the other hand, find it hard to imagine that we don’t have free will. One of the big advantages of free will is that it lets us blame people for stuff they do, because they could always have chosen not to do that stuff. And if we can’t blame people for stuff, how can we have a criminal justice system?

Radiolab recently ran a podcast called “Blame“. The main story involved an epileptic who had surgery to control his disease; a side effect of the surgery was that it made him compulsively download child pornography. He is arrested and brought to trial. Is he guilty of a crime? Should we blame him for his actions?

As neuroscience marches on and we gain a clearer understanding of how the brain works, there will be more and more situations like this, and it will be harder and harder to say that someone is to blame for his misdeeds. The Radiolab hosts, Jad and Robert, seemed to find this a vexing moral and legal dilemma. But again, I don’t get it. If we got rid of blame, we could still have a criminal justice system. You could still send someone to prison, if only to send a message to other people–other brains–that the person’s behavior is not something that society tolerates.

Blaming people, of course, is deeply satisfying, so I can’t imagine it will ever disappear, any more than religion will. Still, I can dream.

Free Will and the Immigration Debate

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I keep meaning to post about free will. Everybody loves posts about free will! Obama’s recent decision about immigration finally prompted me to come up with something. So this is about politics as much as it’s about free will.

I have never really understood free will. Where does this freedom come from, if we don’t postulate a soul or some other non-material entity that has no basis in science? If everything is deterministic (except for some stuff down at the quantum level), where does the freedom come from? I’ve read Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, and I don’t really get it. It seems to me that he comes up with a kind of free will by redefining what free will means away from what everyone thinks it means.

So I don’t see how we can have free will. And if free will doesn’t exist, where does responsibility come from? And similarly, where does merit come from? In what way do we deserve what we have — or not deserve what we don’t have?

A point Michael Sandel made in his course (and book) Justice brought this home to me in a personal way. Sandel gives the Justice course every couple of years to hundreds of Harvard students. In the course, he talks to the students about the concept of “moral desert”. And he brings up the issue of admission to Harvard. These kids have gotten into Harvard because they’re smart and talented. Well, OK, there are plenty of kids who are smart and talented. But the kids who got in worked hard and studied hard and accomplished amazing things with their talents. Isn’t that the difference? Well, OK, but — at this point Sandel asks for a show of hands: how many of the kids in the audience were the first-born in their families?

Every time he gives the course, an astonishing number raise their hands. So, what do we make of this? Being the first-born helps you get into Harvard. But no one chooses their birth order. He quotes John Rawls (another Harvard philosopher): “No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.”

I graduated from Harvard. Yay for me! But I have never been able to figure out why this should say anything good (or bad) about me. I didn’t make myself intelligent; I didn’t make myself hard-working — I just always seemed to be that way. I wasn’t the first-born in my family, but I certainly got plenty of support and encouragement in my studies. If I had wanted to make different choices along the way, could I have? I have no idea. But I suspect not — I am who I am.

This brings me, in a roundabout way, to immigration. The immigration debate always seems to me to circle around moral desert and, ultimately, about free will and determinism. What do we who were born in America deserve because we were born here? Beats me. It just seems to me that we are awfully lucky, the way I was lucky in my parents and my genes and my upbringing. Do the immigrants who are here illegally deserve to be thrown out? They’ve broken the law! But the kids covered by Obama’s decision haven’t exactly broken the law — they’re just here, where life has put them. They can no more change who they are than I can change who I am. We can make the case that throwing them out will help the economy or reduce the need for bilingual education or whatnot– at the expense of untold human suffering, of course. But I think that case is far from clear.

Anyway, as a reward for reading this drivel, here is the great Bonnie Raitt singing “Luck of the Draw.” (She too attended Harvard for a while.)

The no-free-will experiment, avec video « Why Evolution Is True

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Richard Bowker

What is more interesting than free will? Jerry Coyne finds it interesting, anyway.

The no-free-will experiment, avec video « Why Evolution Is True.

Also Sam Harris, according to Coyne. During my endless commutes I have been listening to lectures by John Searle on the philosophy of mind, and he openly admits he hates lecturing on free will, because he has no good solution for it. The only way he can make sense of free will is by invoking quantum indeterminacy, and he openly warns you to stop believing philosophers when they bring up quantum indeterminacy.