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Not My Final Thoughts on Free Will

8/2/2021

4 Comments

 
In case you haven’t been following Sam Harris closely, that title for this post is a subtle dig at Sam’s “Final Thoughts on Free Will” podcast back in March. Evolutionary thinkers can never (as far as we know) claim to have reached a final truth, so they ought not to say they’ve ever reached a final position on any topic. However, we do come to conclusions for now, and it is time now for me to wrap up my posts on free will. As a quick reminder, that series has included:

  • My Review of Just Deserts by Daniel Dennett and Gregg Caruso
  • A Few Further Thoughts on Just Deserts
  • Another Free Will Debate — Kaufman v. Harris (Part 1/2)
  • Another Free Will Debate — Kaufman v. Harris (Part 2/2)
  • Some Thoughts on Sam Harris' Final Thoughts on Free Will
  • Summary of Freedom Evolves

If you read the 17,500 words in all those posts, you’ll have seen that there is already a large zone of agreement on this issue between hard incompatibilists like Caruso and Harris and compatibilists like Dennett, Kaufman, and myself. From my review of Just Deserts:

  • Both are naturalists (JD p.171) who see no supernatural interference in the workings of the world. That leaves both [sides] accepting general determinism in the universe (JD p.33), which simply means all events and behaviors have prior causes. Therefore, the libertarian version of free will is out. Any hope that humans can generate an uncaused action is deemed a “non-starter” by Gregg (JD p.41) and “panicky metaphysics” by Dan (JD p.53). Nonetheless, both agree that “determinism does not prevent you from making choices” (JD p.36), and some of those choices are hotly debated because of “the importance of morality” (JD p.104). Laws are written to define which choices are criminal offenses. But both acknowledge that “criminal behavior is often the result of social determinants” (JD p.110) and “among human beings, many are extremely unlucky in their initial circumstances, to say nothing of the plights that befall them later in life” (JD p.111). Therefore “our current system of punishment is obscenely cruel and unjust” (JD p.113), and both [sides] share “concern for social justice and attention to the well-being of criminals” (JD p.131).
 
My previous six posts also led to this conclusion in my summary of Freedom Evolves:


  • I basically found that I agreed with Dan that free will is not the magic libertarian thing that many ordinary folks believe in. But neither is it the fatalistic determinism that these folks see as the only other choice. Instead, there is something in between these extremes where more and more degrees of freedom have evolved into something that explains the phenomenology of what we experience, which Dan calls "the kind of free will worth wanting." [And] I think I have a few things to add to Dan's position on this, some details which make it clearer.
 
Another way to see the need for this compatibilist conclusion would be to look at a word cloud for all of the issues that get discussed during free will debates. I don’t have the time or resources to put lots of relevant texts into a computer program that would generate such a cloud showing the frequency with which each idea is used, but I did at least gather a list of many of the relevant concepts while I was going through the books and papers and interviews I’ve covered in this series. Please don’t read this entire list, but a quick scan is helpful:

Picture

​Anyone trying to carve a neat and tidy definition of free will out of that mess—either to reject free will or to accept it—will forever be faced with a bunch of “whataboutism” from people holding other positions. There are just too many concepts bound up here. Any simple affirmation or denial of the phrase “free will” is going to feel too blunt to cover it all. To me, following the standard playbook of analytical philosophy and “defining one’s terms” just is not going to get us very far. Consider the following quotes from the world of biology where free will is clearly located. (My emphases added in bold.)

  • “In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.” (Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species)
  • “Neither Mayr nor Tinbergen provide a detailed account of how to integrate different areas of biological inquiry, but both provide enough discussion to make it clear that they have in mind a general practice that philosophers of science have characterized in some detail under the label ‘functional analysis’. The canonical account of this practice among philosophers of science is Robert Cummins’ (1975, 1983) account, according to which functional analysis consists in breaking down some capacity or disposition of interest into simpler dispositions or capacities, organized in a particular way.” (Conley)
  • “Reduction, unlike analysis, ignores a system’s organization (1982), which Mayr characterizes as the interaction between components (Mayr 2004). Organization explains the emergence of new characteristics that could not be predicted from knowledge of the isolated components of a system, but analysis provides a middle ground between reductionism and holism (Mayr 1982). Mayr claims that ‘all problems of biology, particularly those relating to emergence, are ultimately problems of hierarchical organization’ (Mayr, 1982, p. 64).” (Conley)
 
So, for free will, we need a deep “functional analysis” where elements of that emerging property are listed out for separate consideration. In this way, nuances can be captured and lassoed into an evolving understanding of all the issues. Now, where have we seen a hierarchical organization of a complicated emergent biological process before?? Hmmm. This quote from one of Dan Dennett’s papers should help you remember:


  • “It is no mere coincidence that the philosophical problems of consciousness and free will are, together, the most intensely debated and (to some thinkers) ineluctably mysterious phenomena of all. As the author of five books on consciousness, two books on free will, and dozens of articles on both, I can attest to the generalization that you cannot explain consciousness without tackling free will, and vice versa.”
 
In my nearly finished series on consciousness (summarized here), I explained how a Tinbergen analysis is the proper way to explore and explain that complex emergent phenomenon. And since free will and consciousness are so tied together, a Tinbergen analysis is useful here too. This is the extra detail I would add to the free will debate beyond Dan Dennett’s generally excellent contributions that I have discussed so far. I hinted at this in my review of Just Deserts with the following passages:


  • [M]ost philosophers [rely] on classical logic, which says A is A, not-A is not-A, and the law of the excluded middle says there is nothing else possible in between. Such rigid definitions work well in the precise worlds of mathematics and Newtonian physics, but not in the fuzzy world of biology. In that realm, the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen gave us his Four Questions which are now the generally accepted framework of analysis for all biological phenomena. To understand anything there, Tinbergen says you have to understand its function, mechanism, personal history (ontogeny), and evolutionary history (phylogeny). As a very simple example, philosophers could tie themselves in knots trying to define ‘a frog’ such that this or that characteristic is A or not-A, but it’s just so much clearer and more informative to include the stories of tadpole development and the slow historical diversion from salamanders. So, is free will more like a geometry proof or a frog?
  • Tinbergen’s perspective gives us a few additional tricks. It isn’t luck that I grew up to be a person rather than a horse. Once I was conceived, the evolutionary history (phylogeny) that led up to me put a lot of constraints on my personal development (ontogeny). Luck may explain all the differences between me and every other person out there, but we needn’t worry about luck when describing all the things we have in common. There are hordes of characteristics that all humans share, but the one that is most important for this debate is our capacity to learn. The extreme neuroplasticity we have (a mechanism of free will) is what enables all but the most unfortunate humans to sense and respond to their environments (a function for free will) to the point where they slowly, slowly become a unique self.
 
For details on how I developed answers to Tinbergen’s four questions for consciousness, you need to see posts 18 (Tinbergen), 19 (Functions), 20 (Mechanisms), 21 (Ontogeny), and 22 (Phylogeny). Luckily, there’s no need to go into so much depth for free will now. Since the groundwork has been laid for consciousness, a quick sketch will suffice to show how free will folds very neatly into this view and then expands perfectly logically during the developments of consciousness. Essentially, it is clear that degrees of freedom only open up for living organisms, and they expand along as more and more levels of consciousness are developed. I don’t expect that to sound controversial, but the details are hopefully helpful to the discussion.


Picture

​I think it’s easiest to grasp this table by focusing on the Functions column. Going from top to bottom, there is (1) no free will before the emergence of life. Once (2) life is established, the phenomenon of affect provides innate valences for making in the moment reflex choices between good or bad options for life. As (3) complex multicellularity develops mechanisms to learn and act on (unconscious at first) intentions, then life gains the freedom for choosing different actions in the present based on things it has learned in the past. Continuing on, the (4) development of brains enables modelling predictions of the world, which gives life freedom to choose between alternate futures. As all of these abilities lead to (5) the dawning of self-awareness, living organisms can begin to develop autobiographical narratives that inform choices over longer and longer time horizons depending on the quantity and quality of memories and predictions that have been developed. Finally, in the (6) realm of human language, we Homo sapiens have gained the freedom to be influenced by an infinite array of abstract representations. At this level, we can now see strategic planning of actions for decades of a life, which clearly drives the feelings of free will that exist in folk psychology.
 
This brief rundown does not begin to address all of the items in the word cloud shown above for the free will debate. But I’ve already touched on most or all of those in my other posts, so hopefully this final summary just provides a “hierarchical organisation of capacities” (a la Mayr via Conley above), which helps us see the slow step-by-step emergence of degrees of freedom that starts from absolutely nothing but eventually grows to the enormous range that philosophers have contemplated for millennia. Slapping a line on this chart and declaring “here lies free will” or “you must be taller than this degree of freedom in order to be free” would seem to be a very silly exercise. Yet that appears to be what people do when they declare “free will” to absolutely exist or not. Taking all of the facts together, however, by using a “functional analysis” that is typical of the philosophy of science, there is hopefully now a bit more grandeur in the evolutionary view of the emergence of free will. If this brief summary prompts any questions about specific items in my word cloud above, please ask them in the comment section below. Otherwise, I’ll consider myself free to pursue some other topics for now.
4 Comments
Zafir Ivanov
7/27/2024 02:11:00 am

Let me preface this by saying that these are speculative thoughts and I’m far from certain.
It's clear that you have thought about and researched this much more than I have.
Have you considered a probabilistic perspective as an alternative to a deterministic one?
In this framework, our choices aren’t strictly determined, yet we’re not entirely free either. Our actions result from a multitude of factors that shape our priors and the specfic stituation that we find ourselves in. Some of these factors remain obscure, rendering our actions partially unpredictable, even to ourselves.

I propose that this unpredictability is why consciousness evolved. There’s an adaptive advantage in being unpredictable, yet not in being entirely random. I suspect that what we perceive as ‘free will’ might be a misinterpretation. Our inability to predict why we take certain actions could lead us to mistakenly attribute these actions to freedom.

Reply
Ed Gibney link
7/28/2024 02:19:02 pm

I can't say I've heard the term "probabilistic perspective" before, but I think that instead of addressing the free will questions directly, this is more just a realistic way of having to treat the situation that we are in. Which is still super important!

I think you are saying our actions may be determined, but they are not predictable. But I think free will libertarians, compatibilists, and determinists would all admit that this is correct. So, it may not settle this philosophical argument. But, to me, it does take a lot of the force out of determinists' arguments. Even if determinism were true, if we can't determine how things are determined (i.e. know how they are caused), then how could we ever prove that determinism is right? Or useful? At the moment, determinism just seems to be a logical case for a plea to remove all praise and blame from the universe. But I think this is so dangerous that its unprovable arguments should not be relied upon for action. Nor do I think that we need to if we just want to bring compassion to our punishments and patience to our rehabilitations. Both compatibilists and determinists can reject retribution as being uselessly backward-looking rather than helpfully forward-looking.

For a bit more on why I think determinists haven't quite made the case they think they have, see this passage I just wrote in an Amazon review about an annoying novel I just finished:

----------
As is typical of hard determinists, the author believes his irrefutable logic just cannot be beaten. But he has no awareness that he is falling prey to the Sorites paradox. That is, (1 grain of sand does not equal a heap) + (adding 1 grain of sand does not make a heap) = (2 grains of sand do not make a heap) ..... repeat, repeat, repeat, ..... (1,000,000,000 grains of sand do not make a heap). The end result is nonsense even though every step along the way seems logically correct. This is the same form of argument as saying (rocks have no free will), .... repeat, repeat, repeat, .... (humans have no free will). We're not all rocks all the way down.

For context, I am friends with Gregg Caruso who is one of the leading exponents of free will skepticism and the quarantine model of criminal justice. He invited me to review the book he wrote with Dan Dennett about free will (Just Desserts — a much better use of your time). And despite me being very sympathetic to Gregg's scholarship and compassion, I sided with Dennett and his compatibilism in my review. There is no magic, libertarian free will. We moderns can all agree on that. But there are now infinite degrees of freedom located in human individuals, which grow and develop over a lifetime. Just because the boundary between us and our environment is permeable and we are influenced by all that has come before us doesn't mean that we don't eventually grow to make choices that have consequences and deserve to be praised or punished in order to learn. Even if determinism were true, we would never be able to determine the events of the future (not even Laplace's demon can do this; look it up), so what is the point really? Why upend all of our notions of self, society, and justice over some blunt logic applied to a continuously evolving world?
----------

As I said on X, I also agree with what you said about the feeling of free will arising because our actions are "partially unpredictable even to ourselves." There is a sense of freedom, of groping around in the dark, that arises from the ignorance of living subjects trying to further the project of life. Determinsts like to talk about the laws of physics being inviolable in the universe, but living beings are no longer subject to just the rules of physics. There are laws of chemistry and then biology to consider too. The laws of chemistry have been well described. But I don't think anyone has put together the "laws of biology" in this way yet. Darwin gets us most of the way there, but I offer a bit more about that in this essay:

https://www.evphil.com/blog/consciousness-17-from-physics-to-chemistry-to-biology

As for the need for unpredictability, I would say that's a part of why a part of consciousness arose. But I start with a much broader definition of consciousness that basically describes it as the ability to sense and respond to the environment in order to act towards survival. In my hierarchy explaining how this ability has expanded through all of evolutionary history, I have prediction (and hence unpredictability) as a tier that arose during the Cambrian explosion when predator--prey interactions took off. That's a really important part of the story, but I wouldn't go quite as far as you did in saying "this unpredictability is why consciousness evolved." It helps. No doubt. But it's just a piece of a larger puzzle to me. That's another giant conversation and reading assignment for you though. : )

Reply
Zafir Ivanov
7/30/2024 11:46:36 am

Looks like I’m way out of my depth and outside my areas where I can speak with any kind of confidence. Just a few comments on my reasoning rather than an appropriate response to your reply at this stage.
It seems to me that the universe is more probabilistic than deterministic.

The concept of Laplace’s Demon, almost certainly could not exist even in principle due to the impossibility of knowing the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe.

• Electrons are currently best understood as existing in a cloud of probability
• An observer inevitably interacts with what they are observing, thereby affecting the outcome
• The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, states that there are limits to precision.
• Chaos theory

Even if the universe is deterministic in nature, it appears so unpredictable to us, limited observers, that it is Indistinguishable from probabilistic.
I suspect that this probabilistic framing could provide a possible explanation for the emergence of consciousness and the perception of free will (or the illusion thereof).

Reply
Ed Gibney link
7/30/2024 12:09:09 pm

Ah, as usual, you are doing better than you claim. (While philosophizing, that's the better side of our Bayesian Balance in my opinion.) I would just add to your arguments that there is a difference between the ontology of the universe and our epistemology of it. I would say our epistemology is probabilistic, and the ontology appears for now to be deterministic. Since there also appears to be real limits to just how far we can take our epistemology, we may never know the real ontology. That may just be more philosophy-speak for what you are saying. Good stuff!

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