Posts Tagged ‘philosophy’
Carlo Rovelli, humanist extraordinaire, and Lucretius, ditto
Lucretius, apparently
I was, for a time, a member of the South Australian humanists, basically a meet-up group, but also a branch of the national organisation, the title of which I can’t remember, mea culpa. I might also claim to be a prominent member, as I gave three talks to the group, the first on free will (on which I’ve since changed my position), the second on the decline of religion in Australia, and the third on the birth and growth of international organisations. I write this purely to big-note myself, as nobody else will.
I believe that humanist group is no longer with us, but of course humanism lives on in many hearts and minds. I’ve been very much reminded of this as I read a collection of essays by the philosophical physicist Carlo Rovelli, with the grand and charming title, There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness. And I must say, to my shame, that I only got the book via a ‘Dirty Santa’ game last Christmas. I filched the book from someone, as part of the rules of the game, largely to show off about how bookish I am (I also filched another book, to become the sole owner of the only book gifts available).
Strangely I knew the name, probably through my various researches for my writing, but I chanced to search my little library and found a slender Rovelli volume, Seven brief lessons on physics, which I can’t for the life of me remember buying, and have surely never opened – mea maxima culpa. So now I have two Rovelli essay collections to read, and they truly are gems, resurrecting my humanist interests as well as, if it’s not the same thing, making me want to be a better person, at last!
The most recent essay I’ve read, ‘De rerum natura’, rather excited me in anticipation, and I must tell a story about it, which I suspect I’ve written before, but never mind.
In my early twenties I was at a party at a friend’s house, a fairly raucous affair, with painfully loud music and painfully attractive women, and I found myself overwhelmed and wilting. My friend noticed and made some effort to revive me, but I told him I was in a dull mood and should go home. He suggested instead that I spend some time in his spare room, away from the noise, where there was a sofa bed and ‘lots of books’. He knew me well. So, shutting the door to the beats of Ian Dury, Elvis Costello et al, I perused a plethora of texts before more or less randomly selecting Lucretius. De Rerum Natura is generally translated as On the nature of things, or On the nature of the universe, though there may be other variants. It was written in the first century BCE, and, believe me, it’s an extraordinary work, which cuts through the centuries between then and now like a knife through air. After the first few pages I found myself laughing with incredulity. Though from the beginning he addresses the great goddess Venus, it didn’t strike me as a religious text, it was too full of the life of the nature around him, animate and inanimate, and the atoms this natural world was all made from. Yes, this was an early atomic theory, first posited by Democritus and Epicurus, though long before subatomic particles, quantum states, electromagnetism and field theory,
I was certainly bedazzled by this 2,000 year old claim about atoms, but other speculations seemed fascinatingly ‘modern’:
… if things were made out of nothing, any species could spring from any source and nothing would require seed. Men could arise from the sea and scaly fish from the earth, and birds could be hatched out of the sky… The same fruits would not grow constantly on the same trees, but they would keep changing: any tree might bear any fruit. If each species were not composed of its own generative bodies, why should each be born always of the same kind of mother? Actually, since each is formed out of specific seeds, it is born and emerges into the sunlit world only from a place where there exists the right material, the right kind of atoms. This is why everything cannot be born of everything, but a specific power of generation inheres in specific objects.
This is the very sniffter of an intuition about the origin of individual species, which went through me, as a young man, like a very mild and titillating electric shock. The passage, and others like it, appear in the first few pages of De Rerum Natura, and it may well be that I didn’t get much further on that night, given the circumstances, but they made a deep impression. Our thoughts, or those of the best of us, have been plumbing the depths of what’s what in terms of what we are, and everything living – and non-living – around us, for 2 thousand, or 20 thousand, or even 200 thousand years. Our sharing of these thoughts no doubt began with the development of language, and then writing, which boosted us to become the dominant species we now are.
So I note that I’ve got a copy of On the nature of the Universe on my bookshelves, but I likely haven’t read past Book One of six books. Time to make amends. Life begins at 69! Which reminds me – vive les bonobos!
References
Carlo Rovelli, There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness, 2022
Carlo Rovelli, Seven brief lessons on physics, 2014
Lucretius, On the nature of the universe, trans by R E Latham, 1994
Nietzsche and Darwin and science and philosophy
When I was young, living in Elizabeth, a newly-built working-class town north of Adelaide in South Australia, I was able to avail myself of books of all kinds on our home shelves – novels, histories, encyclopaedias and the like. It was only much later that I had cause to wonder – where did all these books come from? I don’t think my father ever read a book in his life (he later, after my mother left him, told me I need only read one book – the Bible). My mother read very few. I had two older siblings – two and three years older – but surely all these books didn’t come from them.
Among them were a few works of philosophy which I skimmed my way through, puzzled and occasionally impressed, I think mostly by the author’s chutzpah. His name was Friedrich Nietzsche, and the titles were Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist. Much of the writing involved seemingly pithy little aphorisms – sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes confusing, and occasionally liberating for an anti-authoritarian adolescent, as I most definitely was at the time. In The Antichrist, for example, Nietzsche got stuck into ‘Saint Paul’, which tickled my fancy in spite of my not knowing much about Nietzsche’s target. The naughtiness of it all was quite a thrill to me.
So my none-too-reliable guess is that I was fifteen or sixteen when this skimming took place, but it certainly stuck in my mind. Meanwhile I continued my reading, particularly from the library close by, from which, often on the recommendations of my older brother’s university friends, I borrowed and read pretty well the whole oeuvre of Thomas Hardy, as well as other 19th century Brits – Dickens, the Brontes, Austen, George Eliot, and writers we’d studied at school – George Orwell, Albert Camus, and, from Camus, the Roads to Freedom trilogy of Jean-Paul Sartre. All this would’ve been in those mid-teen years, the couple of years after I’d left school due to being smacked in the face by the headmaster, for no good reason.
So all of this is preliminary. Years later, I happened to read something very scathing that Nietzsche had written about George Eliot, surely one of the best novelists of the Victorian era. On looking into the matter I learned that he had never read Eliot and was responding simply to a remark made about her by someone he knew. Oh dear. Whatever opinion I had of Nietzsche was definitely dented.
So, flash further forward, and after being apprised, over the years, of some misogynistic remarks by Nietzsche, my interest in him was pretty well dead. That is, until a recent conversation with an intelligent female friend caused me to try reappraising my reappraisal. I checked my admirably voluminous bookshelves (I’m not even sure where all those books came from either) and found I had two Nietzsche paperbacks with my name written on the inside cover over 40 years ago – Thus spake Zarathustra and a two-in-one volume, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner. I’m pretty sure I never read this second book all those years ago, but for my sins I’ve just read The birth of tragedy. I found it more or less completely incomprehensible, and somehow irrelevant.
So I’ll present a comparison, odorous though it might be. The birth of tragedy was Nietzsche’s first published book, in 1872, when he was in his twenties and a very youthful professor in Ancient Greek philology. As it happens I’m now reading another book, published in 1871, on a very different topic – Charles Darwin’s The descent of man. Darwin never obtained a professorship, but he did okay for himself, being a scion of the aristocracy, and, to be fair, an indefatigable researcher. Clearly, both authors felt strongly that they had an important message to impart to the world. So let me quote from both authors.
First, a more or less random passage from Nietzsche’s The birth of tragedy – and, to be fair, this is, by all accounts, far from his best work, and he himself dismissed it in his later years. Yet I feel its esoteric nature is fairly typical:
In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing. His very gestures express enchantment. Just as the animals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural sounds emanate from him, too: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams. He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity. The noblest clay, the most costly marble, man, is here kneaded out and cut, and to the sound of the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artist rings out the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries: “Do you prostrate yourselves, millions? Do you sense your Maker, world?” [the quote is from Schiller].
F Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner, translated by Walter Kaufmann, 1967, pp 37-38
So, the above passage was written, or published when Nietzsche was about 27 years old. The next passage was from a book published in 1871, when Darwin was 62, and very much an established ‘natural philosopher’, revered and reviled world-wide.
The feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, reverence, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements. No being could experience so complex an emotion until advanced in his intellectual and moral faculties to at least a moderately high level. Nevertheless, we see some distant approach to this state of mind in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feelings. The behaviour of a dog when returning to his master after an absence, and, as I may add, of a monkey to his beloved keeper, is widely different from that towards their fellows. In the latter case the transports of joy appear to be somewhat less and the sense of equality is shewn in every action. Professor Braubach goes so far as to maintain that a dog looks on his master as on a god. The same high mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual agencies, then in fetishism, polytheism, and ultimately in monotheism, would infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various superstitions and customs.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: in J D Watson, ed. Darwin, the indelible stamp: four essential volumes in one, 2005, pp 679-680
I’ve excluded the notes from the Darwin extract, but just about every page of his book is annotated with references to contemporary writers and analysts of various species, their behaviours, anatomies and so on. The extract from Nietzsche is of course a translation, so that carries problems, which I haven’t the nous to explore. It could be argued that Nietzsche’s extract is ‘philosophical’ while Darwin’s is ‘scientific’, which certainly tempts me to try to explain, or at least explore, the difference. I remember, from my philosophical readings of the eighties, one philosopher, it might’ve been Max Black, arguing that most analyses of ‘problems’, whether within ourselves or in the world, start as philosophy and end as science – to put it a bit crudely. In that respect I think of Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction, which I’m sure seemed incredibly insightful at the time, and I recall being quite impressed with it as a young person. We experience everything through our senses, but how do we know they’re reliable? We can’t check with others, as they have the same sensory equipment as ourselves – equally unreliable – or reliable. The ‘noumenal’ world is supposedly inaccessible to us all, if it exists. What has happened since Kant’s time is a much greater access to the phenomenal world, from the 13 to 14 billion-year old universe, to quarks, neutrinos and such. And nobody’s talking much about noumena, if they ever were. Scientists now would surely say that Kant’s noumenal world is, and always, was, unprovable. Nice try, Manny. And yet it does raise interesting questions about individual perception and reality.
Another interesting point I would make about Darwin/Nietzsche is that, though their subject matter could hardly be more different, at the time they would both be considered philosophers – at a stretch. In 1867, William Thompson, aka Lord Kelvin, and Peter Tait, published Treatise on Natural Philosophy, essentially treating of what was known about physics at the time. The modern term ‘scientist’ was only just coming into general use towards the end of the 19th century. In the 1880s Nietzsche published a book bearing the English title The Gay Science (the German title was Die frohliche Wissenschaft), which is regarded (by Wikipedia) as one of his more positive books (nout to do with logical positivism), promoting science and skepticism, but I think it’s safe to say that there’s no science at all in The Birth of Tragedy. You might say that he was still weaning himself from Greek philology at this time, and expatiating on his personal response to ancient Greek drama.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make with these two extracts was that they have so little in common with each other. Their preoccupations were poles apart. Darwin’s work was rooted in the world of solid academic and upper-middle class connections, and the gathering of data, whereas Nietzsche is all flightiness and abstract conjecture. I must admit I found little of the bite and the dismissiveness in The Birth of Tragedy that haunt my memories of reading Nietzsche, probably because it was his first published work, but I also found nothing that inclines me to read more of his stuff. And yet, there’s The case of Wagner, which I’ve heard is a demolition job of the notorious anti-semite, though there’s a related work, Nietzsche contra Wagner, published shortly afterwards, that really does the job.
So I was planning to do a more close analysis of the above-quoted passages, but it all seems a bit much. Darwin’s material speaks for itself, I think. It took humans a long time to get to the stage of careful and objective analysis of their environment, in terms of time and space, structural complexity, wave-molecular interactions, life from non-life and so on, and we’re still learning, and discovering. Nietzsche’s work, though this may not be the best example, is more poetic and personal, and considering his fate, it’s hard not to sympathise. Nietzsche, I note, seems very quotable (you can find dozens of quotes from him online), as he was very fond of trying to capture something deep and meaningful in a sentence. Darwin is pretty well the exact opposite, yet surely his influence has been greater. However, in spite of The Birth of Tragedy, I’m prepared to give poor Friedrich another go, kind-hearted soul that I am.
The Gay Science perhaps…
References
Friedrich Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner, trans Walter Kaufman 1967.
Charles Darwin, The descent of man [sic], 1871
on sentience
I’m reading Dennett’s 1996 book Kinds of minds, which, from my dilapidated copy, I must’ve read before, but… anyway, I’m a bit disappointed so far, as I was hoping it would be about the minds of other creatures – cetaceans, elephants, bonobos and such – but so far, nearly halfway through, it’s been dealing with much more basic species, as well as the more complex systems created by humans as of 30 years ago. He does have some interesting things to say about that slippery concept known as sentience, though, so I thought I might think on those thoughts. A brief escape from the political scene.
So here’s Dennett’s first take on the concept:
Since there is no established meaning to the word ‘sentience’, we are free to adopt one of our own choosing, if we can motivate it. We could refer to the slow but reliable responsiveness of plants to their environment as ‘sentience’ if we wanted, but we would need some reason to distinguish this quality from the mere sensitivity exhibited by bacteria and other single-celled life forms…
Kinds of minds, p66
It’s groping at the idea of some kind of awareness which certainly isn’t consciousness but above ‘mere sensitivity’. But these are just words. It suggests something on a certain level of complexity which isn’t quite mammalian – or rather it embraces a complexity which starts at a pre-mammalian stage. Something which provides focus. Descartes, in his attempt to capture human consciousness, imagined that there was a central focussing medium in the human pineal gland. Of course he was wrong, but the idea of such a central processing medium or system, from which sentience emerges, hasn’t died.
If we replace ‘sentience’ with, say, ‘self-awareness’, something that we’d likely deny to plants, and grant to mammals, cephalopods, fish (whose status in self-awareness, and general intelligence, as bestowed by humans, has risen in recent years, I’ve noticed), and maybe crustaceans, but not to oysters and other such mollusks….and then what about insects?
So the more I think on the term, the more uncertain I am about its usefulness. Perhaps that’s because the more we look into particular species or genera, the more we feel we should grant sentience to them. That’s to say, our system of valuing broadens. Lately I’ve been reading about whales, and watching recent videos about them. The history of human relations with cetaceans has been marked by a complete transformation in the past 150 years, more complete, arguably, than that for any other mammal, but the fact is, the more we investigate any living beings, the more we’re made to think along ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ terms, which becomes a kind of ‘transference of sentience’ to other life forms.
So here’s a story. A few days ago, I was at the state library here in Adelaide with my laptop, writing. I was at a long white bench stretching across the back wall, with other people working in a seemingly similar way at a fair distance from me on either side – a kind of Edward Hopper scenario. My researches were interrupted though by a mildly insistent buzzing to my left. I looked over to the young woman some metres away staring intently at her computer. Perhaps she was watching a video. I tried to ignore it – it wasn’t too loud, but monotonous, stopping sometimes, then starting again. I looked over again, puzzling at it, and then I noticed a black speck moving in circles on the bench between us. It was a blowfly, and the sound was its wings beating on the bench. It was upside down and desperately trying to right itself. Issue resolved, I focussed again on my writing, and meanwhile the fly’s struggles brought it closer to my workspace. I had a bag on the bench beside my computer, and the fly managed to get itself, still upside-down, on the bag’s strap, which meant that it was no longer horizontal but tilted slightly towards normality. It remained there, immobile for a while – no more wing-beating. It seemed to be resting, gathering strength, summing up its new scenario. Then it flipped back onto the bench, right-way up. It remained still for quite a while, almost lifeless it seemed. I went back to work, and when I looked again, it was gone.
The lifespan of a blowfly is three to four weeks on average, and I suspect this event would’ve been momentous for this blowfly. Would it be remembered? Perhaps yes, but of course not in any human sense. Sentience, though is generally seen as more basic – Wikipedia starts out with a simple sentence: ‘Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations.’ Sentience is an ability? Is there a difference between a feeling and a sensation? Language so often confuses with distinctions without differences. Was this piece of sentience or experience life-changing for this fly, rendering it in some way different from other flies? Changing its future pattern of behaviour? But that would go beyond sentience to a kind of learning. But what would sentience be for, other than that? A sensation that tells or teaches us to move towards or away from. So sentience is about more than just sentience. There is a purpose to it, a survival purpose, and possibly more. An evolutionary purpose – those who have more effectively learned from their sensations – or simply have had more or a greater variety of sensations to learn from, to survive, will live to copulate and multiply, producing more of their kind of effective learners. Something along those lines was how Darwin thought, surely, and then genes were uncovered, adding more complexity, for how ever could experience be encoded?
Evolution has no purpose, I’ve heard. It’s just that sentience of a certain kind has survival value. The more sentience, the more value? A battle of the sentiences? A battle of the codes for sentience? How could all this be related to nucleic acid sequences? It’s all too mind-boggling, just shut up and connect….
How much sentience is too much? It’s all so exhausting, and then we die, like flies…
References
Daniel Dennett, Kinds of minds, 1996
Sean Carroll on free will – a sort of compatibilist
this comment, from a site called ‘physics of free will’, seems to miss the point completely
There are a few positions on the free will issue, and probably three principal ones. They are, compatibilism (the most common position, particularly among philosophers), incompatibilism and libertarianism. I’m not interested in discussing libertarianism, which is just too weird. Compatibilism, argued for by Daniel Dennett in Elbow Room, amongst many others I’ve read, including Steven Pinker, and most of the contributors to Free will & determinism, a mid-twentieth century collection edited by Bernard Berofsky, claims basically that though our macro world is deterministic, otherwise science would never have gotten off the ground, we as complex, thinking and deciding individuals, make life choices all the time, in large matters and small, choices which we claim as our own, with all the praise and opprobrium that comes with our decisions.
Those that argue for incompatibilism, or hard determinism as it’s sometimes called, question, among other things, this notion of the self-determining self. Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford University, has written a comprehensive defence of the incompatibilist position in Determined, which together with his earlier book Behave, and Sam Harris’ book Free Will, and reflections on the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (a 50-year-old longitudinal study of, inter alia, personality types and how they change, or not, over time), has shifted my own stance on the issue from a wobbly compatibilism to a much more firm incompatibilism.
So to Sean Carroll, eminent physicist and science communicator and author of a 2016 book which I bought the other day, The Big Picture: on the origins of life, meaning and the universe itself – obviously inspired by my own writings. He devotes six pages of his 441-page book to the free will question, so it’s probably not a big issue for him. And indeed, it’s pretty inevitable that successful and highly respected individuals, who have contributed positively to science and human understanding, as Carroll undoubtedly has, would wish to be given credit for their achievements, and to believe that their own decisions and their own hard work have brought them to the position of respected public intellectual that the likes of Carroll enjoys today.
However.
I’m not going to research Carroll’s background, any more than I’ll research the backgrounds of other compatibilists such as Dennett and Pinker, but I think I can safely assume that none of these individuals were born into dire poverty, or a toxic family situation, or a war zone, or a strongly kinship-oriented, non-English-speaking culture. When I think of free will, or the lack thereof, it’s these Big Factors that come to mind, not whether I chose to have muesli or shredded wheat for breakfast. It’s typical, for example, that Carroll uses this example in demonstrating our ability to choose:
Imagine you’re a high school student who wants to go to college, and you’ve been accepted into several universities. You look at their web pages, visit campuses, talk to students and faculty at each place. Then you say yes to one of them, no to the others. What is the best way to describe what just happened, the most useful vocabulary for talking about our human-scale world? It will inevitably involve some statements along the lines of ‘you made a choice’.
Clearly Carroll knows his readership – educated citizens of the ‘Western’ or WEIRD world – so I can hardly blame him for his choice of example. However, he doesn’t really question the essential word ‘you’ here, and seems to think it’s all about a confused use of language and categories:
… the mistake made by free-will skeptics is to carelessly switch between incompatible vocabularies.
Describing the choices we make about what to wear in the morning, he writes:
That’s a decision that you [my emphasis] have to make; you can’t just say, ‘I’ll do whatever the atoms in my body were going to deterministically do anyway’. The atoms are going to do whatever they were going to do, but you don’t know what that is, and it’s irrelevant to the question of which decision you should make. Once you frame the question in terms of you and your clear choice, you can’t also start talking about your atoms and the laws of physics. Either vocabulary is perfectly legitimate, but mixing them leads to nonsense.
Sean Carroll, The Big Picture, p 379
This is, unfortunately, a classic straw woman argument. No careful-thinking incompatibilist is going to bring up atoms or even neurons to explain this particular everyday choice. Amongst the determining factors will be: what clothes are available to the subject; the weather; what job, activities or tasks she expects to engage in; her mood; her age and gender; her culture; her taste, developed over a lifetime and influenced by family, peer group, class etc. The ‘you’, the self, is constructed of many of these elements and more, including daily effects (the weather) and lifelong ones (culture, genetics) operating very much down to the neuronal and hormonal level – but there would rarely be a need to reach down that far to explain the person’s choices.
While I recognise that Carroll has barely skated over the topic in six pages, I find it bizarre that he doesn’t touch on the Big Issues here – culture, upbringing, genetics and our arbitrary ‘thrown-ness’ into the world – and their massive determining effects. He does end on a note of compromise and uncertainty however, while still, I think, largely missing the point:
Most people do maintain a certain degree of volition and autonomy, not to mention a complexity of cognitive functioning that makes predicting their future actions infeasible in practice. There are grey areas – drug addiction is an obvious case where volition can be undermined, even before we go all the way to considering tumours and explicit brain damage. This is a subject in which the basics are far from settled, and much of the important science has yet to be established. What seems clear is that we should base our ideas about personal responsibility on the best possible understanding of how the brain works that we can possibly achieve, and be willing to update those ideas whenever the data call for it.
Ibid, p 384
To me, this feeling of volition and autonomy is simply a product of complexity, and a sense of that complexity being inside us. We feel it, especially when faced with tough choices, or regretting the road not travelled. But what is the difference here between me and my pet dog? Does she feel anger, shame, regret? The general human response would be – maybe, but not like us. And what about bonobos? Cetaceans? We recognise, with all these mammals, that they are ‘individuals’. All dogs I’ve owned, or known, had their own personalities, I recognised that they ‘thought’, and so reacted, differently from each other. There may be similarities in breeds, just as we recognise cultural similarities in humans, but there are individual differences due to being ‘the runt of the litter’, being over- or under-fed by their owner, being brought up with other dogs or not, being pampered or neglected, and so on. But do we grant them free will? Surely not. And only humans, it seems, have the power to grant beings such power! Which is why we grant it so readily to ourselves. It’s just another example of human exceptionalism, as defined by humans. Remember how we were the only tool-makers, the only language-users, the only mourners of the dead….?
In my next piece on this topic I’ll look at what Steven Pinker had to say about free will in his 2002 book The blank slate. I wonder if he’s changed his mind since….
References
Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: on the origin of life, meaning and the universe itself, 2016
Robert Sapolsky, Determined: life without free will, 2023
Robert Sapolsky, Behave, 2017
Daniel Dennett, Elbow room: the varieties of free will worth wanting, 1984
Steven Pinker, The blank slate, 2002
Bernard Berofsky ed, Free will and determinism, 1963
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
free will, revisited
yet to be read
I’ve written about free will before, here , and especially here, (the commentary at the end is particularly interesting, IMHO), and probably in other posts as well, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, so maybe it’s time for a refresher (though, if I say so myself, those earlier posts stand up pretty well).
I first became acquainted with and absorbed in the ‘philosophical’ argy-bargy about free will way back in the seventies, when I read Free Will and Determinism, a collection of essays edited by Bernard Berofsky. It was published in 1966, and is, amazingly (since I’ve moved house about 50 times), still in my possession. Glancing through it again now brings back memories, but more importantly, the arguments, which mostly favour compatibilism, aka soft determinism, seem both naive and somewhat arrogant, if that’s the word. That is, they’re mostly variants of ‘of course we have free will – we display it in every decision we make – but many of us find it hard to present a rational explanation of it, so I’ll do it for you’. Only one philosopher, from memory, John Hospers, argued for ‘hard determinism’, that’s to say, for the absence of free will. And though I found his argument a bit clunky (it was largely based on Freudian and neo-Freudian psychology), it was the only one that really stuck in my mind, though I didn’t quite want to be convinced.
In more recent years, after reading Sam Harris’ short book on free will, and Robert Sapolsky’s treatment of the issue towards the end of his monumental book Behave, I’ve felt as if the scales have dropped from my eyes. Another factor I should mention was a talk I gave to the SA Humanist Society a few years ago on the subject, which didn’t quite go all the way on ‘no free will’, and a pointed question from one of the attendees left me floundering for a response. It was likely that experience that made me feel the need to revisit the issue more comprehensively. So, for memory lane’s sake, I’m going to reread these old essays and then comment on them. And hopefully I’ll be able to slip in a bonobo mention along the way!
I should mention, as Sapolsky does in Behave, that neurology has come a long way since the 1970s. More papers have been published in the field in the first two decades of the 21st century than in all the centuries before, which is hardly surprising. With this, and our greater understanding of genetics, epigenetics. developmental psychology and other fields relevant to the topic, it will behoove me to be fair to the thinking of intellectuals writing a number of generations before the present. However, I’m not interested in giving a historical account – how Cicero, or Augustine of Hippo, or Spinoza, or John Stuart Mill conceptualised the problem was very much a product of the zeitgeist of their era, combined with their unique gifts. The era I live in, in the particularly WEIRD country (Australia) that is my home, religion is fast receding, and the sciences of neurophysiology, endocrinology, genetics and primatology, among others, have revolutionised our understanding of what it is to be human, or sentient, or simply alive. And they help us to understand our uniquely determined situation and actions.
So let me begin with Berofsky’s introduction, in which he raises a ‘problem’ with determinism:
The fact that classical mechanics did not turn out to be the universal science of human nature suggests that contemporary proponents of determinism do not ally themselves to this particular theory. Many ally themselves to no particular theory at all, but try to define determinism in such a way that its rejection is not necessitated by the rejection of any particular scientific theory.
This takes us back to the effect upon the general public of such notions as ‘quantum indeterminacy’ and its manipulation by pedlars of ‘quantum woo’ (for example, The tao of physics, by Fritjof Capra, which I haven’t read). But clearly, however we might understand quantum superposition and action-at-a-distance, they have no effect at the macro level of brain development, genetic inheritance and the like, and they certainly can’t be used to defend the concept of free will. The ‘no free will’ argument does rely on determining factors, and openly so. Our genetic inheritance, the time and place of our birth, our family circumstances, our ethnicity, our diet, these are among many influences that we don’t see as ‘theoretical’, but factual.
Berofsky goes on to worry over types of causes and causal laws in what seems to me a rather fruitless ‘philosophical’ way.
A determinist, then, is a person who believes that all events (facts, states) are lawful in the sense, roughly, that for event e, there is a distinct event d plus a (causal) law which asserts, ‘Whenever d, then e’.
The extremely general or universal character of this thesis has raised many questions, some of which concern the status of the thesis. Some have held the position as a necessary or a priori truth about the world. Others have insisted that determinism is itself a scientific theory, but much more general than most other scientific theories.
As you can imagine, none of this is of any concern to a working neurologist, biochemist or primatologist. In trying to determine how oxytocin levels affect behaviour in certain subjects, for example, they won’t be reflecting on a priori truths or causal laws, they’ll be looking at all the other possible confounding and co-determining factors that might contribute to the behaviour. It seems to me that traditional philosophical language is getting in the way here of attributing effects to causes, however partially.
Berofsky points out, in the name of some philosophers, that determinism isn’t a scientific theory in that it’s essentially unfalsifiable (my language, not his), as it can always be claimed that some so far undiscovered causal factor has contributed to the behaviour or effect. But scientists don’t consider determinism to be a theory, but rather the sine qua non of scientific practice, indeed of everyday life. We live in a world of becauses, we eat x because we’re hungry/it’s tasty/it’s healthy/it reminds us of childhood, etc. We don’t think like this in terms of laws. We needn’t think of it at all, just as a dog wags her tail when she sees her owner after a long absence (or not, if he’s also her abuser).
So much for determinism, over which too much verbiage has been employed. The real issue that exercises most people is free will, freedom, or agency. Here’s how Berofsky introduces the subject:
It has been maintained that if an action is determined, then the person was not performing the action of his own free will. For surely, it is argued, if the antecedent conditions are such that they uniquely determine by law the ensuing result (the action), then it was not within the power of the person to do otherwise. And a person does A freely if, and only if, he could have done something other than A. Let us call this position ‘incompatibilism’. Incompatibilists usually conclude as well that if a person’s action is determined, then he is not morally responsible for having done it, since acting freely is a necessary condition of being morally responsible for the action.
This is a long-winded, i.e. typically philosophical way of putting the ‘no free will’ argument, which is usually countered by an ‘of course I could’ve done otherwise’ response, and the accusation that determinists are not just kill-joys but kill-freedoms. Presumably this would be a ‘compatibilist’ response, and many find it the only common-sense response, if we want to view ourselves as anything other than automatons.
But there are obvious problems with compatibilism, and here’s my ‘death by a thousand cuts’ response. There are a great many Big Things in our life about which we, indisputably, have no choice. No person, living or dead, got to choose the time and place of their birth, or conception. No person got to choose their parents, or their genetic inheritance. They had no choice as to how their brain, limbs, organs and so forth grew and developed whilst in the womb. So, no freedom of choice up to that time. When, then, did this freedom begin? The compatibilist would presumably argue – ‘when we make our own observations and inferences, which starts to happen more frequently as we grow’. And there would be much hand-waving about when this gradually starts to happen, until we’re our own autonomous selves, who could’ve done otherwise. And here we get to the response of Sam Harris and others, that this ‘self’ is a myth. I would put it differently, that the self is a useful marker for each person and their individuality. These selves are all determined, but they’re each uniquely determined, and at least this uniqueness is something we can salvage from the firm grip of determinism. What is mythical about the self is its self-determined nature.
As Berofsky puts it, guilt and remorse are strong indications, for compatibilists, that free will exists. I would add regret to those feelings, and I would admit, as does Sapolsky, that these strong, sometimes overwhelming feelings, based largely on the idea that we should have done otherwise, are our strongest arguments for rejecting the no free will position.
This issue of guilt needs to be looked at more closely, since our whole legal system is based on questions of guilt or innocence. I’ll reserve that for next time.
References
Bernard Berofsky, ed. Free will and determinism, 1966
Robert Sapolsky, Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst, 2017
Sam Harris, Free will, 2012
reading matters 2
The beginning of infinity by David Deutsch (quantum physicist and philosopher, as nerdy as he looks)
Content hints
- science as explanations with most reach, conjecture as origin of knowledge, fallibilism, the solubility of problems, the open-endedness of explanation, inspiration is human but perspiration can be automated, all explanations give birth to new problems, emergent phenomena provide clues about other emergent phenomena, the jump to universality as systems converge and cross-fertilise, AI and the essential problem of creativity, don’t be afraid of infinity and the unlimited growth of knowledge, optimism is the needful option, better Athens than Sparta any day, there is a multiverse, the Copenhagen interpretation and positivism as bad philosophy, political institutions need to create new options, maybe beauty really is objective, static societies use anti-rational memes (e.g gods) while dynamic societies develop richer, critically valuable ones, creativity has enabled us to transcend biological evolution and to attain new estates of knowledge, Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man and Karl Popper as inspirations, the beginning….