Archive for the ‘determinism’ Category
the highs and lows of determinism
The other day I was in a cafe in the inner suburbs here, eating lunch, reading, wondering what to write about next, when in walked a tall dark stranger. She was dressed in black slacks and a black puff-sleeve top over a white shirt – very corporate to my mind. Though I didn’t see her face as she walked to the counter I could see by her hands she was African, most likely. She was very very slim and well over six feet tall. Striking, to put it mildly. I thought of the Masai people, but a quick bit of research brings up the Dinka and the Nuer of South Sudan. I couldn’t stop gawking, and was rewarded as she turned and walked right by me to take up a seat at the back of the cafe. She couldn’t have been more than 20 years old, and was surely the world’s most beautiful woman (I’ve observed quite a few of those).
I had to chuckle. I’ll be 70 next July and I’m five foot six at full stretch. And I had to wonder, too. Is being a very tall woman as much of a ‘problem’ as being a small man? Forget sports – low centre of gravity, great height and reach, etc etc. As for being well short of the average, all the way through school I was picked on, generally in a ‘good-natured’ way. I was popular enough, perhaps because I never complained, certainly not to the authorities. Not just because I wanted to be liked, though that was surely part of it, but mostly because I was fully anti-authoritarian. My peers were my mates, or to be avoided (and sometimes to be worshipped from afar); the teachers were mostly just low-lifes.
The real problem with being a short male though, is this strange equation of shortness with some kind of ‘non-seriousness’ especially during youth. Tall boys just aren’t picked on and pushed about the way short boys are, whether or not they’re physically strong. Within reason, that is. If you’re a short weight-lifter who likes to show off his muscles, maybe not, but…
So there’s three occasions forever stuck in my memory. The first two were more or less identical. I was surrounded during break-time outside of our first-floor classroom, lifted and turned upside down, hoisted over the bannister of the stairwell, and jiggled and shaken merrily by a half-dozen or so classmates. I was compos mentis enough to note that the two young gentlemen gripping my legs were our most celebrated athletes, but I still had images of my heart slipping out of my throat and plopping sloppily onto the bottom steps some 20 feet or so below (I’ve never measured it).
How long did these hijinks last? Isn’t it funny how time passes slowly when death’s in the air. But don’t worry the other piece of fun was less deadly. There was a large papier-mâchéd box outside the school library (class project no doubt) designed for putting in book returns, pretty well just the right size for a mini-student like me to be stuffed into. And so they did, leaving my legs to dangle outside the box for anyone to see. So the school bell rang, everyone went back to class, and I waved my legs merrily, waiting to be rescued. But nobody came – of course, nobody used the library in my school. So, after a while I thought of escape, which was quite easy – the box was wired shut and a bit of jiggling and pulling soon freed me….
Reflecting on these memories has upturned more, but the point is clear. Little kids just aren’t taken as seriously as big kids. And if they stay little, they won’t become Presidents or ‘leaders of men’ – or women. Height restrictions in some occupations make sense, I suspect most don’t. And, of course, short people earn less than tall people, on average.
It’s quite tragic – look at Trump (sorry, don’t) – six feet three inches of unadulterated wanker. Robert Reich, one of the USA’s finest political leaders and a true humanist, suffered fatally, so to speak, for being four foot eleven. Of all the dumb criteria for measuring a person’s worth – think of those dwarves – Dopey, Grumpy, Sleazey, whatever, what chance did they have with Snow White?
So I’m wondering how many full-blown libertarians are my size. It’s a silly thing to wonder about, surely, and yet…
stuff on sexual selection, and our humanity
As perhaps mentioned, I’ve started reading The descent of man, or to be accurate, I started reading it a while ago, then stopped, what with all the other pleasurable and thought-provoking reading I’ve been doing. In fact one of those books is Matt Ridley’s Birds, sex and beauty: the extraordinary implications of Charles Darwin’s strangest idea, to give its full title, and it’s maybe a bit of a spoiler, because I’ve heard that The descent contains a section on sexual selection, that ‘strangest idea’ aforementioned, an idea that, as Ridley tells me, was found more questionable than general evolution by many scientists of his time, and even afterwards. Wallace, who developed his evolutionary theory independently of Darwin, and became a close associate afterwards, was quite skeptical, along with most of Darwin’s other backers, and Ridley, quite rightly I think, points to the reason. Evolution was obviously a rather serious assault on religion – and is still felt that way – whereas sexual selection was an assault on patriarchy, though many of its detractors may have been oblivious of the fact. Patriarchy’s so insidious that many people still think it’s normal! Duh…
So what exactly is sexual selection? Well, just about everyone points to the obvious case of the peacock, with his extravagant tail feathers. Can such a stunningly colourful but ungainly mass to drag around you be anything but a hindrance? It’s kind of exhausting just to look at them. Can a peacock actually fly? Well, yes, but certainly not like an eagle. And how does it sneak up on its prey? Does it only eat blind mice? Actually they’re omnivores, but probably easier to be veggo with all that get-up. And of course they can be prey as well as predators, and you should be able to guess the rest – one minute you’re a mate, next you’re dead meat. It’s just a matter of getting things in the right order.
So sexual selection is about males so impressing females, whether by looks, dancing displays or some other spectacle, that the female offers herself happily, or complacently, to him. And males are often in competition with other males for the honour, the point being that it’s the female who sexually selects. This type of selection goes on in species of birds, fish (eg guppies), insects (eg fruit flies), mammals (eg elephant seals) and reptiles (eg most lizards). It also goes on in humans (eg party hardcore, referenced below), but not generally for the purpose of reproduction. As for bonobos – well, that’s another story, and it’s complicated, much as with humans.
So what about humans? We like to think we’re too complex and sophisticated for that sort of categorisation, and anyway, we in the WEIRD (non-Catholic) world don’t connect sex so tightly with reproduction. Even so, when we do decide on reproduction, we surely, male and female, do it on the basis of having selected, more or less mutually, the best partner available. This is of course a best-case scenario – we can be fooled, perhaps by our hormones, into being convinced that this person will be the best father/mother for our child/children, not to mention a variety of other scenarios which result in pregnancy. If we think of sexual selection in terms of pairing rather than pregnancy, it may be that neoteny, the preservation of youthful characteristics, including by artificial means – make-up, cosmetic surgery, mode of dress and so forth – has played a role, but this doesn’t appear to be a scenario in which only the female does the selecting. Certainly it’s less clear ‘who’s zoomin who’, if anyone. Darwin, I think wisely, considered sexual selection in humans has worked in both ways, with hairlessness in females being selected for by males, and males’ reduced hair ‘going along for the ride’ to some degree (also because of ‘genetic correlation’, though Darwin didn’t know about genes, and so could not consider genotype-phenotype examples), while reduced sexual dimorphism and, in contrast, the greater difference between the voices of adult males and females, are being selected for by their opposites. The reduced sexual dimorphism argues for greater monogamy (compare gorillas). Even so, females may in general be selecting for height, muscularity, and deeper voices. I give up.
Seriously, the scenario is complex for humans, which is to be expected. From Wikipedia:
In a study measuring female attraction to males with varying levels of masculinity, it was established that women had a general masculinity preference for men’s voices, and that the preference for masculinity was greater in the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle than in the non-fertile phase. There is further evidence from the same study that in fertile stages of the menstrual cycle, women also had a preference for other masculine traits such as body size, facial shape, and dominant behavior, which are indicators of both fertility and health. This study did not exclude males with feminine traits from being selected, however, as feminine traits in men indicate a higher probability of long-term relationship commitment, and may be one of several evolutionary strategies.
I don’t want to think too much about male dominant behaviour being indicative of fertility or health – especially mental health – but this finding that the menstrual cycle affects female preference seems just too ‘beyond our control’ for my liking, which isn’t to say it’s not true. As other sources have pointed out, there’s a sort of more-or-less understandable ‘muddle’ between selecting for ‘tough guys’, in both physical and emotional senses, or for caring-and-sharing softies who’ll be reliable providers – they hope. But isn’t that typical of women – they can never make up their effing minds.
Clearly, though, there are two strategies that are more or less blindly operating in humans. A video by ‘Brainstorm’, linked below, puts it neatly:
Sexual selection is an extremely powerful tool to explain much of evolutionary change in behaviour in animals – in humans it becomes a bit more complicated – we’re neither clearly a tournament species [males fighting for dominance (e.g gorillas)] with huge extremes re sexual dimorphism, nor are we sexually identical in behaviour, aggression or life expectancy… we do see dimorphism in bone structure, muscle mass and levels of aggression…
These male-female differences are not extreme, and we might just be able, with work, to make them less extreme. Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually work toward this. The sexual dimorphism among bonobos is minimal, and it would make sense, given their society, that it is diminishing, though we have no substantial evidence that this is so. Humans, of course, still have a way to go, given all the warfare and violent confrontations that are still occurring.
Anyway, once again, vive les bonobos. We have so much to learn…
References
Charles Darwin, The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, 1871
Matt Ridley, Birds, sex and beauty, 2025
Objectivism? Eh what?
and dollars…
As a person with a bad habit of self-isolating, I occasionally check out the possibility of meet-ups in my area. So I was amused by one that definitely didn’t appeal, except for playing a ‘fly in the ointment’ role. It’s called ‘capitalism and coffee – an objectivist meet-up’, and is based on the ‘philosophy’ of Ayn Rand – of course.
So it’s back to the free will issue, one which, I must admit, I quite enjoy rabbiting on about. So, even the most ardent libertarian or free will enthusiast will have to admit that, say, humans aren’t free to become sperm whales, and vice versa. We’re definitely trapped in our species-dom. Even so, every sperm whale is an individual, as is every human. And isn’t this individuality a feature of every dog or cat you’ve ever owned or known? I’ve been familiar with quite a few. But we don’t tend to believe that their (mostly) delightful uniqueness is entirely of their own making, or even partially so. Different breeds have different characteristics, and within those breeds there are levels of timidity, gregariousness, aggression and so on. So each of these pets is unique, but not by choice. So why do we, or some of us, like to believe that we are free to choose our own nature? Our individuality is evident enough, there is nobody else on the planet quite like us, but nobody else has experienced quite the same parenting and formative experience. Even physically, we’re virtually never mistaken for somebody else.
Of course, freedom is appealing – what could be more so? We’re appalled by what is being imposed on people in Ukraine, in Palestine, in North Korea, in El Salvador, and by the impoverished circumstances of children in many regions, who haven’t had the luck of being born to comfortably-off parents in a WEIRD country.
So the place and circumstances in which we’re born are heavily determinising, if that’s a word (it is now – freedom!), but what about the time. I happen to be reading an epic historical study, God’s War, by Christopher Tyerman – well over 900 pages covering the crusading adventures from the 11th century to the 15th, four major crusades and a plethora of minor ones, including the Albigensian crusade against the Cathars in Languedoc and southern Europe. Talk about the past being another country – they do things horribly there. The world Tyerman describes is dominated by more or less fervent religion, which isn’t to say that land-grabbing, rank-pulling and other forms of capitalism aren’t massively in evidence. And reading about it raises obvious questions for me.
I was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1956. What if I’d been born in around the same region in, say, 1156? The town of Dundee probably didn’t exist then – certainly Australia, to which I was taken at the age of five, was then a piece of land completely unknown to northerners. At that time Scotland was being harried by Vikings in the west, 15-year-old Malcolm IV sat uneasily on the throne (of Alba, as it was then known), and Henry II had only recently begun his long reign in the dominant south, after years of civil war. But of course one thing that held fast was religion, i.e Christianity. The Norman conquest had reinforced Catholicism, with Scotland only just beginning to assert independence from the south in religious matters (full independence was attained in 1192 as a result of the Papal Bull of Celestine III, apparently).
There was no way that I could’ve been anything but a Catholic Christian myself in 1192 – as an ageing 36-year-old. And who knows, I might’ve been fit and fervent enough to join the party for the third crusade of that time, led by Richard Coeur de Lion, no less – among other worthies and unworthies. In any case, the last thing on my mind would’ve been free will and capitalist enterprise.
Nowadays, though, free will has become an issue. With the decline of religion in most of the WEIRD world, some have, it seems, come to believe that they are their own gods. But a few problems arise, for obviously we don’t get to choose our parents, our genetic inheritance, the time and place of our birth, our experiences in the womb or in our early childhood. The Dunedin longitudinal study of health and development, which began in the early seventies, and which I’ve written about previously, while not of course designed to ‘prove’ hard determinism, categorised participants in terms of personality types – Well-Adjusted, Undercontrolled, Inhibited, Confident, and Reserved, and has found that those individual types have barely changed over fifty years. Yet within those types there are differences, making every single person on the planet quite unique. But of course uniqueness is not a proof of free will.
So how did Ayn Rand argue otherwise? What is the ‘objectivism’ that she espoused? That’s not an easy question to answer. It certainly isn’t meant as an opposite to ‘subjectivism’, and it seems that very little of her writing analyses the concept of free will directly. Let me take a piece of it for my own analysis:
If [man] chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course. Reality confronts a man with a great many “must’s”, but all of them are conditional: the formula of realistic necessity is: “you must, if –” and the if stands for man’s choice: “if you want to achieve a certain goal”. [from an essay collection – Philosophy, who needs it? – published in 1982, the year of her death]
Rand always uses the male perspective, and was always bizarrely anti-feminist. Apart from that, much of her writing strikes me as pseudo-philosophical, as this passage shows. What is meant by a rational ethics? Are there examples of irrational ethics? Are there unrealistic necessities? Indeed, who needs this philosophy? But to be fair, perhaps this is a bad, decontextualised example. The central point of all this though, is that Rand never really presents a free will argument. Free will, or what she calls ‘volitional consciousness’, is at the heart of her world-view, but it certainly isn’t adequately explained. The term itself suggests the feeling we have when we make a decision, but those feelings, and that decision, are those of a mind or brain that is wholly determined. How could it not be? And not self-determined, because what is an individual self other than an entirely determined entity? How could it be otherwise? And that seems to be the key mistake that libertarians make (apparently Rand didn’t consider herself a libertarian, but that just seems quibbling). They mistake complexity for self-determination, because we’re undoubtedly highly complex beings, perhaps even approaching some cetaceans in that department.
Of course, Rand is simply the product of her upbringing and early experiences. I don’t know much about her background, except that it wasn’t that of a Dalit in Hindu India, or an Aboriginal in Australia, or a Bantu in the DRC, or a woman in ‘modern’ Afghanistan. And of course I’m not at all surprised that her philosophy is popular in the USA. Nor am I particularly surprised that there’s a meet-up dedicated to it here in dear old Adelaide. Actually, I wouldn’t mind attending – but not as myself, more as a ‘fly on the wall’, listening to how they justify and promote themselves. Sadly, though, flies only have a fly’s neural system.
But -that’s determinism for you.
References
https://www.meetup.com/adelaide-ayn-rand-meetup/
Christopher Tyerman, God’s war; a new history of the crusades, 2006
Natural selection – how far does it go?
you don’t control this variability
So let me try to understand something completely different, to do with genetics, neurology and selection theory. I’m reading a rather complex, demanding and ambitious book, published back in 1992, by Michael Gazzaniga, called Nature’s Mind, and sub-titled ‘The biological roots of thinking, emotions, sexuality, language and intelligence’. Selection theory gets a regular mention, and I’m assuming what is meant is the Darwinian theory of natural selection. That’s to say, the idea or finding that phenotypic traits that enable individuals in a species to more effectively survive, thrive and reproduce in their particular environment will be ‘naturally selected’ as against other less favourable traits. And so the species will ‘evolve’, that’s to say change, because individuals with the better-adapted traits for a particular environment will out-compete those without those traits and, crucially, pass on those traits to their offspring. Darwin, of course, could only speculate about how those traits were passed down to the next generation, as the whole story of genetic inheritance and DNA wasn’t fully established until well into the 20th century.
Anyway, Gazzaniga seems to be writing about selection theory as some kind of controversial issue, which surprises me and makes me wonder whether I’m reading him right. So let me focus on Chapter 2, ‘The plastic brain and selection theory’, to help my understanding. Here’s the opening sentence:
Although there is little argument that the selection process is at work at both the molecular and the evolutionary levels in whole organisms, there are major questions about whether the brain develops and functions in accordance with the concept of selection.
I don’t understand what Gazzaniga means by these separate ‘molecular’ and ‘evolutionary’ levels. After all, evolution just means change of a certain type – that’s to say, changes in organisms. And organisms are, of course, made up of molecules, coded for by genes. So the organisational structure of the brain, down to the molecular level (or upwards from the molecular level), has everything to do with our genetic inheritance. So what, then, are these major questions? Gazzaniga puts it this way:
…if, as I argue… the majority of our psychological capacities are the result of natural selection, the developing and static adult brain, which houses the neural circuits that enable the human’s high-powered psychological mechanisms to exist, must develop in a surefire, genetically determined way. At the level of behaviour, for example, we want to see whether or not a baby learns to identify a face, or whether there exist in the brain specific circuits enabling facial recognition, circuits laid down by prior genetic forces arrived at through selection pressure.
So, as I conceive it, Gazzaniga is exploring facial recognition (presumably that of other humans, but ‘face’ isn’t of course restricted to humans) in terms of learning and distinguishing, but also in terms of genes and circuitry that have evolved to render such recognition as vitally important. He cites the Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Niels Jerne’s view that selection operates at the cellular level, even though ‘it might look like instruction occurred at a higher level of organisation’. A ‘signal’ of recognition will prompt a response, once described as ‘unconscious’ (but it seems most scientists today dismiss this as a ‘woo’ word), that has been selected for on the most basic, molecular level.
So this takes us into a bit of immunology. Jerne used three analogies, as described by Gazzaniga: first, ‘the immune system is forever changed by the appearance of each new antigen, just as the brain is somehow changed by each new experience’, second, ‘each system – brain and immune system, appears to have a memory: when the same antigen presents itself a second time to an organism, the latter produces more and better antibodies’, and third ‘the experience one organism has developed for its immune system is not transferable to its progeny, just as my skiing ability is not necessarily transferred to my offspring’.
So, to antibodies, and the kappa light chain, which is present in the antibodies of humans and other animals. In all creatures who have these molecules, there is a variable and a constant part of the chain. They’re made up of amino acids, and the constant section is constant for all humans (and presumably for other species), while the variable part varies individually, or ontogenetically.
It seems that Jerne, and Gazzaniga, have taken this as some kind of analogy for the brain, the plasticity of which has both an ontogenetic (individual) and phylogenetic (species-specific) element. That’s to say, there’s a great deal of ontogenetic plasticity within the brain’s overall phylogenetic structure. I’m not sure if I’m getting this right, though. Here’s more from Jerne, comparing the immune system and the central nervous system:
In the immune system, the constant part of the light chain is obviously laid down in the DNA of the zygote, and it is equally clear that there is DNA in the zygote that represents the variable part of the light chain, although, ontogenetically, this DNA may exhibit an immense plasticity.
In the central nervous system, instincts are also obviously encoded in the zygote, most probably in the DNA. But if DNA acts only through transcription into RNA and translation into protein, and if the phenotypic expression of instincts is based on particular arrangements of neuronal synapses, the DNA through RNA and protein must govern the synaptic network in the central nervous system.
Niels Jerne, ‘Antibodies and learning: selection versus instruction’, 1967
So what to make of this ‘magnificent analysis’ (according to Gazzaniga)? You could say that it’s another brick in the deterministic wall, that ontogenetic plasticity, that which makes me different from you, starts with ‘particular arrangement of neuronal synapses’, or the particular sets of proteins that bring about those arrangements, or, before that…
I’m no doubt being influenced right now by some very recent discussions/arguments I’ve had on the subject of determinism, so I’m probably going further than Gazzaniga intended with his thinking. Or not. I shall continue reading the book to see if he comes to any definite determinist conclusions, or if he even touches on such a touchy subject.
References
M Gazzaniga, Nature’s Mind, 1992
on determinism and IQ, class, castes and elites
Nehru, of course, belonged to the Brahmin caste
I wrote a post recently on the stupidity of Steven Pinker’s view of determinism, his mocking of ‘the abuse excuse’ and such like, and I noted how people from elite, privileged backgrounds tend to downplay – or desperately avoid mentioning – their advantages while advocating for the ‘common sense’ compatibilism or free will positions of their class.
Something that I didn’t mention though, in that Pinker post, is a recollection that Pinker had written some kind of puff piece about the Ashkenazi Jews (‘The Lessons of the Ashkenazim’ – which I’ve not read as yet)), their high IQs and their over-representation in the fields of elite science, chess grandmastery and such. Pinker, needless to say, is Jewish. Presumably the argument will go that these Ashkenazim have higher IQs for some particular reason, be it genetic, cultural or some synergistic mixture of the two. That’s to say, a deterministic reason.
I’m not Jewish, and I certainly don’t come from an elite background. My father was an unskilled labourer, in a variety of jobs with a variety of gaps between them. My mother was the breadwinner, a nurse who managed to move up the ladder to hospital administration and then nurse education. As migrants to Australia, half the world away from my Scottish birthplace, we were cut off from the wider family, and I didn’t hear much about how any of them made their livings, and, for some reason, I wasn’t particularly curious about them, though I was curious about many other things, or, at least, a few.
Do I have an IQ? The IQ concept has of course been controversial. Is it culturally based? Can it be made less so, or more multicultural, since human culture is pretty well inescapable? Apparently the result can be reduced to a number, and based on that number you can be classed as a genius, an imbecile or anything in between. I myself have never knowingly sat for an IQ test, so I have no number to preen myself on or shake my head over. However, I have taken two tests, one at age twelve, the other at age twenty-nine, which made some difference to my life. The first test was taken at the end of my final primary school year, and had to do with students’ placement in high school the following year. The high school had introduced ‘streaming’, based, apparently on natural smarts – measured by the test I had taken, but perhaps also by other primary school results. There were eight first-year high school classes, divided in two depending on whether you wanted to take French or German as your language choice (there were only two choices, no Tamil or Pitjantjatjara). So the ‘top’ two classes were F1 and G1, going down to F4 and G4. The new students for 1969 gathered together in the grounds of the relatively new Elizabeth West High School for the name-calling. To my surprise, I was the first name called for the F1 class. I was mildly puzzled, but then, some name had to be first. But a week or so later, one of my new classmates – I still remember his name, Blair Farquar – came to me and said excitedly ‘do you know you got the top marks for the class test?’ He’d been asked by our home teacher to retrieve something from her office, and had seen and looked through the test papers, which were numbered in a pile on the desk. I was frankly shocked. I knew I wasn’t stupid, but this news really unnerved me. I felt I’d been handed a burden I didn’t really want. And looking back on it, this test, which wasn’t based on any schoolwork but on reasoning and problem solving, must have been a child of the IQ family. And also looking back, our test results weren’t based on our diligence as students. We didn’t ‘study’ for the test, it was imposed on us without notice. So I couldn’t pat myself on the back for my achievement, I’d succeeded, if that was the word, due to determining factors completely beyond my control.
In any case, I squandered my advantage over the next few years due to increasing tensions at home, and at school, to which I responded with passive resistance and a sense of anti-authoritarianism which has never since left me. As mentioned in a previous post, I dropped out of school at 15. On my last school day, I was smacked across the face by the headmaster, because I was chewing gum while he was questioning me. I’ve no idea why this bothered him so much, but I knew exactly why his behaviour bothered me, and I’d had more than enough of it. I didn’t resume any formal education until I sat for a university-entrance test, as aforementioned, in my 29th year. In the intervening years I worked in various jobs, in factories, in a hospital, and as a general dogsbody in a fancy French restaurant, and became a habitual diary writer and a mover in slightly more intellectual, but small, circles. I developed a self-mocking fantasy of myself as the smartest person without a uni degree in the known universe.
The university test was definitely not an IQ test, as it involved writing a couple of essays on a choice of topics, and as a habitual writer, this was my comfort zone. I received acceptances from the two universities in South Australia at the time, Adelaide and Flinders, which enabled me to obtain a straightforward Arts degree – certainly not a road out of poverty. Eventually, after much faffing about, including the publication of a novel, I managed to obtain enough further qualifications to score some teaching work here and there, by which time I wasn’t far off from retirement age.
I write all this, largely because I’m self-obsessed, but also to illustrate the role of determinism. If I was born to nomadic pastoralists in Somalia, or to a Dalit family in Hindu India, I wouldn’t be writing here, and I wouldn’t have scored the kind of meagre successes I might be credited with in the WEIRD world. On the other hand, had I been born to a successful and supportive Ashkenazi family, my connections and my opportunities would have been unimaginably different from what I’ve experienced. And in all this I’m as typical as most other humans on this planet.
So this is important. When you come to reflect on the free will/determinism issue, don’t be taken in by the sorts of claims I once read, I think it was on a Stanford University website, that this is a fun topic to cut your philosophical teeth on. No, it isn’t a fun topic, it cuts to the heart of who we are and what we can become. And of course it’s complex. People from impoverished backgrounds can become Nobel Prize winners, and children of the Ashkenazim can become hopeless drug addicts or career criminals. To understand why that may have happened would mean to look in detail at the determining factors, insofar as they can be uncovered. And when and if you read some of the philosophical arguments on the topic, it’s essential to note the backgrounds of the writers, insofar as they can be ascertained. It will definitely hold the key to their position on the subject – such is my determination.
References
https://newrepublic.com/article/77727/groups-and-genes
Stewart Henderson, In Elizabeth, 1997
Pinker on free will, and more about myself
I’m still feeling anger, after all these years, at the free will proponents who, I feel, have benefitted from a cushy upbringing and have no idea what it’s like to have had nothing like the opportunities they’ve had. Of course, it’s always a worry that we can just attribute our relative failure to that lack of opportunity, but facts are facts, and it’s simply a fact that our macro world is determined.
And so to Steven Pinker, who, in his 2002 book The blank slate, ventured a few remarks on free will. I’ve written about Pinker before, and I consider it amusing to compare my life with his. We were both born in the mid 1950s’ – he’s a bit older – but that’s just about where the similarities come to an end (though I, too, have quite a big personal library – just saying). On the free will issue, I’d be inclined to make the small point, and I think Sapolsky makes it too, that successful career people would be more inclined to believe in free will than more or less abject failures – which of course isn’t saying anything about me.
Chapter 10 of The blank slate is titled ‘The fear of determinism’, and in it he starts looking at determinism from what I would call the wrong end – what he calls ‘molecules in motion’. My own thinking on this always starts from ‘thrown-ness into the world’, at an unchosen time and place, and as an unchosen living specimen. From there we get to our own parentage, our genes and our pre-natal and antenatal development, and their epigenetic effects.
Pinker also jumps quickly into the confusion I always find when I speak to people about this topic – that between determinism and predeterminism/fatalism:
‘All our brooding and agonising over the right thing to do is pointless, it would seem, because everything has already been preordained by the state of our brains’.
Pinker highlights the fear of determinism for a reason, claiming that ‘it is the existential fear of determinism that is the real waste of time’, though it seems to me that few people suffer such fear – and this appears to be borne out by experimental evidence. When we’re primed by tricky lab-coated types to reflect on ‘victims of circumstance’, there is an effect, but it appears to be minimal and short-term.
Of course, it isn’t the fear of determinism that concerns me, but the lack of acknowledgment of its factual basis. Pinker goes on a long and rather facile discourse about lawyers, medicos and neurologists seeking to get wrong-doers off the hook on the basis of defective genes and/or brain processes. Note that Sapolsky admits to having offered his services in this way, generally to no avail. I would note, just in passing, that the USA has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the WEIRD world, by a huge margin. It’s the land of free will after all. No excuses.
Some of Pinker’s ‘analyses’ here really miss the mark badly. For example, he references Dennett, who…
points out that the last thing we want in a soul is freedom to do anything it desires. If behaviour were chosen by an utterly free will, then we really couldn’t hold people responsible for their actions. That entity would not be deterred by the threat of punishment, or be ashamed by the prospect of opprobrium, or even feel the twinge of guilt that might inhibit a sinful temptation in the future, because it could always choose to defy those causes of behaviour….
And so on. But this is obvious bullshit – even if you fully believed in free will, the threat of imprisonment would be a massive deterrent, especially given the horrific private prisons of the US. And so would the opprobrium directed at you for your wrong-doing, given that we’re the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet. Others’ opinions of us massively matter. Free will doesn’t preclude a sense of right and wrong. It should also be obvious that we are determined, by evolution, to survive and thrive as best we can – so in a world of severe punishments, such as exists in the USA, we’ll obviously be determined to avoid such punishments as best we can, even given a deprived background or a shrunken amygdala.
But where Pinker goes wrong in a way that is, to me, more offensive, is in his mockery of what he calls environmental determinism. It’s the typical upper middle class response, I must say:
The most risible pretexts for bad behaviour in recent decades have come not from biological determinism but from environmental determinism: the abuse excuse, the Twinkie defence, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media violence, rock lyrics, and different cultural mores….
This little parade of glibness doesn’t, of course, begin to address any real issues. Firstly, there’s little real difference between biological and environmental determinism. Our biology evolves in adaptation to changing environments, as every evolutionary biologist knows, and, to be fair to Pinker, there has been a revolution in our understanding of environmentally-induced gene expression (epigenetics) in the two decades since The blank slate was published. Even so, my experience of growing up in a profoundly working-class environment, in which classroom illiteracy was commonplace, as well as vandalism, neglect and police harassment, makes me flare up when I hear the life-shattering experiences of kids in the street where I lived being dismissed in terms of ‘the abuse excuse’. I also note that in mocking these ‘excuses’ his target is invariably the lawyers (his own class) that bring these claims, rather than the accused themselves, about who’s background he appears to be indifferent. It’s the same clubbish elitism that I found in the dated Berofsky collection I re-read recently, but more focussed on law than philosophy.
Another of the irritations I found in revisiting Pinker’s determinism-free will piece, is that he focusses almost exclusively on crime, ignoring the much larger issues of lives lived in struggle because of determining forces beyond their control – a Palestinian in modern Israel, a woman in Afghanistan, a Dalit in India, an Australian Aboriginal at the time of the British colonisation of that island, a Jew growing up in Germany in the 1930s, the Tainos visited by the Spanish horror in the late 15th and 16th centuries, the Scots massacred in the reign of Edward I, the East Timorese massacred by Indonesian forces, the isolated old women burned as witches… millions of people who found themselves members of the wrong gender or ethnicity at the wrong time – murdered, raped, enslaved, or simply deprived of the means to live a life in which there’s some hope of an upward trajectory. None of us got to choose our ethnicity, our class (yes it does exist), our early upbringing, our parentage, even our level of intelligence, and this is so obvious, and so overwhelming a fact, that it seems to me almost embarrassing to have to point it out. And all of this is profoundly determining. That’s why reading history, as I often do, can be such an affecting experience. It is so full of innocent victims. And of course it continues….
So, finally, it isn’t the fear of determinism that should concern us – it’s the very fact of determinism.
I’ve been lucky, on balance. I was brought, as a five-year-old, to live in one of the richest and most peaceful nations in the world. I can’t praise or blame myself for this. Certain aspects of my treatment both at home and at school resulted in, for me, a fairly extreme anti-authoritarianism, and something of an over-self-reliance, which has its positives and negatives. But I benefitted from a world-full of books in our house, which took me to places of wonder outside myself. And I’ve benefitted from a nation with a strong social safety net, a minimum wage which is the highest of any nation outside of Luxembourg, a justice system that eliminated the death penalty nationwide almost 60 years ago, and a political system that was the first in the world to grant votes, and the right to stand for parliament, to women. It also rates as one of the least religious nations on earth – which for me is a godsend.
More on determinism from me, no doubt, as I plough into the second half of Sapolsky’s Determined.
References
Steven Pinker, The blank slate, 2002
Bernard Berofsky, Free will and determinism, 1963
Robert Sapolsky , Determined, 2023
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
more gobbledegook on free will?: C D Broad
The Cambridge philosopher C D Broad (1887-1971) was, from what I’ve read, a genial self-effacing fellow, who according to his bio, got into philosophy because he didn’t think he could make it as a scientist. His contribution to the Berofsky volume is, so far, the most incomprehensible piece I’ve read. So, in the French tradition of explication de texte, I’ll have a go at pulling apart the penultimate paragraph of his essay. The whole essay is entitled ‘Determinism, indeterminism and libertarianism’ (published in 1952). The final two paragraphs of the essay come under the sub-title ‘Libertarianism’:
We are now in a position to define what I will call ‘Libertarianism’. This doctrine will be summed up in two propositions. (1) Some (and it may be all) voluntary actions have a causal ancestor which contains as a cause-factor the putting-forth of an effort which is not completely determined in direction and intensity by occurrent causation. (2) In such cases the direction and the intensity of the effort are completely determined by non-occurrent causation, in which the self or agent, taken as a substance or continuant, is the non-occurrent total cause. Thus, Libertarianism, as defined by me, entails Indeterminism, as defined by me; but the converse does not hold.
This sort of language-torturing borders on criminality, it seems to me. But it might be fixed. My simplification:
Here’s my summary of Libertarianism. First, our deliberate acts often (and perhaps always) proceed from a causal chain which, followed back in the past, involve efforts which have little to do with these current actions [if that’s what Broad means by ‘occurrent causation’]. Second, this means that these current acts can be traced causally to those past actions/decisions which…. oh, forget it.
What Broad is engaging in here, presumably without fully realising it, is just word-play. He fails to define ‘occurrent causation’ and ‘non-occurrent causation’, which are key to understanding the paragraph. On the face of it you’d think they mean ’causes that exist’ and ’causes that don’t exist’, but that just sounds dumb, so better to stick with the obscurantism. More important, Broad fails completely, like most of the contributors to this volume, to deal with real situations and the lives of real people. It’s all abstraction, which is often the biggest failing of philosophy. I recall many years ago reading comments, I think by Max Black – another philosopher heavily influenced by Wittgenstein – to the effect that most philosophical problems eventually get taken over and clarified by science (‘theory of mind’ comes immediately to mind – I mean, brain). Meaning, I reckon, that they move from abstract constructions and general formulae to formalised research and the hard data thereby produced.
In any case, Broad relies a lot on the concept of entailment, as mentioned in the last sentence of the above quote, which is essentially a concept in logic. The determinism that Sapolsky is focussing on is about more slippery phenomena, like the combined effects of genes, hormones, neural connections, early childhood experiences, thousands of years of culture, physical development, recent trauma, and much else besides, in our daily decision-making. Strict entailment isn’t what this is about at all, but that hardly rules out or mitigates against a determinism which is multifactorial and inescapable. It turns out, apparently, on the basis of other, more patient (and no doubt smarter) analysts than myself, that Broad is likely, on the basis of this essay, as much a determinist as Sapolsky:
The position Broad reaches is a version of what is sometimes called free will pessimism: free will is incompatible with determinism, but there is no viable form of indeterminism which leaves room for free will, either; therefore, free will does not exist—indeed could not exist.
from Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: Charlie Dunbar Broad
And just a note on libertarianism – it has always seemed to me an ideology of the more-than-haves rather than the have-nots – and I note with some bemusement, and amusement, that it doesn’t rate a mention in Sapolsky’s book. It also seems to run in families – if your Dad’s a libertarian, you’ll rarely feel free to be anything else! In any case, libertarianism is usually defined in terms of individual freedom, which is funny coming from the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet.
To be continued, perhaps.
References
Bernard Berofsky, ed. Free will and determinism, 1966
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/broad/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ludwig-Wittgenstein
Robert Sapolsky, Determined: life without free will, 2023
free will (or not) stuff, past and present
definitely of its time, and its time has gone
‘The idea that free will can be reconciled with the strictest determinism is now very widely accepted’.
This is the opening sentence of the philosopher Philippa Foot’s 1957 essay ‘Free will as involving determinism’. Whether Foot is arguing that free will requires determinism, as many philosophers have argued, or ‘involves’ it in some other way, will be explored later. Or not.
So, having read Foot’s essay and wanting to be generous as she’s the only female contributor to the mid-twentieth century collection of essays I’m pushing my way through without much enthusiasm (linked below), I find little that’s truly relevant to the issue, to my mind. There are two reasons, I think, that these essays generally seem to miss the mark. One is that, largely under the perhaps baleful influence of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Anglo-American philosophers of the period were overly concerned with ‘clarifying’ language terms such as ‘responsibility’, ‘agency’ ‘freedom’ and the like. The assumption was that, under the right circumstances, the person ‘could have done otherwise’, as long as you understood the term ‘could’ or ‘can’ correctly. To be fair, the importance of genetics was only just being felt at the time, to say nothing of epigenetics, endocrinology and neural development. Having said that, the lack of any thought to the massive effects of social disadvantage – having the ‘wrong parents’ and belonging to the ‘wrong’ class or sub-culture – is typical of these academicians, who clearly had little idea of what a childhood of extreme poverty or ill-treatment does to a soul, or of just how many people out there, myself included, could never dream of the academic life these philosophers enjoyed. That was a second assumption – that they were there by the grace of their own smarts – hence the exasperated arrogance I’ve often detected in their writings.
I did get to university though, in my thirtieth year, via the mature age entry scheme, after passing some sort of essay-writing, IQ testing amalgam. I did some philosophy as part of my BA, and read Daniel Dennett’s Elbow Room at that time, because my philosophy tutor, whom I was rather attracted to, informed me that Dennett had recently been a visiting lecturer.
I found Elbow Room to be persuasive enough, even though, as a bottom-of-the pile, anti-authoritarian nobody, I had a niggling suspicion that, smart though I thought myself to be, there were reasons, or rather, forces, beyond my ken, for my occupying the lowly societal position I found myself – occupying. Some time later, after more or less dropping out of uni (it was something of an on-again, off-again romance), I read a few books by Steven Pinker, in one of which he briefly dealt with ‘free will’ in the same rather off-hand, elitist, compatibilist way. That, and some conversations I had with members of a humanist group I joined quite a bit later, made me reconsider the whole topic more thoughtfully, so that by the time I read Sam Harris’ little book on free will I was convinced. I should also add that Thalma Lobel’s Sensation: the new science of physical intelligence – full of bonafide research data on the unconscious effects of holding a warm cup of coffee (we feel friendlier), wearing sunglasses (we feel like cheating), mild hunger (makes us more snarky), and of our view of others (tall people are better leadership material, good-looking people have better morals) – also put me on the right track. Even so, Sapolsky’s summary dismissal of the free will myth towards the end of his book Behave came as something of a revelation – a lot of detail packed into a dozen pages or so (from memory). The degree to which we, like all living beings, are the plaything of shaping forces beyond our control became more apparent than ever.
All of this makes me wonder whether it’s worth continuing with the Berofsky book. Sadly, I learned nothing useful from Philippa Foot’s contribution. What I did find rather interesting was that her grandfather was Grover Cleveland, twice President of the USA. Not that this would have had any career influence on this Oxford-educated co-founder of ‘virtue ethics’ hahahahahahaha.
And just on the topic of heritage, I happened to listen recently to a podcast commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Anglo-Australian Telescope. It included a broadcast made in the early 70s about the telescope’s launch. A couple of British astronomers were interviewed, and I was struck by their plummy accents – ‘one is raally struck by the quality of viewing here in the southern hemisphaar, it rahther takes one’s breath away’ (okay, not verbatim). Clearly, success in such exalted fields was more due to one’s connections with the royal family than with mere talent. An American astronomer was also interviewed, with a basic New York accent as far as I could tell. Of course, academic success in the US is more due more to New Money than to Old.
So anyway, I’m continuing with the Berofsky volume, for now, and I want to analyse a passage from a 1951 essay, ‘Is “freewill” a pseudo-problem?’, by C A Campbell (a Scots philosopher educated at Glasgow University – where Adam Smith, James Watt, Frances Hutcheson and Lord Kelvin all got their start – and at Oxford. Sigh). I want to analyse this passage because I found it so discombobulating. Hopefully it’ll turn out more combobulous by the end of the process:
Let us put the argument implicit in the common view [that we have free will, incompatible with determinism] a little more sharply. The moral ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. If we say that A morally ought to have done X, we imply that in our opinion, he could have done X. But we assign moral blame to a man only for failing to do what we think he morally ought to have done. Hence if we morally blame A for not having done X, we imply that he could have done X even though in fact he did not. In other words, we imply that A could have acted otherwise than he did. And that means that we imply, as a necessary condition of a man’s being morally blameworthy, that he enjoyed a freedom of a kind not compatible with unbroken causal continuity.
First, there’s so much that’s mid-20th century about this passage, and all the essays in the Berofsky volume. They all, including the one female contributor, use, at all times, the male pronoun to identify an abstract or ‘universal’ human and her decisions. They also describe abstract situations – ‘A could/should have done X but he chose to do Y’. By contrast there are no abstract humans in Sapolsky’s determinist analyses and descriptions. In fact, the lack of abstractness or universality of every human (not to mention other animals) is a major theme of his argument. Campbell (who turns out to self-identify as a libertarian), like most philosophers of the time, utilises clunky phrases such as ‘necessary condition’ and ‘unbroken causal continuity’. Even ‘moral blame’ sounds clunky to me. If we blame someone for something, the morality (or rather, immorality) element is already implied. In short, this passage could’ve been much shorter, and so clearer. Here’s my update:
Here, in short, is the common or garden incompatibilism argument. Saying ‘she should have’ implies that she could have. We blame people for failing to do what they really should’ve done, in our view. They could’ve acted otherwise but chose not to, thus exercising their own personal freedom, unconstrained by determinism.
I don’t think I’ve missed anything out here, but I think it reveals the weakness of Campbell’s reasoning, which is easy to miss among all the philosophic dross. And that is that, ‘exercising our own personal freedom’ isn’t proof that our decision is not determined. It’s just a phrase, after all. Campbell’s extended argument, presented later in his essay, is of the ‘self is its own undetermined (or self-determined) determinator’, variety which is just silly – though rather popular. He bases this largely on the swirling complexity we find within our own minds, which leads to determinism-beating impulsivity, unpredictability and the like. So our determining factors are complex – what else is new?
Anyway, I’ve decided to continue grinding through the Berofsky volume, in tandem with Sapolsky’s much more enlightening Determined. I’m also planning to write a few posts of the ‘dummies’ guide to particle physics/quantum mechanics’ type, which might be good for a laugh. Never too late to learn.
References
Bernard Berofsky, ed. Free will and Determinism, 1965
Thalma Lobel, Sensation: the new science of physical intelligence, 2014
Sam Harris, Free will, 2012
Robert Sapolsky, Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst, 2017
John Hospers and free will – some remarks
John Hospers (1918 -2011), US philosopher and first presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party
The philosopher John Hospers lived to the ripe old age of 93 and died in 2011. His essay “What means this freedom?” was published in a 1961 philosophical compendium, Determinism and freedom in the age of modern science, edited by Sidney Hook, and reprinted in Free will and determinism, edited by Berofsky. I haven’t been able to ascertain exactly when the essay was written. The internet tells me Hospers was strongly associated with libertarianism, and was once a good friend of Ayn Rand, which strikes me as bizarre considering that the above-mentioned essay presents an argument against free will. Perhaps a closer study of the essay will clarify the apparent contradiction.
Hospers brings up the concept of unconscious motivation in his first paragraph. He reflects on a ‘criminal act’:
The deed may be planned, it may be carried out in cold calculation, it may spring from the agent’s character and be continuous with the rest of his behaviour, and it may be perfectly true that he could have done differently if he had wanted to; nonetheless his behaviour was brought about by unconscious conflicts developed in infancy, over which he had no control and of which (without training in psychiatry) he does not even have knowledge. He may even think he knows why he acted as he did, he may think he has conscious control over his actions, he may even think he is fully responsible for them; but he is not. Psychiatric casebooks provide hundreds of examples. The law and common sense, though puzzled sometimes by such cases, are gradually becoming aware that they exist; but at this early stage countless blunders still occur because neither the law nor the public in general is aware of the genesis of criminal actions.
The conscious/unconscious division, born of psychoanalysis, seems dated now, but there’s plenty of evidence of retarded neural development in childhood, and of the epigenetic effects of early developmental experiences, both pre- and post-natal. It’s also worth noting that Hospers here confines himself to ‘criminal actions’, without seeming to recognise the much wider implications of the determinist world we live in. Our deterministic world is massively more encompassing, something that perhaps remains hidden to many of us because of the more or less infinite variety of human individuals the chains of cause and effect produce. And, of course, because of the modern WEIRD emphasis on human freedom.
A problem with Hospers’ argument is that, as he claims above, it supposedly relies on ‘training in psychiatry’. In a marginal note to Hospers’ analysis of Hamlet’s inability to act, due to an unconscious ‘Oedipal conflict’, I wrote this, more than 40 years ago:
I can’t accept this – it suggests that someone else knows my motives better than I do. This is the insidious power structure on which psychoanalysis is built.
Of course it’s true that if you want an accurate description of a person’s character, you ask those who know her well rather than the person herself, because for sound evolutionary reasons, we emphasise our ‘best’ qualities and minimise our worst. However the psychiatric view misses a great many other factors in determining character – genetic, epigenetic, cultural, hormonal, traumatic, dietary, and probably countless others still insufficiently researched. All of these factors create a self, which, according to many ‘compatibilists’, including Sidney Hook in Berofsky’s collection, is the agent which ‘freely’ acts. What means this freedom, indeed!
It’s hardly Hospers’ fault that he didn’t widen the determining factors I’ve just mentioned, as so little was known about them, mid-twentieth century. And yet, much further along in his essay, he makes this extraordinary claim:
I want to make it clear that I have not been arguing for determinism.
And much of what follows makes little sense to me. The philosophical language, it seems to me, gets in the way of basic reasoning (not only here but in most of the essays in the Berofsky volume). For example, much is made of the question ‘Are our powers innate or acquired?’ This is a non-issue. We acquire certain ‘powers’ or skills or world-views or whatever because of the family we’re born into, the zeitgeist that surrounds that family, and particular mentors or events that have influenced us, particularly at an early age. We have no control over our early brain development, over whether we’re attractive or ugly by our community’s standards, whether we’re short or tall, ‘black’ or ‘white’ skinned, or introduced as babies into the English or Tagalog language. And these factors and a thousand others heavily influence what we will become. To sort them into innate or acquired characteristics is largely a mug’s game.
Essentially the reason Hospers and others are fearful of the determinist label is the idea that all is ‘fixed’, that nothing could have been otherwise, or can be otherwise in the future. So what’s the use of trying? What I do tomorrow is already set. No need to think about it, to worry about what to wear to work, what to prepare for tomorrow’s lesson – it’s already taken care of. But that’s not how things work. What’s missing is the complexity of interacting determining factors that make us, the most hyper-social mammalian species on the planet, want to survive and thrive within the social web that has created us. Some of us, largely due to the luck of our early years and environment, are very good at doing this, sometimes to the detriment of others, sometimes not. Others are overwhelmed and seek to withdraw into a more ‘safe’ and static environment. In any case, things are not fixed, due to the dynamic, albeit determined, world that we have to negotiate constantly throughout our lives. A determined world is far from being predictable, because we’re constantly encountering unexpected events, conversations, challenges, requests, crises, accidents, insights, and so on. They often come at us thick and fast, and we must deal with them, determined though they be. And our own dealing with them has always been determined, because we dealt with them in this way and not that. How we deal with a situation in the future isn’t yet determined – nor is it entirely predictable, because the elements of that future situation are always unique, and complex.
To return to Hospers, let me analyse some remarks towards the end of his essay:
What of the charge that we could never have acted otherwise than we did? This, I submit, is not true. Here the proponents of … ‘soft determinism’ are quite right. I could have gone to the opera today instead of coming here; that is, if certain conditions had been different, I should have gone. I could have done many other things instead of what I did, if some condition or other had been different, specifically if my desire had been different.
Hospers goes on to examine ‘could’ as a ‘power word’, but in my view that is beside the point. The point, as Sabine Hossenfelder bluntly states in her video on free will, is that, given all the things you could have done in response to situation x (which are virtually infinite), you did y. And this decision was the result of all the impinging circumstances of the moment together with the character you have become due to a virtually infinite combination of historical events, neural connections, hormonal flows, genetic inheritances and so forth. Hospers mentions desire, as if this is something we have control over. I can attest that, when young, I became pathetically sick with desire for certain young women while unmoved by others who seemed equally attractive by general standards. I felt like the plaything of strong emotions which I wasn’t sure whether to feel proud of or ashamed of. I’ve also felt extremely violent emotions towards people who mistreated me, in my view, such as an old headmaster, but also toward long-dead dictators and war-mongers I’ve read about. None of these feelings are under my control. Nor is it really under my control that I haven’t acted on my violent or libidinous passions. My desire not to go to gaol or make a fool of myself, which are pretty commonplace desires, shared by the vast majority of people, have kept me well out of the spotlight. That desire is, of course, the result of experiences that have befallen me, and shaped me. Not of my own free will – whatever that means.
References
Free will and determinism, ed Bernard Berofsky, 1966