Dr. Harris is forthrightly skeptical that free will, as popularly conceived, exists. He seemed concerned, in the first of his posts, to make some sort of case for moral responsibility nevertheless, but it was a pretty half-hearted effort, and he didn’t pull it off. In the second post he didn’t really even try. He has now published a third item in the series, and it says nothing whatsoever about morality, focusing instead on buttressing his argument that our subjective sense of uncaused agency is an illusion.

As I’ve said before, I agree (though I don’t think that it matters in any meaningful way, in part because I think our familiar notion of “free”, original agency is incoherent).

Dr. Harris reminds us that while we can do as we choose, the choosing itself is opaque to introspection. We enter a deliberative state, and our decision simply appears. He quotes Einstein:

Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will, but he cannot will what he wills).

All correct, I think. Where then, does that leave consciousness? Experimental observation has shown that decisions seem to become accessible to conscious awareness only some time after they are made; the simplest account, then, would seem to be that consciousness is quite unnecessary for deliberation and decision-making. (Indeed, were it not for the lethal objection raised by Titus Rivas, Daniel Dennett, and others, and discussed here, I’d say that pure epiphenomenalism — the idea that consciousness has no causal effect on anything at all, and is just a spectator along for the ride — is the simplest and best account of what’s going on.)

But why, then, does consciousness even matter? Harris wonders too. He talks about “the very reason why people believe in free will in the first place: the feeling of conscious agency”:

People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about.

Each of us has many organs in addition to a brain that make unconscious “decisions”—but these are not events for which anyone feels responsible. Are you producing red blood cells and digestive enzymes at this moment? Your body is, of course, but if it “decided” to do otherwise, you would be the victim of these changes, rather than their autonomous cause. To say that I am “responsible” for everything that goes on inside my skin because it’s all “me,” is to make a claim that bears no relationship to the feelings of agency and moral responsibility that make the idea of free will an enduring problem for philosophy.

Our subjective experience having led us to a chimerical notion of what it means to be “free”, we then imagine that a choice must be conscious to be “free”, and that the choices of which we are conscious are “free”. Wrong all round, it seems.

Why, then, bother about consciousness at all, if it isn’t the seat of free agency? The answer is that consciousness matters because it is all there is to our subjective existence — and because even if our preferences and deliberations only present themselves to conscious awareness after the fact, they can still lead us to practices, to studies, to efforts of the attention, that enhance and deepen our conscious experience and the subjective enjoyment of our lives. Consciousness is what brings us into existence as loci of subjective experience.

As Gurdjieff said:

Life is real only then: when ‘I am.’”

The problem is that no account of causality leaves room for free will—thoughts, moods, and desires of every sort simply spring into view—and move us, or fail to move us, for reasons that are, from a subjective point of view, perfectly inscrutable. Why did I use the term “inscrutable” in the previous sentence? I must confess that I do not know. Was I free to do otherwise? What could such a claim possibly mean? Why, after all, didn’t the word “opaque” come to mind? Well, it just didn’t—and now that it vies for a place on the page, I find that I am still partial to my original choice. Am I free with respect to this preference? Am I free to feel that “opaque” is the better word, when I just do not feel that it is the better word? Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.

There is a distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, of course, but it does nothing to support the common idea of free will (nor does it depend upon it). The former are associated with felt intentions (desires, goals, expectations, etc.) while the latter are not. All of the conventional distinctions we like to make between degrees of intent—from the bizarre neurological complaint of alien hand syndrome to the premeditated actions of a sniper—can be maintained: for they simply describe what else was arising in the mind at the time an action occurred. A voluntary action is accompanied by the felt intention to carry it out, while an involuntary action isn’t. Where our intentions themselves come from, however, and what determines their character in every instant, remains perfectly mysterious in subjective terms. Our sense of free will arises from a failure to appreciate this fact: we do not know what we will intend to do until the intention itself arises. To see this is to realize that you are not the author of your thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.

Good so far. Next, he acknowledges the concern this raises regarding moral responsibility:

The great worry is that any honest discussion of the underlying causes of human behavior seems to erode the notion of moral responsibility. If we view people as neuronal weather patterns, how can we coherently speak about morality? And if we remain committed to seeing people as people, some who can be reasoned with and some who cannot, it seems that we must find some notion of personal responsibility that fits the facts.

Happily, we can.

Really? It’s no easy trick, that.

Well, after reading the rest of Dr. Harris’s essay I have to say don’t think he pulls it off; the argument he puts forward leaves very little room indeed for anything most people would recognize as moral responsibility. As Daniel Dennett said somewhere in one of his books on the subject, “if you make yourself small enough, you can externalize everything” — and Dr. Harris seems to be making the domain of responsible human agency very small indeed. He gives specific examples in which responsibility is mitigated by 1) extreme youth, 2) youth + parental abuse, 3) passion + parental abuse, 4) psychopathy, and 5) brain disease; he also tosses in “bad genes, bad parents, bad ideas, and bad luck”. He does offer a sop at the end; a glimpse of what actual blameworthiness might look like:

If, after weeks of deliberation, library research, and debate with your friends, you still decide to kill the king—well, then killing the king really reflects the sort of person you are.

But given what he has just finished telling us about the inscrutable neural processes that underlie even our preferences, valuations, and volitional acts, it’s hard to see why he would see any of the above as conferring “real” responsibility (as opposed to ascribed responsibility, which is, I think, the best we can do, and is in fact quite good enough).

Now he may be quite right about this: there may be an awful lot less “could have done otherwise” in our actions than we’d like to think, and indeed I’d say it’s neither incoherent nor indefensible to assert that there is actually none at all. But the hard job is to make that compatible with a meaningful and satisfying concept of moral responsibility — and I can’t see that Dr. Harris has managed that here, or even given it much of a try.

Am I missing something? Perhaps I am. Read the whole thing here.

Here.

We read;

Andre Thomas raised 44 claims in his petition to the state’s highest criminal court, challenging his conviction and death sentence for the murder of his estranged wife’s 13-month-old daughter five years ago in Grayson County in North Texas.

His wife and their 4-year-old son were killed in the same attack. The victims were stabbed and their hearts were ripped out. Thomas, 26, of Texoma, walked into the Sherman Police Department, admitted to the killings and said God told him to commit them.

The nine-member Texas Court of Criminal Appeals unanimously upheld Thomas’ conviction and punishment.

Thomas “is clearly ’crazy,’ but he is also ’sane’ under Texas law,” Judge Cathy Cochran wrote in a 14-page statement accompanying the court’s brief order.

Shortly after being incarcerated in 2005 Thomas plucked out his right eye, and then this past December pulled out his other eye and ate it.

Clearly this man is not quite “sane” in the usual sense of the word, and should not be out in public. But the important question of diminished moral responsibility is not so simple, and this story reminds me that we left off this topic rather abruptly a few months ago, and pick up the thread again.

Read the story here.

Bill examines the idea that the meaning of life is subjective — that life has whatever meaning you give it. He finds it wanting:

The subjectivist theory is identitarian as opposed to eliminativist. The claim is not that there is no meaning, which would amount to nihilism, but that there is meaning but it is subjective by its very nature: objective meaning is incoherent. Thus E. D. Klemke speaks of being “free to forge my own meaning.” (The Meaning of Life, 1st ed., p. 172) Klemke tells us that he finds his meaning in “knowledge, art, love, and work.” (173) These are the things he values, but on his theory it is only his subjective acts of valuation that posit these things as valuable. Someone who valued ignorance, hatred, and sloth would not be evaluating incorrectly on Klemke’s subjectivist theory but just differently. I would say that Klemke values the right things, but he couldn’t agree with me, at least not without qualification. For by my lights, knowledge, art, love, and work are objectively valuable, valuable in themselves; this Klemke would have to deny. He would have to say something like: they are valuable, but only for me or those like me.

The subjectivist view of existential meaning strikes me as deeply incoherent. If the activities of my life have only the meaning that I give them, then this would have to hold also for the acts of meaning-bestowal whereby certain goals and activities become meaningful for me. Suppose knowledge is the central value from which depends the meaning of my life. On the subjectivist theory, the value and meaning of knowledge-acquisition derives from a subjective process of meaning-bestowal. This process, which is integral to my life, must be meaningful if my life is to be meaningful. But the process of meaning-bestowal cannot be intrinsically meaningful on the subjectivist theory: nothing is intrinsically meaningful on the subjectivist theory. So I must be the source of the meaning of my acts of meaning-bestowal if these acts are to have meaning. And this seems to lead to an infinite vicious regress.

[If you would like a further elaboration of this regress, please visit Bill's post, which is linked to above; there is also a good exchange in the comments thread between Bill and visiting philosopher Peter Lupu, who, as always, provides an effective counterbalance to Bill's theistic objectivism.]

I think that there is a fundamental error here, and it is a common and easily made one, namely an insistence on the discreteness of the property or attribute under consideration. This is often lurking in the shadows when infinite-regress arguments are made, and we should always be wary of them, because, playing on our categorical intuitions as they do, they can blind us to the real world’s gradualism and continuity.

I think nobody has articulated the solution to this problem — which also has major significance for our ongoing discussion of free will — more clearly than Daniel Dennett, so I will summarize here the argument he presents in Chapter 2 of his book Elbow Room. (You can read the relevant passages here as well, thanks to Google Book Search.)

First of all, it is helpful to understand how a regress argument can lead us into trouble. Dennett gives us a good example of a sorites: if every mammal has a mammal for a mother, then there can’t be any mammals, because we know that if we go far enough back in the tree of life, there weren’t any mammals at all.

Given that we know there are mammals in the world (and ruling out, of course, special Creation of a first mammal by miraculous intervention, as I assume I am writing for an educated and adult audience), we must assume that the argument is flawed, as indeed it is. What existed instead was a continuum of organisms, along which lineage various mammalian traits gradually appeared. We can look at a bison, or Dolly Parton, and say with no fear of contradiction that we have before us a mammal; likewise we can examine a fossilized lungfish and say with equal confidence that we don’t. But there is no obvious place to draw the boundary — and it is this sort of gradualistic process that brought intentionality (“aboutness”), and therefore meaning, into the world.

Dennett asks us [p. 21]:

How could reason ever find a foothold in a material, mechanical universe? In the beginning, there were no reasons: there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing had so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all. The explanation for this is simple: there was nothing that had interests. But after millennia there happened to emerge simple replicators, and while they had no inkling of their interests, and perhaps properly speaking had no interests, we, peering back from our godlike vantage point at their early days, can nonarbitrarily assign them certain interests — generated by their defining “interest” in self-replication.

Hold on — is Dennett pulling a fast one here? Isn’t he retroactively bestowing the gift of his own intentionality on these primitive self-copying machines? No, he is just adopting an “intentional stance” toward them, and only provisionally so:

That is, maybe it really made no difference, was a matter of no concern, didn’t matter to anyone or anything whether or not they succeeded in replicating (though it does seem that we can be grateful that they did), but at least we can assign them interests conditionally. If these simple replicators are to survive and replicate, thus persisting in the face of increasing entropy, their environment must meet certain conditions: conditions conducive to replication must be present or at least frequent.

Put more anthropomorphically, if these simple replicators want to continue to replicate, they should hope and strive for certain things; They should avoid the “bad” things and seek the “good” things. Still more dramatically, were we to imagine ourselves guardians of their interests, we could see quite clearly that there would be steps to be taken, assistance to be rendered, warnings to be issued.

Dennett here is trying to be very clear that nobody, at this point, cares about anything. We are still a long way from living beings with any sort of “purpose”:

This is not saying very much yet, for it is also true that if we imagine ourselves to take a fancy to some particularly beautiful rock formation spewed up millions of years ago by some volcanic eruption, we can readily imagine the steps we would have to take to preserve it — to protect it from erosion, from being buried in sediment, from being broken by subsequent volcanic eruption, and so on.

But now we begin to see something more coming into being — and this is the key idea: the beginning of the slow, gradualist ramp that leads to emergent intentionality. This is how meaning begins to enter the world:

What is the difference? In what way did the interests of replicators begin to take on a life of their own? Just this: the replicators began to turn into crude guardians of their own interests. Indeed their power of self-replication depended on it. Unlike the volcanic scuplture, they were not utterly helpless and dependent on the solicitude of others; they could fend for themselves, a bit. The day that the universe contained entities that could take some rudimentary steps toward defending their own “interests” was the day that interests were born. The very tendencies of these organisms to preserve this and that (their varieties of homeostasis) helped sharpen the definition of their interests. Only certain sorts of homeostasis tended to be self-preserving in the long run; those kinds were replicated and hence persisted, and hence gave further definition to the crude, primordial “interest” in self-preservation and self-replication. Thus if body-temperature maintenance played an important role in the self-preservation of members of a species, body-temperature-maintaining control systems that evolved would persist. And that species’ catalog of interests would come to include the maintenance of a certain (range of) body temperature.

This is still early days: we are talking about mindless replicating machines. But the process is underway; the footings and abutments of the “gradualist bridge” that takes us from inanimate matter to a world of complex interests and meanings are built, and we now have billions of years in which to perform further construction.

Dennett again [p. 23]:

When an entity arrives on the scene capable of behavior that staves off, however primitively, its own dissolution and decomposition, it brings with it into the world its “good”. That is to say it creates a point of view from which the world’s events can be roughly partitioned into the favorable, the unfavorable, and the neutral. And its own innate proclivities to seek the first, shun the second, and and ignore the third contribute essentially to the definition of the three classes. As the creature thus comes to have interests, the world and its events begin creating reasons for it — whether or not the creature can fully recognize them.

And so organisms begin to act, and their design of their bodies begins to change, in a way consistent with reasons, that are in turn definable in terms of their interests. When we look at such organisms, however, it would be wrong to assume that, although the animal behaves in the way one would expect if one made a reasoned evaluation of its options, that it necessarily has any idea why it does what it does. The rationale is there, but it has never been explicitly considered by the animal itself. That would be unnecessarily expensive: rather it is what Dennett calls a “free-floating” rationale that is simply built in.

Lower animals … are constitutionally oblivious to many of the reasons that concern them. They are like the stock character in spy fiction who plays out his role in a complex project without an inkling of the the real import of the events he is involved with…

Mother Nature abides by the “need to know” principle, but we appreciate a contrary principle: our ideal is to be completely savvy, to be able to notice all the reasons that concern us, to be in the dark about nothing of relevance to us, to be the completely and perfectly informed guardians of our own interests. That is what it would be to be able to choose one’s actions always as reason dictated.

We often say that “reason dictates” a certain course of action to an actor in a certain circumstance. We do not mean by this that there is some strange personified force, a Dictator called Reason who has issued an edict. Obviously we mean something abstract: we mean that a certain problem (abstractly considered — that is, whether or not any creature has explicitly expressed and addressed it) has a certain (optimal) solution. The problem is defined by the interests and circumstances of the actor in question. But the subliminal image of wise old Reason, telling us what to do, has had quite a strong effect on the way the issue has been conceived by philosophers.

We are obviously far more complex creatures than the simple replicators we have considered here. In particular we have acquired enormously complex brains that have evolved to the point that we can take advantage of a splendid new trick: we are able not only to act on our interests, but also to represent them, and to represent our representations of them. Our brains are able to form complex and manipulable models of the reasons and rationales that motivate our behavior, an ability that vastly increases our behavioral repertoire, and gives us enormous flexibility, adaptability, and yes, freedom.

It appears that, like the lower animals, whose “good” — representing Nature’s free-floating rationales — is simply wired in, we also come with some universal moral intuitions. But what is unique to us is our ability to bring our new and special talent — for imagining and evaluating our prospective behavior in light of our reasons and interests — to bear on those reasons and interests themselves. What is “good” is subject, in the human mind, to re-evaluation at any depth, it seems.

So are “meaning”, “purpose”, and “good”, ultimately subjective? I think that we are limited in this by our built-in emotional affinities and aversions; a truly radical re-evaluation may not be possible for us, as we must always have some bedrock valuation against which to measure any proposed revision. Perhaps not, though; maybe it is indeed possible to drill all the way down to nihilism, to conclude that ultimately nothing matters. But, as Dennett also reminds us [p. 156]:

Some suspect that if determinism is true, so is nihilism… I cannot say that it would be a great pity, a crying shame, an instance of “cosmic unfairness” if nihilism turned out to be true. For if nihilism were true, all value judgments would be illusory; the brute fact of anyone’s sorrow or pain wouldn’t mean a thing, and bemoaning our predicament would be as misguided as regretting that the square root of two isn’t one and a half. Nihilism might, I suppose, be true; it might even follow from determinism, as some suspect (though I have no reason to believe this). Nevertheless, we may assume that nihilism is false. How can I make that complacent (or cavalier) claim? Shouldn’t we even stop to consider carefully the prospect that it might be true? Well, if it were true that we ought to take the possibility of nihilism that seriously, then nihilism would be false, for if we ought to do anything then nihilism is false. But then we may as well assume it is false, because either it is false, or, if it isn’t, then nothing matters and we may do whatever we want. Nihilism is, quite literally, a negligible position.

But regardless of the possibility of a total re-evaluation of life’s subjective meaning, we have seen how the infinite-regress objection raised by Dr. Vallicella can be avoided without recourse to any sort of theistic or other supernaturalist foundation.

The choice is ours, then: if we wish to imagine that our intuitions about “good” and “meaning” are objective, we may simply assert that they are, and indeed they will continue to represent the “free-floating” rationales that installed them. But those rationales are themselves amenable to human understanding, and I think that if the human race is ever to rise above its brute and unasked-for nature it is up to us to examine ourselves, to understand our own origins and the source of our moral and ethical intuitions, and to consider them in the light of day. Socrates would approve.

Before we move on, let’s remind ourselves once again how difficult it is to come up with a coherent alternative. What people seem to be hoping for is some sort of loophole whereby we are Ultimately Responsible: we make our choices, but nothing makes us make our choices. We wish to be Prime Movers, Uncaused Causers, Domino One. This notion is known as “agent-causation”. But does it make any sense?

The problem with determinism, we are told, is that if the present state of our brains is what causes (in the usual way that all the other events in the world appear to be caused) the decision we are about to make a moment from now — and if our present state is in turn the result of previous causal influences of the customary material sort — then the decision, which is really just a link in a causal chain that recedes into the past, is not really ours at all. But what, then, do we want? My brain now is full of thoughts, beliefs, desires, opinions, valuations about the matter at hand; do I really wish that the important decision I am about to make should be disconnected from all of that? And if my decision isn’t going to be the result of summing over all of those complex and countervailing dispositions, then what is it going to be the result of? I certainly don’t want the choice I am about to make to have nothing to do with what I have in mind now, do I? At every moment in time, am I supposed to be radically disconnected from what I was in the previous moment? If so, then how is it even coherent to think of me as the same “me” that I was previously? And if prior deliberations, dispositions, etc., are taken out of the causal sequence, then what is left to do the deciding?

Is the problem limited to a deterministic world? Let’s say that at the moment of choice the causal chain is broken, and my choice, rather than being the result of electrochemical processes in my brain, is made in an indeterministic way: by a coin flip, perhaps — or if that is still too determined for you, then by a truly random event at the quantum level. We have gotten out of the dreaded causal trap, but at a price, because now it’s hard to see how such a choice can really be ours. After all, we didn’t cause the quantum coin-flip to come out the way it did; that’s simply not possible. So how are we responsible?

So we find ourselves in a cleft stick: we are looking for perfect, Ultimate Responsibilty, and nothing — neither determinism nor its opposite — seems to give it to us.

The problem, I think, is our fondness, when thinking about such abstractions, for absolutes. We haven’t even bothered to think about what might constitute an acceptable, useful, real-world concept of responsibility; it’s all or nothing. The unquestioned assumption always seems to be that either we must be godlike Ultimate Buck-Stoppers (whatever that means), or we are entirely worthless. Why?

Perhaps we can do better if we think a little bit more about what really matters, about what might indeed make any sort of meaningful difference in our lives. We might begin with a fundamental question: why do we even care about moral responsibility? We all think it’s awfully important, but have we any idea why? It won’t do just to announce that determinism threatens something infinitely precious; we have to understand just what it is we think is so precious, and why. I think this is where we have to turn our attention next.

Today also my muse appears to be silent, as happens from time to time — so, looking ahead to resuming our musings on free will, I will simply offer a couple of provocative thoughts about causation and possibility, lifted from Daniel Dennett’s book Freedom Evolves. I’ll just plunk them on the page, for now; they will provide useful material for subsequent conversations, I think.

The first has to do with necessity and sufficiency. Consider the following [p. 74]:

Everybody in the French Foreign Legion outpost hates Fred and wants him dead. During the night before Fred’s trek across the desert; Tom poisons the water in his canteen. Then Dick, not knowing of Tom’s intervention, pours out the (poisoned) water and replaces it with sand. Finally, Harry comes along and pokes holes in the canteen, so that the “water” will slowly run out.

Later, Fred awakens and sets out on his trek, provisioned with his canteen. Too late, he finds that his canteen is nearly empty, but besides, what remains is sand, not water, not even poisoned water. Fred dies of thirst. Who caused his death?

Next we look at an example from John Austin (Dennett [p. 75] quotes Austin’s 1961 paper Ifs and Cans) that bears on our sense that free will depends on it being the case that we “could have done otherwise”:

Consider the case where I miss a very short putt and kick myself because I could have holed it. It is not that I should have holed it if had tried; I did try, and I missed. It is not that I should have holed it if conditions had been different; that might of course be so, but I am talking about conditions as they precisely were, and asserting that I could have holed it. There is the rub. Nor does “I can hole it this time” mean that I shall hole it this time if I try or if anything else; for I may try and miss, and yet not be convinced that I could not have done it; indeed further experiments may confirm my belief that I could have done it that time, although I did not.

What does it mean to say that something “can” happen? This is not a simple question.

One might point out that living in a deterministic world means that, for any state of the world at time t, only one state is possible at time t + 1. This, in turn, means that any deliberation on our part — the point of which is to select between available futures — is an illusion, because only one future was ever possible. Deliberation and determinism are simply incompatible.

But how can that be so? After all, we plainly do deliberate, all the time. So this is obviously reading too much into the pernicious effect of determinism.

Refining the objection somewhat: OK, fine, we “deliberate”, but it is not effective deliberation; it makes no difference to the outcome. Dennett gives an example of some truly ineffective deliberation:

The prisoner who spends his days and nights concocting vengeful schemes but dies in his chains has engaged in deliberations whose only effects are, let us say, to deepen the furrows in his brow and exacerbate his high blood pressure.

But then he offers a contrasting instance:

His cellmate engages in similar deliberations, and acting on them, escapes his cell and puts all his plans into tumultuous effect. If this is what “making a difference” comes to, then some of the deliberation in a deterministic world will make a big difference and some of it will not. There will be cases of premeditated murder, for instance, of which one can truly say: had the premeditation not occurred, the victim would still be alive.

So the effect of deliberation is not nullified by determinism; after all, we have no reason to doubt that if that if we decide to do X we will do X, and if we decide to do Y we will do Y.

So already we have moved some distance from the original, naive concept that in a deterministic world all deliberation is pointless; indeed, it is hard to imagine how we would react to such a revelation even if it were true. How could we not deliberate? (Dennett quotes Peter van Inwagen as suggesting that we would “either move about in random jerks or scuttles, or would withdraw into catatonia.”)

So, a further refinement: well, OK, our deliberation is indeed effective, in that it plays a necessary role in determining the future. But our deliberation is itself determined, no? That’s not real deliberation.

But is this so? As Dennett asks:

…isn’t a determined thunderstorm a real thunderstorm? Isn’t a determined traffic accident a real traffic accident? It begs the question to declare, without support, that determined deliberation is not real deliberation. But — comes the reply — in real deliberation there is a genuine opportunity for the agent, with both branches “open to the agent”. The agent’s deliberation closes off one of these as it selects the other. If the outcome of the deliberation were itself determined, then it would have been determined “all along” — so there wouldn’t have been a real opportunity in the first place, just an apparent opportunity.

This is a more substantial objection, and one to which we must return. For now, though, I hope we can agree that it is clear that our deliberation is no illusion, and that our acting as the deliberators we so obviously are plays an essential causal role in what actually happens. But before we can understand whether it actually matters in any meaningful or perceptible way if our deliberation is deterministic or not — in other words, whether we have any good reason to care one way or the other — there is more work to do.

To be clear about the difference: reasons are understood by us to be normative and logical abstracta. If I am heading for work, and the sky is grey and heavy, I’ll take my umbrella, for the reason that I am likely to get wet if I don’t. Causes, on the other hand, are exactly what we are referring to when we talk about determinism: my brain sends a signal down my arm that causes my hand to grasp my umbrella.

Part of the confusion that arises in this subject has to do with an ambiguity about what moves us from one step to the next: we don’t mind, it seems, being forced to choose a particular option as long as the choice is the only “reasonable” one to make. I’ve just severed an artery in my hand. Should I apply direct pressure and call 911, or go take a dip in the bay? The choice to seek help is “forced” upon any sane person, but that sort of “determinism” is OK, apparently.

What does seem repellent to many is the idea that we act not in response to to reasons, but “merely” to a cause-and-effect chain taking place in our heads. C.S. Lewis, in his book Miracles, seized upon this, and called it “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism”. If our choices are not driven by reason (what Lewis called a process of “ground and consequent”), but rather by “mere” cause and effect, then what grounds do we have for trusting them? How can we have confidence in the processes of our own reasoning?

This seems like a good case on the face of it, but it isn’t, really (we took a closer look at it back in April of 2006). The principle weakness in the argument is its absolutism; what Lewis overlooks is that we don’t need to be Godlike, perfect deliberators to get by, nor do we need to have confidence in the perfection of our reasoning abilities in order to rely on them on a day-to-day basis. We know from psychological observation that our cognition is susceptible to all sorts of illusions and intuitive error; once we know the way it’s all wired up to work, it’s easily fooled. But it has evolved, over a very long time, to give good, practical results and a whole lot more; that it isn’t perfect should come as no surprise.

So, yes, our mentation, fine-tuned as it has been over the eons to effectively track and model the “reasons” that affect our well-being, can proceed according to neurological cause and effect with results that aren’t perfect, but are usually “pretty good” – good enough to get us this far, at least.

Everybody wants free will, of course, but the notion itself is one of those things that look clear enough from a distance, but get harder to make out the closer you look. What is a “free” choice, anyway? Apparently the key notion is that not have been caused. Is this really what we want? Let’s say I am presented with a choice to make: say, whether to put my paycheck in the bank or buy some crack.

How am I to proceed? I could simply flip a coin, or if that’s still too deterministic, I could rig up a truly random device that would, say, count how many ticks a piece of radium makes in a Geiger counter in the space of a minute, with an odd number being heads, and an even number tails.

This is hardly what we want, though; a random choice takes none of our own interests into account. Sure, a crack binge might be fun, but we have all sorts of things to consider: our financial responsibilities, the danger of being caught, the risks to health and reputation, and so forth. We must take all of this into account as we decide.

Fortunately, that’s not a problem. We have all sorts of knowledge, opinions, affections, aversions, beliefs, memories, and dispositions at our disposal to bring to bear on the problem. We want all of these to be weighed carefully in the balance, and indeed they will be.

But once we’ve consulted all of these resources, and sought the counsel, as it were, of our Cabinet, there still comes the moment of choice, that place where the decision has to happen. In our interval of deliberation, we have managed to put ourselves into well-informed state regarding the pros and cons of the options before us, and about which of those options might be most congruent with our personality and our goals; it would not be unreasonable, then, to hope that our decision would be the result of this careful deliberative work.

According to prevailing sentiment, however, it seems this might not be enough. We require, it appears, that even after all this effort our decision must still, somehow, be independent of the effort we’ve made: despite all that preparatory work, the choice must not be the causal result of any cognitive state that we’ve got ourselves into.

But if the choice is not random, and is not caused by our state immediately prior to the decision, then it seems only fair to ask: where does it come from? What can tip the balance one way or the other? What makes the final call? If the choice can still go either way regardless of our state in the previous instant — in other words, we insist that it is causally isolated from our deliberations — then in what sense can we even regard it as ours?

Rather than asking ourselves what it even means to say that we have “free will” — in other words, rather than asking what, exactly, we think is taking place when we make a “free” decision, and how it might possibly be so — we simply announce that regardless of what it is, exactly, we must have it, because it would be awful if we didn’t. We then use this little pep talk as the basis for an elaborate structure of metaphysical, ethical, and even theological reasoning, all of which is, of course, no sturdier than than the fogbank upon which it is built.

All of this stems from our apparent dread of the possibility that the ordinary causal processes that, as far as we can tell, order and impel the behavior of everything else in the entire Universe might apply to us as well. In order to support the edifice described just above, we are willing to imagine that out of all the vastness of the Cosmos, and everything contained therein, a special exemption from the regularities of Nature has been made in the case of a small but complex blob of goo housed in the cranium of a modest and recently-arrived bipedal ape. Put as charitably as possible, this seems a bit of a stretch.

So why not go with the simplifying assumption that our brains, and the minds they support, do in fact proceed according to deterministic principles, like everything else? Indeed we do seem to realize that this is the most likely assumption — but rather than accepting it, we hastily declare it off limits, put up the yellow police tape, and announce instead that we stand in the humbling presence of a Mystery. It is as if, to paraphrase Dennett’s discussion of this point in Elbow Room [pp 14-15], that we fear that science threatens to reveal a Dread Secret: one that, once learned, will reduce us to helpless, paralyzed lumps. Note that it is not the fact of determinism that appears to make the difference; determinism, if true, has always been true, and we’ve done just fine so far. No, it seems, instead, that what we must prevent at all costs is our believing it to be true. But are we really justified, having been told all along that “the truth will set us free”, in believing that it will do exactly the opposite?

I think not. But we have a lot more careful scouting to do, I think, before we can see why this should be so. In particular, we will have to look very carefully at what it is we think we have, what it is we want, and why.

To repeat the question that concluded the previous post: when we insist that “we” must have free will, what do we mean by “we”, anyway? Plainly we make an awful lot of volitional choices that occur quite automatically; in fact we make thousands of little decisions all day long without, quite literally, giving them any thought at all. We carry with us all sorts of unconscious desires, likes, dislikes, affinities, aversions, resentments, and so forth, all of which affect our choices without our awareness or conscious consent. In fact, it is probably safe to say that the vast majority of all our volitional acts occur in this way. Are such acts “free”? And here’s an odder, but also, I think, very important question: in what sense are they ours?

It is tempting to say that only those decisions that we make consciously are “free”, but as we have seen above, even those are only conscious, it appears, in retrospect. We can consciously endorse them, perhaps, or report on them, but it looks as if consciousness is not part of making them. So where are “we” in all of this?

One of the folks who, I think, has the right attitude about all of this is the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has written two excellent books on the subject. The first, published in 1984, was Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, and the second, from 2004, is Freedom Evolves. Elbow Room is the denser and more academic of the two, but they are both well worth reading. Because so much of Dennett’s take on this ancient problem feel right to me, and because he does such a splendid job of burning off the dense and persistent fog that surrounds the issue, I will draw upon him heavily.

There are many places these ruminations must go. For tonight, let’s begin with this one: what do we mean when we speak of free will? Those who have the luxury of brooding about the problem at all — and they are a distinct minority, I think, because most people in the world are far too busy simply doing the things they must do to get by — seem generally to agree that it is of vital importance, but what is it? It can only be “threatened” by determinism in the first place if it is something we have hitherto imagined ourselves to possess. What, then, is this treasure we must guard so jealously?

It seems to involve the idea that our decisions come from us, that we are, so to speak, “Domino Number One”. But how can this be? And what do we mean, here, by “we”, anyway? Are we referring to our conscious minds?

In order for us to be Domino One, there must be no prior domino we are relying on to tip us over. We are faced with a choice between two alternatives, and must decide. If we have real, buck-stopping original agency, our decision must be wholly uncaused. An inner randomness won’t do; that our decision is merely a coin toss is hardly what we mean by “will”. We might want, then, our decision to be the result of deliberation: our consideration of the choice before us in light of our aims, our experience, and so forth. But that will be the case regardless of whether determinism is true or false; we use software all the time that makes decisions based on its inputs. So what is it, exactly, that is supposed to pull the lever? We tell ourselves that it is simply up to us: that we do deliberate, yes, but when push comes to shove we simply choose. And it is we who decide which to choose.

But do we ever see ourselves doing that? Do we have any actual experience of what is alleged to be the critical step in that process, the essential moment of genuine, uncaused, creative agency? No. Our decision simply appears, bubbling up from some place beneath our awareness. We tell ourselves, constantly, that we have decided this and that, as if reporting on the the conscious act itself, but in fact by the time our decisions become conscious they are already made. We may veto them, but that decision also arrives from beneath, in the same way.

So what is this “we” to which our free will is ascribed? It appears then, that our consciousness is not the origin of our will, but learns of it after the fact. Just what is happening here?