olde worlde arguments on free will and determinism – MacIntyre, Bradley etc
when you’re at the centre of your universe…
I’m struggling my way through some of the olde worlde philosophical discussions on the free will/determinism theme, which seem so abstruse and beside the point that I’m not quite sure why I’m bothering, and I actually find it more fun to look up these boffins on Wikipedia, etc… e.g.
Abraham I Melden – (1910- 1991) Canadian-born, associated with California and Washington Universities, essays on ethics and human rights, action theory
Donald Davidson – (1917-2003) US philosopher, taught at Uni of California, Berkley, also at Stanford, Princeton, etc, analytic philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, action theory. I actually read a book of his decades ago.
Alasdair Macintyre – (1929 – ) Scottish-US philosopher, has taught at Essex and Oxford Unis in England, and at Wellesley College, Notre Dame, Yale and many other Unis in the US; Aristotelian philosophy, history of philosophy, virtue ethics, converted to Catholicism in the 80s (!!).
Again we find these philosophers getting stuck on the definition of terms – rationality, entailment, and many other irrelevancies. Take this passage by Macintyre and do what you want with it:
The logically unsophisticated determinist may seek to put his views beyond refutation by asking how we can be certain in any given case that some one of these features [the ‘indefinitely long’ set of determinative features set out by Aristotle et al, and added to by Freud and ‘future neurologists’ etc etc] will not be discovered or does not go undiscovered. But this question only has force, so long as we use the word ‘certain’ in such a way that we mean by ‘a certain proposition’ a proposition that we can have no reason to doubt; whereas in empirical discourse we mean, or ought to mean, by ‘a certain proposition’, not one that we can have no reason to doubt, but one that we do have no reason to doubt. This kind of determinist then can be answered by saying that a given act is free, if on reasonable inspection we find that none of the relevant features are present….
Got that? This is high-quality philosophical gobbledygook, which has no relevance whatever to the real matter of determinism, which has to do with your parents and ancestors, the culture and language you were born into, your genetics and the epigenetic effects upon them, your developmental experiences, your diet, how much sleep you’ve been getting lately and a multitude of other impacts upon your life, which ultimately determine whether you become a university professor in the USA or a Dogon hunter in Mali or Burkino Fasso, out of billions of possibilities…
But of course not billions of possibilities. If indeed you were born into the Dogon community of the Sahel in the early twentieth century, you would never have become a prominent Anglo-American philosopher fifty years later. If you were born Jewish in Germany or Eastern Europe in the early 20th century, you would have been lucky to survive the holocaust. If you were born in rural China in the same period, you’d have been lucky not to starve to death as a result of ‘The Great Leap Forward’. And so on – think of Palestinians today in Gaza, or the Sudanese in Darfur and Khartoum. In short, the issue of determinism is no game, no amusing thought-bauble for undergraduates to cut their philosophical teeth on, it’s in fact what’s behind much of human inequality and suffering – as well as success.
So, though I’m committed to finishing the collection of essays edited by Berofsky, for deterministic reasons (though hardly reasons, more like neurotic neural impulses), I’m just doing it to clear the way for the brighter light of Sapolsky.
Some of these philosophers debate or deliberate over whether reasons are causes, presumably preliminary to being able to claim that reasons emanate from the reasoning mind, which is free to reason as it wills. But of course this is BS, we reason according to all the influences that have contributed to our reasoning style and skills, and most of those influences occurred early on, which is why the Dunedin longitudinal study of personality types has found what it has found – that our ‘type’ is fixed at an early age. But the philosophers in the Berofsky volume don’t take the long view at all, They’re constantly reflecting on the moment – of deliberating, of deciding, of choosing etc, while employing some abstract agent in the process (always ‘he’), and tying themselves in knots, so it seems to me, about the conditions for and constraints against so-called deliberative or rational action. Something about cloistered academics debating each other…
I’ve read further into the Berofsky volume, including essays by:
Richard Taylor – (1919-2003) US philosopher, mostly associated with Brown University, author of Metaphyics (1963) and Virtue Ethics (1991), and many other works.
John L Austin – (1911-1960) British philosopher with the standard credentials, educated and taught at Oxford, with teaching visits to Harvard and Berkley, etc. Worked mostly in philosophy of language, principal work, How to do things with words (1955/62)
Both of these philosophers’ essays miss the point horribly, it seems to me. Taylor spends a lot of time on the meaning of ‘deliberation’, as if this could clarify the free will/determinism issue in any way, though I was struck by one brief remark at the end of a fairly cogent paragraph :
… philosophers, no less than the vulgar, are perfectly capable of holding speculative opinions that are inconsistent with some of their own beliefs of common sense.
As a compleat vulgarian myself I want to protest, but then ‘speculative opinions’ can be anything, really, so I’m not sure what point is being made, other than that philosophers are generally considered to be superior beings. Well, if this volume is anything to go by….
But Taylor’s contribution is beaten hands down in terms of erudite vacuity by that of Austin, whose essay ‘Ifs and cans’ took me precisely nowhere. To me, it seems boringly obvious that analysing the meanings of words won’t much help us in clarifying the determining factors in the lives of people (or birds, trees, or bacteria). We, like all living things, live and continue to live, or not, due to preceding factors, such as a mix of gases creating what we call an atmosphere, and the still-mysterious formation of self-sustaining and replicating cells, which over millions of years form much more complex organisms which yet cannot but operate under determined conditions. It’s certainly true that we owe our sense of free will to that complexity, but a little close thought, and a knowledge of our deep history, should clarify the matter for us. It’s a bit like we think we’re free to think ‘for ourselves’ because we can’t see our neurons firing, our hormones and other electrochemical processes streaming, our specifics neural regions signalling to or suppressing other regions. So we think it’s ‘us’ that’s doing all this of ‘our own accord’. Do we ever think of bacteria, or even one of our more recent ancestors (e.g Juramaia, a rat-like creature that flourished 145 million years ago) choosing how to survive and thrive? Evolution, apart from anything else, should convince us that ‘free will’ is a myth. When did this free will come about? Gradually, some have said. Dogs and cats, etc have ‘limited’ free will, while we have the whole shebang. How? Uhh, complexity explains it, somehow. The more complexity, the more freedom. Bullshit, I say – it’s just that the determining factors are more complex.
I need to read more of Sapolsky’s Determined as an antidote to all this philosophasting, but his previous book, Behave, also does the job. The whole book deals with the determining factors that go into any piece of behaviour, from a split-second before it occurs, right back to human ancestry. What more evidence do we need?
Anyway, since these philosophers, arguing among themselves about ifs and cans, as if clarifying these terms might prove or disprove free will, use tennis as an example, i.e ‘he could have smashed that lob’, I’ve been thinking about all the determining factors that might affect the outcome of a pro tennis match.
First, one is seeded well above the other. This will clearly have a psychological effect on both, which will translate into physiological effects, e.g one will play more aggressively, the other more conservatively. But one is coming back from injury and isn’t sure if she’s feeling ‘100%’, and so doesn’t go all out. Also one is playing before her home crowd, which can have subtle pyscho/physiological effects. One is feeling she’s past her best as a player, the other is an up-and-comer. The court surface is perhaps not to the liking of one of them, but a favourite surface for the other. The (perhaps changing) head-to-head record of these two players plays its psychological part. One is on a roll, the other has suffered surprising defeats recently. The crowd noise, the wind factor, the umpire’s previous decisions, the pep talk or strategy talk given by their couch before their match, a nasty argument with their girlfriend earlier in the day, a breakfast that didn’t agree with them and so on, all may play a greater or lesser part, and so in combination determine an outcome which nobody, least of all the players themselves, could have predicted with certainty beforehand. Determining factors are complex, and real – they’re not about the language you use for them.
It seems to me that these mid-century philosophers were too interested in competing with each other, finding fault with each others’ language-based analyses, to see that language in itself has nothing whatever to do with determinism (though of course the language world you operate within – Yoruba, Hebrew, Tigre or Gaelic – will have determining effects on your life’s course). I can’t help but think of Shakespeare’s ‘expense of spirit in a waste of shame’. These writings aren’t exactly shameful but they do seem to me a waste. Clearly these are highly intelligent men, and it’s clearly a shame that they wasted their energies on such fruitless activities. Sabine Hossenfelder put it very simply and emphatically. ‘It’s no good saying you could have done otherwise. You DIDN’T!’ And what you did was determined.
References
Bernard Berofsky, Free will and determinism, 1966.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/rat-creature-ancestor-mammals-11082018/
Robert Sapolsky, Behave, 2016
Robert Sapolsky, Determined, 2023
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