Meat Computers and Metaphysics

Jerry Coyne and Massimo Pigliucci have engaged in intellectual internet fisticuffs on the problem of free will, which is unsurprising given that they seem to disagree on nearly everything. But their particular disagreement is more interesting than "We have free will." "Nuh-uh." "Yeah-huh." This dispute has brought up some interesting questions about the nature of the free will debate, which I'd like to explore a little bit. What kind of question are we asking when we ask if we have free will? Is it a metaphysical problem? Scientific? Conceptual?

Kant on Freedom of the Will

Kant recognized the prima facie conflict between the idea that the world is causally determined and the idea that we are free agents, but he employed his novel epistemological theory in order to resolve the conflict. Kant's solution is flawed, I think, because his epistemology is flawed, but his recognition that the fact that we appear to ourselves to be free does constitute indisputable evidence that we are free is a key insight in the history of the development of the debate about free will. I'll discuss his solution here, which will necessitate diving into his strange vocabulary of technical terms. Kant was an obsessive system builder, and the interrelations between terms in his system is complicated and messy, but I'll do my best to untangle the mess enough so that his version of free will is explicable.

Free Will: The Compatibilist Alternative

To this point most of my posts on free will have centered on the two extremes of the debate, libertarianism and determinism. But there is a middle way that has often been proposed, namely compatibilism, which will be very appealing if it can preserve what we know about the causal structure of the world as well as the elements of a theory of free will we desire. Over at The Stone Eddy Nahmias (who I have never heard of) has offered the framework of an account of a compatibilist alternative to the problem of free will and determinism. He argues that the apparent problem of reconciling free will with physical determinism is at least in part attributable to the use of a bad account of what free will is. Once this bad definition is replaced by a better one, we can see that free will, while still unexplained in detail by neuroscience, is much less of a philosophical puzzle than it appears.

Hume on Freedom of the Will

Hume recognized that any account of free will has to be made compatible with our knowledge of the causal operations of the world around us. Given that his Treatise is an attempt to detail a "science of man" we should expect that Hume's explanation of human freedom to fit within his naturalistic and empiricist philosophy of nature. This is, in fact, exactly what we get. Hume puts his theory of the will within his general casual account and in doing so offers an interesting solution (or rather, dissolution) to the problem of the compatibility of free will and determinism.

Leibniz on Freedom of the Will

Leibniz had a strange belief that the essence of a substance ("monad" in his terms) contains everything that will ever happen to it. Every event that is going to occur during a substance's existence follows necessarily from its essence. Since people are substances, it's pretty obvious that this conflicts with freedom of the will, but Leibniz claims that the two doctrines can be reconciled. His concern was not the metaphysical determinism that modern compatibilists might seek to reconcile freedom with; instead Leibniz was attempting to absolve God of responsibility for the evils and sins committed by individual agents. But there are still a couple of interesting elements in Leibniz's account of freedom that make it potentially relevant to modern discussions.

Locke on Freedom of the Will

Locke defines liberty as the ability to act or refrain from action according to the will. The will, for Locke is our capacity to “order the consideration of any Idea” or the ability to “prefer the motion of any body to its rest.” The will is a faculty of the mind, not an independent agent, and we should take care not to mistake faculties for agents, or we'll fall into confusion. Only beings capable of thought or volition can rightly be said to possess liberty. Liberty is not possible for inanimate objects. A tennis ball, for example, is not taken by anyone to be an agent with volition; we do not attribute its motion or rest to its acting according to choice.

Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Choose

The arguments for determinism are fairly straightforward, and unlike a lot of philosophical speculation can be formulated in relatively easy to understand terms. Sam Harris has a series of posts in which he outlines, in pretty accessible terms, the basic structure of the argument for determinism. In what follows here I'll discuss some of the interesting features that Harris brings out of the arguments for determinism, and take a careful look at some of his claims about the relation of the free will problem to moral philosophy.

Descartes on Freedom of the Will

In his Principles of Philosophy Descartes claims that the freedom of the will is one of the “common notions that are innate within us” and therefore does not need to be defended with argument. But as obvious as the notion of freedom of the will is the notion that God has pre-ordained all things, including our own actions. Descartes offers only our imperfect epistemic state as an attempt to reconcile these two incompatible truths. We are not in a position to understand how the two are compatible, but instead must simply assent to both propositions as known (CSM I 205-6). In his response to Hobbes' objections to the Meditations Descartes claims that the freedom of the will is “very evident by the natural light” (CSM II 133-4).

So Descartes will likely not be a place to find a full answer to the modern problem of free will and determinism, since he simply asserts compatibilism without arguing for it. But this idea that God causes everything is a form of determinism and it fits uncomfortably with the idea that we are responsible for our errors in judgment. So his versionof free will is in fact a version of compatibilism. Descartes also, despite his dualism, sought to provide an account of the relationship between the free mind and the deterministic world, of which the body is a part.

Anything You Can Do I Can Do Or Not Do In Some Relevantly Similar Possible World

As I discussed in the first post on the free will topic, the idea that we are free seems obviously true. This is the intuitive position on the free will debate, or what we can refer to as the received view or the common sense view: we have free will. It is essentially the default position, one for which mountains of introspective evidence can be assembled.

But what is exactly meant when we say that we are free? According to just about any doctrine of free will, when I make a decision a few different things have to obtain in order for us to call the decision free. First, it must be possible for me to have done otherwise. At the moment of decision, it must be the case that given a list of possible choices, it is in a real sense undetermined which action I will select. Second, I (as an independent agent) am the cause of the action that I undertake. The decision I make is the result of my deliberation and my desires. Third, I am responsible for my decision. This follows from the conjunction of the two other, but is important enough to emphasize separately. In what follows I'll briefly sketch what is entailed by each of these components of free decisions, why we think it's important, and touch on some of the reasons for the belief that each of components really does obtain when we make decisions.

The Problem of Free Will (what's the problem again?)

Are we the authors of our own actions? Do we have free will? Whether this question can be answered in the affirmative has far reaching consequences for moral theory, political discourse, and even our interpersonal relationships.

At first glance it seems like a textbook example of a question so stupid only a philosopher could ask it. Of course we are free. We experience our free choice all the time, in big and small decisions. We decide what to have for breakfast, what to wear, what careers to pursue, who to marry, and a whole host of other things. What could be more obvious than that we have free will? It turns out, though, that when you look closely at the idea of free will, especially in light of our ideas about causation, the question isn't nearly as stupid as it looks.

McCarthy, Metaphysics, and the Moral Structure of the World

Cormac McCarthy is a philosophical novelist, even if he might not apply such a label to himself. He combines a subtle portrayal of the complexities of human nature and moral judgments with metaphysical ruminations on the deep structure of the world. He does this without explicitly invoking philosophers or having his characters engage in much lofty dialogue. His characters, with few exceptions, do not contemplate deep questions. And yet, those deep questions pervade his works and form the logical structure under which events unfold in his narratives.