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Overview of Knowledge and Its Limits by Timothy Williamson

12/24/2021

Consider this your lump of coal for Christmas for anything naughty you've done this year.

In my last post, I kicked off a short series on epistemology books with an overview of Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch. I found that one really useful, and I have two other excellent books that I'm itching to explore in this series, but first I feel the need to cover one that I really disliked since I think it's still illustrative of the problems that exist with this topic of knowledge. That book is Knowledge and Its Limits by Timothy Williamson. Williamson is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University and he cracked the top 10 in two lists of the most cited philosophers in history, as discussed in a recent blog post by Eric Schwitzgebel. Keen followers might remember that I got to meet Tim in 2018 at a local event when I was asked by The Philosopher to write and present a short review of Doing Philosophy by Williamson. Tim was a most impressive thinker and a very gracious man to interact with four amateur philosophers and our impressions of his work. He obviously has done an enormous amount of good in the field of philosophy so I was excited to dive into his 2002 book on epistemology which sounded by the title like it might agree with my position that we cannot claim to have justified, true, beliefs (the traditional definition of knowledge). As it turned out, however, I think there's a reason Tim is a professor of logic and not one of epistemology.

As before, I'm not going to provide a formal review of this book. I'll just share some selected excerpts that I jotted down and insert a few of my own thoughts and interpretations where necessary. All page numbers are from the 2009 paperback edition from Oxford University Press.

Knowledge and its Limits by Timothy Williamson

(p.v) If I had to summarize this book in two words, they would be: knowledge first. It takes the simple distinction between knowledge and ignorance as a starting point from which to explain other things, not as something itself to be explained. In that sense the book reverses the direction of explanation predominant in the history of epistemology.

These are the very first sentences in the book, coming in its new Preface, and they explain why one of the blurbs on the back cover said "Williamson is to be commended for turning the theory of knowledge upside down." I didn't immediately grasp what Williamson meant by this, so I kept going through all 300+ pages of the book, but I might just as well have stopped right here. What Williamson is saying is that anything you know...you know! That's it. There's no need to fight over what counts or doesn't count as knowledge. This doesn't actually turn epistemology upside down; it throws it out the window! Williamson takes what is traditionally a normative study of the how's and why's of what we accept as knowledge and he settles for mere bald descriptions and assertions. By the end of the book, it became apparent to me that this is exactly what one might expect from an analytic professor of logic who wants crisp neat lines and unassailable starting points which he can use to build crystal palaces of thought by applying his rigorous formulas. Spoiler alert, that's not the way a gradually transitioning evolutionary world works.

(p.4) It will be assumed, not quite uncontroversially, that the upshot of that debate [among epistemologists] is that no currently available analysis of knowledge in terms of belief is adequate.
(p.6) Sceptics and their fellow-travellers characteristically suppose that the truth-values of one’s beliefs can vary independently of those beliefs and of all one’s other mental states: one’s total mental state is exactly the same in a sufficiently radical sceptical scenario as it is in a common-sense scenario, yet most of one’s beliefs about the external world are true in the common-sense scenario and false in the sceptical scenario.
(p.19) The point about the conjunctive proposition that p is true and unknown is that, in virtue of its structure, it is not available to be known in any case whatsoever. The argument for this conclusion was first published by Fitch in 1963. Contrapositively, he showed that all truths are knowable only if all truths are known. This is sometimes known as the Paradox of Knowability.

Williamson starts by acknowledging the skeptical problem of knowledge. (If you can see it through the jargon.) Philosophers haven't been able to prove that any beliefs rise to the level of true knowledge. Skeptical scenarios can always be imagined which would make our current beliefs false. Therefore, the only way to know if anything is true is to know everything that is possible to know. And it sure seems like that is impossible in a growing and changing universe where we are limited to our subjective viewpoints of the here and now with no way of ever knowing what we don't know.

Sounds pretty irrefutable, right? So what does Williamson offer to combat this?

(p.21) Knowing is a state of mind. That claim is central to the account of knowledge developed in this book. … A state of a mind is a mental state of a subject. Paradigmatic mental states include love, hate, pleasure, and pain. Moreover, they include attitudes to propositions: believing that something is so, conceiving that it is so, hoping or fearing that it is so, wondering whether it is so, intending or desiring it to be so. One can also know that something is so. This book concerns such propositional knowledge.
(p.27) Nothing said here should convince someone who has given up ordinary beliefs that they did in fact constitute knowledge, for nothing said here should convince her that they are true. The trick is never to give them up. This is the usual case with philosophical treatments of scepticism: they are better at prevention than at cure. If a refutation of scepticism is supposed to reason one out of the hole, then scepticism is irrefutable. The most to be hoped for is something which will prevent the sceptic (who may be oneself) from reasoning one into the hole in the first place.

The trick?!? So we're just supposed to ignore the centuries of arguments about philosophical doubt? Williamson wants us to confine ourselves to "propositional knowledge." But this is the kind of knowledge that simply takes for granted the propositions that are used to construct a logical argument. For example, take the two propositions A) "Socrates is a man" and B) "all men are mortal." Accept these, and you know for certain that C) "Socrates is mortal." Sure, that's one way to arrive at certainty. But only in "logic space" as opposed to reality. Logic space tells us nothing about how to evaluate the truth of the propositions. And without that, then any old proposition will do. If we were to accept the norm of taking propositions for granted, then we would slide immediately into a vicious relativism where anything can be claimed as true. I'm sure Williamson doesn't want that, but as soon as he gets off his perch and gets into debates about which propositions are to be disallowed, then he's going to need traditional epistemology. Only that can tell you why a proposition such as "all men are not mortal" should be treated as false.

(p.34) The main idea is simple. A propositional attitude is factive if and only if, necessarily, one has it only to truths. Examples include the attitudes of seeing, knowing, and remembering. Not all factive attitudes constitute states; forgetting is a process. Call those attitudes which do constitute states stative. The proposal is that knowing is the most general factive stative attitude, that which one has to a proposition if one has any factive stative attitude to it at all.

This proposal from Williamson isn't simple at all! Cutting through the dense obfuscation, he has simply smuggled in the claim to know "truths" while ignoring the entire debate about how we know which truths are true. (Spoiler alert, we can't say for certain.)

(p.101) Since it is logically possible for the deer to be behind the rock at one moment and not another, their present-tensed belief may be true at one moment and false at another. By standard criteria of individuation, a proposition cannot change its truth-value; the sentence ‘The deer is behind the rock’ expresses different propositions at different times.

I just want to flag up this point that "a proposition cannot change its truth-value." That's an important part of the definition for truth that must be considered, and it's also a point that I may raise in an article about evolutionary logic some day. For now, just notice the problem of this "standard criteria" in philosophy.

(p.138) Thus, the reasoning by which they rule out a last-day examination is unsound, for it assumes that knowledge will be retained in trying to refute a supposition on which it would not be retained.

This is a diversion from the epistemological problem of knowledge that I'm concerned with, but it is an example of the narrowness of Williamson's logic-driven approach so I wanted to mention it. I've cut this passage short, but essentially Williamson tries to solve the surprise test paradox by saying, "A ha! Your argument rests on knowing that a test is coming, but since you might possibly forget that knowledge, then your argument isn't fully airtight. Thus, (*pushes up glasses*), I can ignore the paradox." This is utterly pedantic and misses the entire point of the argument. But when logic is your only hammer tool, every problem gets nailed with it. For a more direct treatment, see my own response to this thought experiment.

(p.180) Uncertainty about evidence does not generate an infinite regress of evidence about evidence about . . .. In order to reflect adequately on one’s evidence, one might need evidence about one’s evidence, and in order to reflect adequately about the latter evidence, one might need evidence about it, and so on. But this regress is merely and harmlessly potential. We cannot in fact realize infinitely many levels of adequate reflection; at best, further reflection enables us to realize finitely many further stages. At some stage, one must rely on unreflective causal sensitivity to evidence.

This is the heart of Williamson's long argument — that one must rely on unreflective causal sensitivity to evidence. No matter how much logical notation he hides behind (and there is a lot of it), this is a stunningly weak point to rest one's epistemology upon. I thought an unexamined life was not worth living. So how is an unreflective philosophy worth listening to?

(p.184) In recent decades, questions of knowledge seem to have been marginalized by questions of justification. According to Crispin Wright, “knowledge is not really the proper central concern of epistemologico-sceptical enquiry… We can live with the concession that we do not, strictly, know some of the things we believed ourselves to know, provided we can retain the thought that we are fully justified in accepting them.” Similarly, John Earman argues that accounts of knowledge are irrelevant to the philosophy of science, because in it ‘the main concern is rarely whether or not a scientist ‘knows’ that some theory is true but rather whether or not she is justified in believing it’.

That's right. Building cases for justification is good enough for scientists, but that's all our knowledge can ever be as well. It is time for a turn to humble pie in epistemology.

(p.189) Why does it matter what counts as evidence? Consider the idea that one should proportion one’s belief in proportion to one’s evidence for it. How much evidence one has for the proposition depends on what one’s evidence is. More precisely, a theory of evidence is needed to give bite to what Carnap calls the requirement of total evidence: “[I]n the application of inductive logic to a given knowledge situation, the total evidence available must be taken as a basis for determining the degree of confirmation (1950: 211).”

This is another excellent point to consider. We need a theory of evidence for determining degrees of confirmation. Sounds like a job for another evolutionary hierarchy! Not one of needs or of consciousness or of free will, but one of knowledge. I'll be working on that for sure for my paper to come out of all this research.

And with that, I've reached my limit on Knowledge and Its Limits. Let me know if you have any other questions or thoughts about it in the comment section below. Until next time, merry Christmas! Hope you liked pressing on this lump of coal as we try to make diamonds with clarity.

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Overview of Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch

11/30/2021

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As some of you know, I was working on a conversation about evolutionary epistemology with David Sloan Wilson last year, but that has stalled for a number of reasons. While I do still hope it will resume (David has apologised and promised to get back to it!), I have decided to carry on with my own research towards what I think will be my next academic paper. So, I've been working through lots of essays on the subject as well as a few key books, which I thought I'd review here as a way of building towards my own eventual contribution. As a reminder for where I stand on this, my most important blog post to date about epistemology is the one titled Knowledge Cannot Be Justified, True, Belief. The ideas there are the ones I will be expanding on in my paper, and they provide the lens through which I will be reviewing these other epistemological works.

First up is Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch, which was published in 1993. Rauch is an American author, journalist, and activist. After graduating from Yale University, he worked at the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, the National Journal, and The Economist, in addition to being a freelance writer. He is currently a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution as well as a contributing editor of The Atlantic.

That isn't the typical profile of someone I'd look to for thoughts about epistemology, but Rauch had a new book out in early 2021 called The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, which I've heard him speak about on a couple of podcasts. Those conversations were excellent and they spurred me to go back to his original work. From what I've seen of the reviews of his new book, he's basically updating the same core ideas from Kindly Inquisitors in light of the modern war on truth by Putin, Trump, and other demagogues around the world. That's great, but Kindly Inquisitors does a fantastic job reviewing the history of the search for truth, and it sets down some good ideas about epistemology, so I'll stick to reviewing that one from Rauch for now.

Rather than provide a full review, I'll just share selected excerpts from Kindly Inquisitors and insert some of my own thoughts and interpretations where necessary. All page numbers are from the 2013 paperback edition with a new forward from George Will.

Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch

p.4 We have standard labels for the liberal political and economic systems—democracy and capitalism. Oddly, however, we have no name for the liberal intellectual system, whose activities range from physics to history to journalism. So in this book I use the term “liberal science,” for reasons to be explained later.
p.5 The liberal regime for making knowledge is not something most of us have ever even thought about. … What is the right standard for distinguishing the few true beliefs from the many false ones? And who should set that standard?

It's a great idea to name this epistemology (and it's alternatives), although I'd probably propose something different than "liberal science". I'll have to work on that later. For now, I'll just add that I thought many of the answers Rauch is looking for were in Naomi Oreskes' book Why Trust Science?, which I discussed in my published review of that book. In short, Oreskes builds the argument that the requirements of "what it takes to produce reliable knowledge" are fivefold: 1) consensus, 2) method, 3) evidence, 4) values, and 5) humility. This fits well with Rauch's views, as we will see below.

pp.5-6 To the central question of how to sort true beliefs from the “lunatic” ones, here are five answers:
- The Fundamentalist Principle: Those who know the truth should decide who is right.
- The Simple Egalitarian Principle: All sincere persons’ beliefs have equal claims to respect.
- The Radical Egalitarian Principle: Like the simple egalitarian principle, but the beliefs of persons in historically oppressed classes or groups get special consideration.
- The Humanitarian Principle: Any of the above, but with the condition that the first priority be to cause no hurt.
- The Liberal Principle: Checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.
p.12 The biologist and feminist theorist Ruth Hubbard says, in a phrase that could come from any of a variety of contemporary writers on knowledge, “The pretence that science is objective, apolitical, and value-neutral is profoundly political.”
p.30 This essay proposes a more fundamental, and more radical, kind of answer to the enemies of criticism. It requires thinking of science in a way which at first may seem strange—in a very broad way, and particularly in a political way. It requires thinking about science as a set of rules for social behaviour, rules for settling conflict. To think that way means, to begin with, understanding what the rules of the game are, and how philosophers like Descartes and Hume launched a social revolution no less than a philosophical one.

This is an excellent reminder that epistemology is a normative discipline. It's not descriptive—it's not about what we know. Instead, it's about how we know that we know things. What are the norms of behavior that lead to agreements about knowledge? As Rauch is getting at here, the scientific method may play a very broad role in this discussion and should not be confined merely to the realm of scientific facts. Is this "scientism"? Yes, but in the good sense; not the pejorative one spat out by religious scholars.

p.31 Read The Republic, putative wellspring of Western values, and you find that once you look past the glittering façade of Plato’s rhetoric you are face to face with the ethic of the totalitarian regime. It was that Republic of Plato’s which John Locke, David Hume, and the other founding fathers of the liberal epistemological regime rebelled against and, eventually, overthrew.
p.33 Plato believed that knowledge comes from wisdom, and so knowledge belongs especially to the especially wise—to the true philosophers, who are rare indeed. The real philosophers are the people “who are capable of apprehending that which is eternal and unchanging, while those who are incapable of this, but lose themselves and wander amid the multiplicities of multifarious things, are not philosophers.”
p.41 “One man is wiser than another and … the wiser man is the measure,” Plato says. To each, then, according to his wisdom: appoint the extraordinary thinker as arbiter of truth. Plato’s logic stood dominant for two thousand years. At last it was upended by an innovation in social thinking which audaciously replaced extraordinary philosophers with ordinary critics.

Count me among the philosophers who don't believe in such "true philosophers." Our post-Darwin view of the universe wipes out "that which is eternal and unchanging" and with it any claims to know that kind of truth. Just as Darwinism removed heavenly designers from nature — a view characterized as "a strange inversion" from top-down to bottom-up — the same must be done to our notions of knowledge. Knowledge is built from the bottom-up, agreement by agreement, never ultimately reaching a state of perfection, as opposed to being revealed or adjudicated from the top by some wise man.

pp.42-43 Sceptical doubters have been around since at least the days of Socrates himself and of Pyrrho of Elis (fourth century B.C.), who is supposed to have made it his aim to withhold judgment on all matters on which there were conflicting views, including the matter of whether anything was known. … As Plato had understood almost two millennia earlier, the problem of knowledge could tear society to shreds, and indeed, as Catholics and Protestants bloodied each other in battles across Europe, it did so. … Perhaps more brilliantly and ruthlessly than anyone before or since, Montaigne argued in 1577 that for man to attain knowledge was hopeless.
p.44 In 1739, David Hume, the brilliant twenty-eight-year-old enfant terrible of modern philosophy, came along with his bulldozer and made a ruin of the last pillars of certainty about the external world. … Knowledge has not been the same since. Hume demolished the logical underpinnings of all naïve claims, and most sophisticated claims, that we can have any certain knowledge whatever of the objective world.

Yep. And yet people are weak and seek certainty from their political, religious, philosophical, and economic leaders, many of whom are all too happy to oblige with far-too-sure pronouncements.

p.45 The “scepticism” upon which liberal science is based is something quite different. (To distinguish it from the kind which says that we should never conclude anything, philosophers often call it “fallibilism”.) This kind of scepticism says cheerfully that we have to draw conclusions, but that we may regard none of our conclusions as being beyond any further scrutiny or change. … This attitude does not require you to renounce knowledge. It requires you only to renounce certainty, which is not the same thing.

Yes!! Shout that from the hilltops with certainty! 😁 Seriously, it's not a contradiction to say that fallibilism is and always will be the correct way to treat knowledge...as far as we can tell.

p.47 Why did the sceptical fires not leave society in disarray, unable to believe anything, as seemed to happen during the sceptical crisis of Montaigne’s day? The answer is: because the fires cleared the ground for a new and extraordinarily powerful game—the game of liberal science.
pp.47-49 The scientists and scholars of the Enlightenment were showing that uncertain knowledge is possible. … Freeman Dyson wrote: “The Royal Society of London in 1660 proudly took as its motto the phrase Nullius in Verba, meaning “No man’s word shall be final.” … With nullius in verba we have reached one of the two great foundation stones of the liberal intellectual system. … First, the sceptical rule. … No one gets final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it. … Second, the empirical rule. … No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement.

These two rules are the heart of Rauch's work, and from what I can tell they remain unchanged in his 2021 book The Constitution of Knowledge. They work well as simple statements of how inquiry works.

p.50 Suppose a group needs to decide which of several conflicting ideas is right. ... First, each school of thought places its opinion before the group. Second, friends and enemies of the ideas begin testing and criticising, poking and prodding, checking and cross-checking. To check, players can do all kinds of things. Their tests can include real experiment, thought experiment, plausibility, simplicity, generality, utility, logical consistency, beauty—always understanding, however, that whatever test they use has to be a test that I or anyone else also can use, at least in principle (no personal authority). If, for you, a theory passes the test of experiment or beauty, then it must do the same for me and for others, or else the theory has not checked out conclusively. Third, everyone is entitled to modify one of the original ideas or to suggest a new one. Fourth, the opinion which emerges as the survivor is the winner—only, however, for as long as it continues to survive (no final say). Thus the liberal game of science. Whenever you and others agree to follow those rules, there are a million things you might do to investigate reality—but whatever you do will look a lot like science.

In other words, the scientific method could actually be extended and called the epistemological method. I'll have to defend that view another time, but here I want to focus on the fact that this passage ends up being a near perfect description of my own formula for answering the Gettier problem of knowledge. As a quick reminder about that issue, Plato defined knowledge as having three components—it must be justified, true, belief. Gettier, however, showed us examples that made us question if we could ever justify a belief to the point that we knew it was true. Since then, decades of epistemology work has tried and failed to do so, which is why I say we ought to abandon truth as one of the criteria for knowledge. Truth may be the guide we aim towards, but we will never be able to prove that we have it. What's left, then, is my formula for knowledge as justified beliefs that are currently surviving our best tests. Rauch never mentions the Gettier problem in his book, but his fourth step in this passage above almost perfectly describes my replacement for Plato's JTB theory as K=JBS.

p.51 The game of science is not just for “scientists”. It encompasses the defining ethic of the whole vast culture of critical, liberal inquiry.
pp.55-56 “One man’s experience is nothing if it stands alone,” the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce wrote a century ago. “If he sees what others cannot, we call it hallucination. It is not ‘my’ experience but ‘our’ experience that has to be thought of, and this ‘us’ has indefinite possibilities.” … No one better understood the social implications of science’s liberal idea of objectivity.

More good points about how the scientific method can be extended to all knowledge inquiries. But is it exclusionary to do so?

p.56 The creationist, or UFO-watcher, or minority separatist, or whoever, can [each] go off and play his own game. As he walks away, he leaves his challenge behind: “Who gave you the right to set the rules? Why is your ‘science game’, with its rules built by comfortable, secular, European males, the only game in town—especially if it hurts and excludes people?

The goal is not to hurt people, but the two principles that Rauch identifies above ("No one gets final say." and "No one has personal authority.") make it very clear that no one is actually excluded from this game. This is exactly why it gets us as close as we can come to independent and objective knowledge. If that is injurious to any ancient, exclusive claims of knowledge, then so much the better for overturning them. This is the logical progression of authority being reduced from many polytheistic gods, to one single monotheistic deity, and then right on down to zero figures of unquestionable revelation.

p.57 If you had to pick a three-word motto to define the liberal idea, “order without authority” would be pretty good. The liberal innovation was to set up society so as to mimic the greatest liberal system of them all, the evolution of life. Thus, a market game is an open-ended, decentralized process for allocating resources and legitimizing possession, a democracy game is an open-ended, decentralized process for legitimizing the use of force, and a science game is an open-ended, decentralized process for legitimizing belief.

This does a great job of pointing out how how evolution has worked — it is open-ended and decentralized — but Rauch fails to recognize that evolution is not always good! The evolution of life is just an amoral fact, which we should not passively accept as some kind of argument for libertarianism. (That would be a big violation of crossing the is-ought divide.) Living systems discover many ways to manage and regulate their internal and social lives for the good of individuals and groups. That's an element of the evolution of life that we ought to mimic too.

pp.57-58 Most of us think of science as a kind of machine whose equations and labs and research papers inexorably grind out data and theories and inventions. But philosophers of science have moved sharply away from that view, and toward what has become known as evolutionary epistemology. Evolutionary epistemology holds that our knowledge comes to us not from revelation, as religious traditions maintain; not from deep reflection by the wise, as in Plato; nor even from crisp experiments that unambiguously reveal nature’s secrets, as in the mechanistic view of science that prevailed until this century. Rather, our knowledge evolves—with all the haphazardness and improvisation that “evolving” implies. In evolutionary epistemology, hypotheses and ideas evolve as they compete under pressure from criticism, with intellectual diversity providing the raw material for change.

Yes! This is another description of my JBS theory of knowledge. And, in an analogy to natural selection, I label these changes in knowledge coming from criticism as a form of rational selection.

p.59 The theory of political liberalism and the theory of epistemological liberalism were fathered by one and the same man, the father of liberalism itself. John Locke proposed, three hundred years ago, that the legitimacy of a government resides not with the rulers but with the rolling consent of the governed. … Locke himself never explicitly linked his philosophy of knowledge with his philosophy of politics, but the kinship is not hard to see. To begin with, he was one of the greatest of all the fallibilists.
p.60 In passages which today define the morality of liberal science, Locke preached the sermon which every generation learns with such difficulty and forgets with such ease: “We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance, and endeavour to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information, and not instantly treat others ill, as obstinate and perverse, because they will not renounce their own, and receive our opinions. … For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or the falsehoods of all he condemns?”

Nice. If only our populations of voters were to take this to heart and stop listening to authoritarian demagogues.

p.72 The constant threat to any social system from choosing between ideas is schism. That was the threat which the geologists of two hundred years ago were confronted with. Their success in coping with it illustrates an important point. One of liberal science’s greatest triumphs is what it has not done: split apart. We do not have two or ten incompatible kinds of physics or history, each denying the legitimacy of the others; there has been no Great Schism in science.

This is an excellent and overlooked point! Surely a schism in science would have happened by now if it was going to. Instead, the norms of science have evolved slowly and effectively.

p.77 No one, however, has managed to say just what reason is, and where it differs from faith. (Why is it “reason” for a layman to believe Darwin’s story about human development but “faith” to believe the Bible’s story?) The truth is that liberal science rests upon faith in its rules; it is not a system for doing without faith but a system for managing it.

No!!! This very much depends on your definition of faith, but a good one to distinguish it from reason is "belief without evidence." Understood that way, faith is not like reason at all. Liberal science doesn't "rest" on anything. It is always active. It starts with hypotheses and maintains that all of them are fallible and could one day be disproven. We have reasons to believe the ones we hold. That's entirely different than acting on faith alone.

p.82 However, a critical intellectual system cannot fill our spiritual needs and does not pretend to; it sends us off to fill them privately as best we can. It is incomplete—utterly so—as to providing for our souls.

Gah! No! This is blind, religious hogwash and very sad to see. Any "spiritual needs" that "provide for our souls" are fictional inventions that can only pretend to soothe. Too often, they blind us to reality and lead us into extinction. The incredible story of life evolving and surviving is enough to give us purpose and goals at the top of our evolutionary hierarchy of needs.

pp.116-117 To believe incorrectly is never a crime, but simply to believe is never to have knowledge. In other words, liberal science does not restrict belief, but it does restrict knowledge. It absolutely protects freedom of belief and speech, but it absolutely denies freedom of knowledge: in liberal science, there is positively no right to have one’s opinions, however heartfelt, taken seriously as knowledge. Just the contrary: liberal science is nothing other than a selection process whose mission is to test beliefs and reject the ones that fail. A liberal intellectual regime says that if you want to believe the moon is made of green cheese, fine. But if you want your belief recognized as knowledge, there are things you must do. You must run your belief through the science game for checking. And if your belief is a loser, it will not be included in the science texts. It probably won’t even be taken seriously by most respectable intellectuals. In a liberal society, knowledge—not belief—is the rolling critical consensus of a decentralised community of checkers, and it is nothing else.

This is another wonderful illustration of my JBS theory in action. It's a shame Rauch didn't attempt to use Gettier to help explain this clearly. If you don't have any justifications (J) that come from the ongoing scientific method, you are just left with BS. And that is not knowledge.

pp.146-147 When activists insist on introducing the “gay perspective” or the “black perspective” or the “women’s perspective” into a curriculum or a discussion, they really mean introducing the activists’ own particular opinions. Those minority activists want power and seek it by claiming to speak for a race or a gender or an ethnicity. Accept their premises, and knowledge comes in colours.

Written in 1993, this may be (if I'm being generous) a prescient warning against the excesses of claims about "my truth" that we see from some activists who demand they cannot be challenged. However, In line with the values of the scientific method, all of these other perspectives must certainly be listened to, respected, and valued. They may also be impossible or very difficult to perceive for people that do not inhabit the same embodied subjective experience. So, in that sense, knowledge does indeed come in colors. For an extreme example that proves the point, it's uncontroversial to say the knowledge of a bat has a different flavor than our own. Surely we can extend that principle to the differences among the varieties of human experience, even if our requirements for social cohesion demand that we strive for consensus and integration across the full and complicated spectrum of those varieties.

p.171 Knowledge, then, is often empirical, but it is always social. By its very nature, it transcends individual effort. “We are all putting our shoulders to the wheel for an end that none of us can catch more than a glimpse at—that which the generations are working out,” wrote Pierce. ... Half a century later, Popper pioneered the insight that the social process of checking is evolutionary in nature. Hypotheses provide raw material; competition to withstand the rigors of public criticism then weeds out the many errors, and what survives on any given day is our knowledge. As in biological evolution, we cannot assume that any result is final. “We should not dismiss the possibility that we may have to be content with improving our approximations forever,” wrote Popper.

Fantastic. I'm excited to have this confirmation that evolutionary epistemology is the way to go. What do you think? Can we reach consensus on that?

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Consciousness 24 — The FAQs of Consciousness

10/3/2021

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Here it is! Finally, after 19 1/2 months, I've reached the end of my series on consciousness. This project started on a bit of a whim when I was looking for something interesting to dig into during the Covid lockdown. But I also had a hunch that there were some big evolutionary ideas to uncover about this topic. I had been listening to a lot of podcasts about consciousness and I felt like the time was right for a quick exploration.

Boy was I wrong!

This has been by far the hardest philosophical topic that I've focused on during my 10 years of writing. And after all that, I shared the summary of my evolutionary theory in my last post about consciousness. I think this could really make an important contribution (no one I know of has attempted a Tinbergen analysis of this phenomena before), but did that summary answer all of the questions about this topic? Hardly! So that's what I'm sharing here now to wrap up this series and finally turn my attention to other things.

During my research I gathered a huge list of questions that typically arise about consciousness. I whittled them down and felt they could best be organised into 5 groups: introductory questions, those from impartial sources, those coming from other naturalists, questions coming from those who doubt or disbelieve naturalism, and finally the many questions that have come from David Chalmers. Answering these questions in this order takes us on the best journey, but my answers ended up filling 43 pages with over 23,000 words. That's a lot even for me!

Rather than string these out over several digestible posts, I decided it was better to be able to see all the questions at once. After that, I have provided a pdf version of the answers so you can download them and read them in whatever way you prefer, in whatever order you like, and on as many questions as you care about.

Thanks to everyone who came along with me on this journey. In particular, thanks to Mike, James, and the two Eric's — your attention and expertise kept me going far longer than you ever could have wanted, but it was exactly what I needed to get where I thought I should go.

As always, questions and comments are very much appreciated in the comment section below. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did writing it!

INTRODUCTORY QUESTIONS
1. What would a good definition of consciousness look like?
2. What’s your definition?

QUESTIONS FROM IMPARTIAL SOURCES
3. Why do we think consciousness is a physical phenomenon?
4. How could minds possibly arise from matter?
5. Does consciousness contain non-physical information?
6. And what about Hume’s missing shade of blue?
7. Is consciousness so mysterious that it is beyond our ability to understand it?
8. What about Zombies?
9. How is our conscious experience bound together?
10. What can the neural correlates of consciousness tell us?
11. Are other animals conscious?
12. Can machines be conscious?
13. So, “what is it like” to be conscious?
14. Do we have immortal souls?
15. Do we have free will?

QUESTIONS FROM OTHER NATURALISTS
16. Can’t we just get by with a very rough definition of consciousness?
17. What about the various parts of living systems? Which ones are conscious?
18. Is the United States conscious?
19. How do we know we don’t have “inverted qualia”?
20. How do you solve the mind-evolution problem?
21. Does consciousness have a purpose?

QUESTIONS FROM THOSE WHO DOUBT OR DISBELIEVE NATURALISM
22. Why doesn’t a chair feel my bottom?
23. How can consciousness survive sleep?
24. How could consciousness have possibly emerged from lower organisms?
25. Is conscious experience outside of the realm of science?
26. Are minds everywhere? What about panpsychism?

QUESTIONS FROM DAVID CHALMERS
27. What are the easy problems of consciousness?
28. What is the hard problem of consciousness?
29. What does it take to solve the easy problems of consciousness?
30. Is the hard problem really different than the easy ones?
31. Can we see an example? Is the binding problem hard or easy?
32. How have people tried to answer the hard problem?
33. So, what else is needed and why do physical accounts fail?
34. Is this the same problem we faced with vitalism?
35. So, is consciousness just fundamental?
36. If we accept consciousness is fundamental, then what?
37. Is this fundamental view a sort of dualism?
38. If consciousness is fundamental, shouldn’t it be simple to describe?
39. What about Chalmers’ own theories?
40. Is consciousness all about information processing?
41. So, can we make progress and answer the hard problem of consciousness?

The FAQs of Consciousness.pdf
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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism
Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves
Consciousness 13 — (Rethinking) The Attention Schema
Consciousness 14 — Integrated Information Theory
Consciousness 15 — What is a Theory?
Consciousness 16 — A (sorta) Brief History of Its Definitions
Consciousness 17 — From Physics to Chemistry to Biology
Consciousness 18 — Tinbergen's Four Questions
Consciousness 19 — The Functions of Consciousness
Consciousness 20 — The Mechanisms of Consciousness
Consciousness 21 — Development Over a Lifetime (Ontogeny)
Consciousness 22 — Our Shared History (Phylogeny)
Consciousness 23 — Summary of My Evolutionary Theory

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Not My Final Thoughts on Free Will

8/2/2021

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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:

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 behaviours 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 behaviour 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:

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 organisation 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 (summarised 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.

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.

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Summary of Freedom Evolves

6/25/2021

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Time to get back to the subject of free will. If you remember, I reviewed Just Deserts by Dan Dennett and Gregg Caruso for 3 Quarks Daily back in March. Then, I shared some passages that didn't make the final cut for that article. Next, while I was on this topic, I reviewed parts 1 and 2 of Scott Barry Kaufman's debate with Sam Harris about free will. And finally, I shared some thoughts on Sam Harris’ "Final Thoughts on Free Will" (that was the title of a podcast he posted in March). I finished that last post by saying:

"Okay, that’s enough from Sam. He has helped me see more issues that need to be discussed, but it’s time for me to put them all on the table in my next and final post in this short series about free will."

Well, as I began writing up that last post, I decided I really needed to go back and read Dan Dennett's full book from 2003, Freedom Evolves. I had read several of his papers on free will, and I'd read Just Deserts very closely (which Dan himself tweeted was his "latest and best defense" of his position on free will), and 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." I think I have a few things to add to Dan's position on this, some details which make it clearer, but I needed to go check Freedom Evolves to be sure. So, here are the main quotes (about free will) that I pulled from that book, along with just a few comments from me about them as well.

p. 25 Determinism is the thesis that “there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future” (Van Inwagen 1983, p.3).

This is the succinct definition that Dan lays out at the beginning of the book which all naturalist / physicalist / materialist philosophers must recon with. This is really the crux of the free will issue. We humans feel that we have alternatives and that we make choices, but if there is only one physically possible future, then how real are these choices? If they are not real, then is free will really just an illusion?

p. 59 [Dennett's imaginary foil Conrad says,] “Determined avoiding isn’t real avoiding because it doesn’t actually change the outcome.” [Dennett replies:] From what to what? The very idea of changing an outcome, common though it is, is incoherent—unless it means changing the anticipated outcome. ... The real outcome, the actual outcome, is whatever happens, and nothing can change that in a determined world—or in an undetermined world!

Dan is making the point here that we cannot change the past, and we cannot accurately anticipate the future. So, a determined world feels exactly the same as an undetermined world and we shouldn't get so worked up about which one we are in. But what struck me from this passage was the question of whose prediction are we talking about here? If no one is actually able to anticipate the future (more on this later), then the determined outcome is literally non-determined. Ahead of time, no one has actually determined it. Therefore, to worry about determinism is like worrying about someone who never reveals their guesses about the future but still annoyingly insists on repeating after the fact, "I knew you were going to do that. I knew you were going to do that."

p. 75 Now that we have a clearer understanding of possible worlds, we can expose three major confusions about possibility and causation that have bedeviled the quest for an account of free will. First is the fear that determinism reduces our possibilities.

That's right. Determinism doesn't remove any of the possibilities that have been opened up by previous actions in the universe.

p. 84 Philosophers who assert that under determinism S* “causes” or “explains” C miss the main point of causal inquiry, and this is the second major error. In fact, determinism is perfectly compatible with the notion that some events have no cause at all.

What Dan really means here is that some events have no known singular cause. He uses some examples like stock market fluctuations or legal cases where there are multiple attempted murderers to show that many events are simply overdetermined by several various things, which makes it impossible for us to say that any one thing caused the event.

p. 88 Consider a man falling down an elevator shaft. Although he doesn’t know exactly which possible world he in fact occupies, he does know one thing: He is in a set of worlds all of which have him landing shortly at the bottom of the shaft. Gravity will see to that. Landing is, then, inevitable because it happens in every world consistent with what he knows. But perhaps dying is not inevitable. Perhaps in some of the worlds in which he lands headfirst or spread-eagled, say, but there may be worlds in which he lands in a toes-first crouch and lives. There is some elbow room.

That last sentence is, of course, a reference to Dan’s 1984 book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, which argues that our human-specific evolutionary history has carved out quite a lot of (elbow room) space for decisions to be made beyond the determinable knee-jerk reactions of simpler animals. This sounds great, but what doesn’t get emphasized from Dennett is that this perceived freedom is perhaps just due to ignorance. Could a super-intelligent being from another world scan the entire life history of the man in the falling elevator and know for sure that he will try a toes-first crouch because he once saw it in a movie as a teenager? Sure. I guess that’s possible. Does that matter to the choice the man is trying to make as he is falling towards his potential death? It shouldn’t, because that man cannot possibly know about it.

p. 89 At last, we are ready to confront the third major error in thinking about determinism. Some thinkers have suggested that the truth of determinism might imply one or more of the following disheartening claims: All trends are permanent, character is by and large immutable, and it is unlikely that one will change one’s ways, one’s fortunes, or one’s basic nature in the future.

Well, those thinkers are just making an obvious error. A fixed future doesn’t mean an unchanging future. It just means that the changes are conceivably all knowable ahead of time. So, no one should have a fixed mindset vs. a growth mindset.

p. 91 Every finite information-user has an epistemic horizon; it knows less than everything about the world it inhabits, and this unavoidable ignorance guarantees that it has a subjectively open future. Suspense is a necessary condition of life for any such agent.

Coming back to the point made above, Dan is showing how our ignorance about the future is always guaranteed.

p. 91 Footnote 6 Laplace’s demon instantiates an interesting problem first pointed out by Turing, and discussed by Ryle (1949), Popper (1951), and McKay (1961). No information-processing system can have a complete description of itself—it’s Tristram Shandy’s problem of how to represent the representing of the representing of…the last little bits. So even Laplace’s demon has an epistemic horizon and, as a result, cannot predict its own actions the way it can predict the next state of the universe (which it must be outside).

So, in fact, that ignorance is a logical fact of every enclosed system. Nothing can get outside of everything it knows in order to truly know everything that might affect it. Therefore, not even Laplace’s demon could determine the future of its determined universe. And that kind of ignorance is vital to our feelings of freedom. This ends up being similar to something I said in my article “Mortality Doesn’t Make Us Free Either”:

“If there is any hope for the kind of spiritual freedom that Hägglund longs for, it could only be in the epistemological uncertainty that exists between certain mortality and certain immortality.”

p. 92 Do fish have free will, then? Not in a morally important sense, but they do have control systems that make life-or-death “decisions,” which is at least a necessary condition for free will.

This hints at the evolutionary development of free will, which I intend to expand upon in my next post in a way that also aligns it with my summary of the development of consciousness. Furthermore, according to my view of evolutionary ethics, these “morally important” decisions are all life-or-death decisions. We humans are just able to consider longer time horizons and wider circles of moral concern. But the decisions we make are still moral or immoral if they lead to more robust or more fragile survival. (That’s my argument anyway. Lots of moralizers can be mistaken about what they think is moral or immoral.)

p. 94 The question that interests me: Could Austin have made that very putt? And the answer to that question must be “no” in a deterministic world.

Correct. But no one knows which putts will be missed ahead of time, so we still plan and try to make them. And we learn from misses about what to do differently the next time we are in similar situations.

p. 122 If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything. [See Footnote 6]
p. 122 Footnote 6 This was probably the most important sentence in Elbow Room (Dennett 1984, p. 143), and I made the stupid mistake of putting it in parentheses. I’ve been correcting that mistake in my work ever since, drawing out the many implications of abandoning the idea of a punctate self.

Great point. This is exactly the trap that Sam Harris falls into when he refuses to see consciousness as embedded in our entire bodies with lots of unconscious processing. He has a very tiny (dualistic?) view of the self.

p. 125 The idea that someone who has been tested by serious dilemmas of practical reasoning, who has wrestled with temptations and quandaries, is more likely to be “his own man” or “her own woman,” a more responsible moral agent than someone who has just floated happily along down life’s river taking things as they come, is an attractive and familiar point, but one that has largely eluded philosophers’ attention.

This is a great point that philosophers would not miss if they used the evolutionary framework of a Tinbergen analysis. The personal development of every individual (their ontogeny) is a vital part of the whole story of the development of free will.

p. 127 We should quell our desire to draw lines. We don’t need to draw lines. We can live with the quite unshocking and unmysterious fact that, you see, there were all these gradual changes that accumulated over many millions of years and eventually produced undeniable mammals. Philosophers tend to take the idea of stopping a threatened infinite regress by identifying something that is—must be--the regress-stopper: the Prime Mammal, in this case. It often lands them in doctrines that wallow in mystery, or at least puzzlement, and, of course, it commits them to essentialism in most instances.

Great passage! This is drawn out much further in Dan’s paper about Darwinism and the overdue demise of essentialism.

p. 135 Where is the misstep that excuses us from accepting the [incompatibilist’s] conclusion? We can now recognize that it commits the same error as the fallacious argument about the impossibility of mammals. Events in the distant past were indeed not “up to me,” but my choice now to Go or Stay is up to me because its “parents”—some events in the recent past, such as choices I have recently made—were up to me (because their “parents” were up to me), and so on, not to infinity, but far enough back to give my self enough spread in space and time so that there is a me for my decision to be up to! The reality of a moral me is no more put in doubt by the incompatibilist argument than is the reality of mammals.

This points out how incompatibilists attempt to rely on a version of the Sorites paradox to make their case, but that is an unsolved paradox for a reason! Imagine if I tried to start with the claim that I am responsible for my decisions, and then went back and back and back and back, claiming my responsibility continued to hold for each small step along the way, until eventually I took responsibility for the Big Bang. That is of course nuts. But that is essentially the exact same logic that incompatibilists are using on their side of the argument. They are just using it in the opposite direction. But if that trick doesn’t work for me, then it doesn’t work for them either. A new approach to the problem must be used. (Read the link above on the Sorites paradox to see a glimpse into an approach informed by evolutionary logic.)

p. 223 Love is quite real, and so is falling in love. It just isn’t what people used to think it is. It’s just as good—maybe even better. True love doesn’t involve any flying gods. The issue of free will is like this. If you are one of those who think that free will is only really free will if it springs from an immaterial soul that hovers happily in your brain, shooting arrows of decision into your motor cortex, then, given what you mean by free will, my view is that there is no free will at all. If, on the other hand, you think free will might be morally important without being supernatural, then my view is that free will is indeed real, but just not quite what you probably thought it was.

This is an excellent synopsis of Dan’s argument. And it is basically consistent with his strategy for consciousness too. He says folk notions of consciousness are an illusion, just as folk notions of free will are an illusion. I believe he’s right that our definitions of these terms must evolve.

p. 223 In my book Brainstorms, one of the questions discussed was whether such things as beliefs and pains were “real,” so I made up a little fable about people who speak a language in which they talk about being beset by “fatigues” where you and I would talk about being tired, exhausted. When we arrive on the scene with our sophisticated science, they ask us which of the little things in the bloodstream are the fatigues. We resist the question, which leads them to ask, in disbelief: “Are you denying that fatigues are real?” Given their tradition, this is an awkward question for us to answer, calling for diplomacy (not metaphysics).

This is a great example of the confusion that arises when Western languages use too many nouns. As I said in my review of Just Deserts, “We may not have free will, but we are a will with an infinite degree of freedom (subject to certain restrictions).” It may help somewhat to consider this issue as the act of a verb.

p. 225 I claim that the varieties of free will I am defending are worth wanting precisely because they play all the valuable roles free will has been traditionally invoked to play. But I cannot deny that the tradition also assigns properties to free will that my varieties lack. So much the worse for tradition, say I.

Yep! The tradition must evolve.

p. 237 The conclusion Libet and others should draw is that the 300-millisecond “gap” has not been demonstrated at all. After all, we know that in normal circumstances the brain begins its discriminative and evaluative work as soon as stimuli are received, and works on many concurrent projects at once, enabling us to respond intelligently just in time for many deadlines, without having to stack them up in a queue waiting to get through the turnstile of consciousness before evaluation begins.

Yep again! I was very glad to see this as I independently arrived at the same conclusion in my post about Libet. Good evolutionary thinking leads to the same places.

p. 238-9 Conscious decision-making takes time. If you have to make a series of conscious decisions, you’d better budget half a second, roughly, for each one, and if you need to control things faster than that, you’ll have to compile your decision-making into a device that can leave out much of the processing that goes into a stand-alone conscious decision.

I thought this was an interesting precursor to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.

p. 243 As David Hume pointed out so vigorously several centuries ago, you can’t perceive causation. You can’t see it when it happens outside, and you can’t introspect it when it happens inside.

Excellent observation.

p. 273 A proper human self is the largely unwitting creation of an interpersonal design process in which we encourage small children to become communicators and, in particular, to join our practice of asking for and giving reasons, and then reasoning about what to do and why.

This is a nice point to make about our ontogeny. Morality concerns others. It is built by them too. We could not develop selves or morality in isolation.

p. 279 The hard determinists say that our world would be a better place if we could somehow talk ourselves out of feeling guilty when we cause harm and angry when harm is done to us. But it isn’t clear that any feasible “cure” along these lines wouldn’t be worse than the “disease.” Anger and guilt have their rationales, and they are deeply embedded in our psychology.

My analysis of what causes our emotions adds a lot of details to clarify this. Emotions (when they are working properly) do arise from reasons and we would be wise to recognize and hold on to the good reasons while discarding any poorly driven emotional responses. Properly aimed anger and guilt help shape individuals and societies to act towards more robust survival. Determinists think we can eliminate these and other emotions tied to notions of free will, but it is only the mistaken supernatural beliefs that need to go.

p. 287 The self is a system that is given responsibility, over time, so that it can reliably be there to take responsibility, so that there is somebody home to answer when questions of accountability arise. Kane and the others are right to look for a place where the buck stops.

This is a nice description of how free will and moral responsibility are socially constructed in a bi-directional manner.

p. 290 We now uncontroversially exculpate or mitigate in many cases that our ancestors would have dealt with much more harshly. Is this progress or are we all going soft on sin? To the fearful, this revision looks like erosion, and to the hopeful it looks like growing enlightenment, but there is also a neutral perspective from which to view the process. It looks to an evolutionist like a rolling equilibrium, never quiet for long, the relatively stable outcome of a series of innovations and counter-innovations, adjustments and meta-adjustments, an arms race that generates at least one sort of progress: growing self-knowledge, growing sophistication about who we are and what we are, and what we can and cannot do.

Yes! This makes for a good summary of the evolutionary steps that both free will and our understanding of it take. Next time, I’ll do my best to help grow that knowledge and sophistication just a tiny bit further.

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North East Humanists — Beliefs and Values

6/1/2021

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Hi all! I've got two big posts yet to do to finish up 1) my mini series on free will, and 2) my major series on consciousness. I'm still doing a bit more research on them, but mostly I've been busy over the last several weeks with a big project for North East Humanists, which is a local charity that I am on the board of. Ever since the start of the pandemic, we've been going through some major upgrades including developing a new logo (seen above), moving the management of our supporter emails online (you can now sign up here), and generally reviewing our strategic plan. Now that all of those are more or less complete, I made a major overhaul of the North East Humanists website and launched that to the general public today.

There is a lot of information on that website now, which I think will be of interest to anyone following an Evolutionary Philosophy blog. Have a look around. I'm not always convinced "Humanism" is the best name for it, or that everyone involved is on board with where I think it is headed, but if you are looking for a worldwide movement of non-believers to come together into a strong coalition that can act to improve life on Earth (and beyond), then I think Humanist organisations are probably best positioned to become a home for that. They have a long history, they are active at the local, national, and international levels, and they have a strong resource base in terms of people and funding. They're also open to changing and adapting their beliefs in response to rational arguments, so if there's something you don't like about Humanism, you can get in there and change it!

As evidence, the North East Humanists just changed our own official statement of our beliefs and values. And I have to say, I'm quite proud at how they've come out. The six main statements, followed up by their brief explanations, mirror my own ideas about what comprises a worldview and what evolution can teach Humanism. See what you think of these and let me know in the comments below if they would be something you could sign up to.

What do North East Humanists say?

Humanists have no official dogma, sacred texts, or infallible leaders, and we aren’t required to believe the same things. However, Humanists generally share some very basic but important commitments. In 2021, the trustees of North East Humanists developed the following list of beliefs and values that currently represent what we are committed to.

1. We only live once so we want to make the best of our lives. As far as we can tell, our life here is the only one we will ever have. We are part of an evolutionary process on Earth where all life is related and shares the same genetic building blocks. We see no evidence that anything supernatural affects our existence. It is up to us to give our lives purpose and to make them the best that we can for ourselves and others.

2. Our behaviour is guided by reason and empathy with concern for the welfare of all people and the entire planet. Morality is the product of our experience as evolved social animals. It is developed using natural capacities such as reason and empathy. Humanists believe that the underlying principle governing morality is a desire for the flourishing of all life.

3. Our knowledge of the world comes from experience and is aided by the sciences and humanities. Humanists ask questions and seek evidence to support their beliefs about the world. Our theories become robust in this way but must change when new information and better arguments become available.

4. We support democratic participation, secularism, and human rights. Humanists are committed to a pluralist, secular society. Whilst generally respecting the right of people to have different beliefs, Humanists will challenge ideas and practices which threaten harm to others or undermine their human rights.

5. Conflicts of interest require negotiated resolution and cooperation. Disputes at all levels, from the personal to the international, should be resolved through reasoned argument and negotiation, rather than through the use of power. We cooperate with others to address problems and reduce pain and suffering in the world.

6. Creativity and physical expression are key parts of our humanity. Humanists recognise that art, sports, practical skills, socialising, and mutual support meet innate needs in human beings. These things make our lives enjoyable and worth living. We believe that everyone deserves to have opportunities to express and experience their unique array of interests and capabilities.

For more information about North East Humanists and Humanism in general, see:
www.northeast-humanists.org.uk

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Some Thoughts on Sam Harris' Final Thoughts on Free Will

4/19/2021

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In my last two posts (1, 2), I examined Sam Harris' long appearance on The Psychology Podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman. Shortly after those aired, Sam released his Final Thoughts on Free Will on his own Making Sense podcast, which I thought I should take a look at before summing up my own current thoughts on this matter. I didn't find Sam to be very persuasive in his conversation with Scott, but let's see if he's had any better thoughts upon reflection (and in sole control). Since I've already spent a lot of time on Sam's ideas, I'll try to be quick about it and just pick out any new points that need to be made.

The concept of free will touches nearly everything we care about: morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment. But the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. It is built on two things: the ability to choose otherwise and being the source of conscious awareness. But these are both wrong.

There are more things bound up in "free will" than just these two points. In particular, there's the question of avoiding external coercion, as well as the ability to carry out actions and plans that were made using conscious considerations. Both of those do a lot of work in building up feelings about the term free will. But even leaving those points aside for now, Sam's discussion of "the ability to choose otherwise" is a flawed repetition of ideas that have already been debunked. Dan Dennett knocked these down in his review of Sam's book, when he said:

"You can't assess any ability by 'replaying the tape.' ... This is as true of the abilities of automobiles as of people. Suppose I am driving along at 60 MPH and am asked if my car can also go 80 MPH. Yes, I reply, but not in precisely the same conditions; I have to press harder on the accelerator. In fact, I add, it can also go 40 MPH, but not with conditions precisely as they are. Replay the tape till eternity, and it will never go 40MPH in just these conditions."

So, looking backwards at decisions that were made just doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the ability to make decisions going forward. As for what Sam means about "being the source of conscious awareness", I'll have to hear more to understand his claims.

There’s no place for you to stand outside of the causal structure of the universe.

Agreed. But my unique genetic and environmental history forms its own cause. We witness that from the inside as we act. That is consistent with the embodied view of consciousness. As I said in my review of Just Deserts, we may not have free will, as that makes it sound like free will is a possession that could be separated from our selves. But we are a will that has degrees of freedom.

You aren’t a self. You’re not a subject in the middle of experience. You’re not on the riverbank watching the stream of consciousness. As a matter of experience, there is only the stream, and you are identical to it.

That’s right that we aren’t a homunculus watching the Cartesian theatre unspool before us in some ethereal mind space. But that stream that we are identical to is something. It exists. And I don’t see why we can’t call that an everchanging, unique, and personal self.

[Sam asks for you to choose a film. Any film.] We can’t see how those choices are made. If free will isn’t there, then it’s not anywhere.

Bollocks! This is just like the point I made in my last post about looking for a decisive moment in the random noise of choosing when to drink water. Sam is stacking the deck in his favour by asking for a random film choice, but there are no identifiable interior mechanisms to make random choices. If, instead, I asked you to choose the top 20 films of all time in terms of their return on investment, you would immediately be flooded with ideas on how to act to solve that problem. (And if you are JT Velikovsky, you will have already written a PhD thesis on this subject!) Where did those thoughts come from? From some mysterious darkness that we have no access to? No! They would come from learned experience that I myself have experienced, plus maybe some creativity at putting together bits of experiences that I haven’t thought about putting together before. This type of problem solving is one of the 13 types of cognition that we have evolved to have. And that feels very much like a self acting in its own self-interest.

Everything is springing to mind. What could free will possibly refer to?

To the ability to hold onto a train of thought rather than pinging among these random upsurges?

Letting go of free will is the only thing that cuts through the desire to retributively punish people.

Not so! The fact that you can’t change the past is another perfectly good reason to get rid of the desire to retributively punish people. From a consequentialist point of view, retributivism makes no sense.

People ask, “if there’s no free will, then why are you trying to convince anyone of anything? … Your very effort to convince people that they don’t have free will is proof that you think they have it.” Again, this is confusion between determinism and fatalism. Reasoning is possible. Not because you are free to think however you want, but because you are not free. Reason makes slaves of us all. To be convinced by an argument is to be subjugated by it. It’s to be forced to believe it, regardless of your preferences.

Well, this certainly doesn’t track with the history of reasoning with people about their beliefs. Sam hasn’t responded to any of Dan Dennett’s very good arguments. Why not? Because people have their own unique personal histories, which drive their passions and their reasoning. These people are selves who act for their own self-determination.

Not thinking about this clearly has consequences. In the United States, there are 13-year-olds serving life sentences in prison. Not because we have determined that they can’t be rehabilitated, but because some judge or jury felt that they truly deserved this punishment as retribution because they were the true independent cause of their actions.

This is an abhorrent shame and it definitely needs to be corrected. It’s possible that making the argument that “we don’t have free will” could actually open many people’s eyes to the problems with their retributivist thinking. But it’s also possible that such arguments close off many people’s minds because they think they definitely are autonomous agents, so free will skeptics must be out of touch with reality.

At the moment, the only philosophically respectable way to defend free will is to endorse a view known as compatibilism and argue, in essence, that free will is compatible with the truth of determinism. Compatibilists like my friend the philosopher Dan Dennett generally claim that a person is free as long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsion that would prevent him from acting on his actual desires and intentions. So, if a man wants to commit murder, and does so because of this desire, then that’s all the free will you need. But from both a moral and scientific perspective, this seems to miss the point. Where is the freedom in doing what one wants, when one's very desires are the product of prior events that one had absolutely no hand in creating? From my point of view, compatibilism is just a way of saying that a puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

Well, there are definitely strings from our evolutionary history. And natural selection has generally produced beings who love them. The ones that don’t tend to go extinct. In fact, in Just Deserts, Dan agrees with this and says, “I have adopted [this] sentence and reinterpreted it as indeed a pretty good definition of free will. … If you are lucky enough to be a responsible agent, you have an obligation to love your strings, protecting them from would-be puppeteers.”

Compatibilists tend to push back here. They say even if our thoughts and actions are the products of unconscious causes, they are still our thoughts and actions. Anything that your brain does or decides, consciously or not, is something that you have done or decided. So, on this account, the fact that we can’t always be aware of the causes of our actions does not negate free will. Our unconscious neurophysiology is just as much us as our conscious thoughts are. But this seems like a bait and switch that trades a psychological fact, the subjective experience of being a conscious agent, for an abstract idea of ourselves as persons. The psychological truth is that most of us feel identical to or in control of a certain channel of information in our conscious minds, but we are wrong about this. The you that you take yourself to be isn’t in control of anything.

This is not a bait and switch by compatibilists. It’s a holistic understanding of our evolved and embodied selves. What’s wrong with that? Sam is the one who insists on fighting a straw man by merely picking on the worst kind of dualist, Cartesian, libertarian free will.

Compatibilists try to save free will by asserting that you are more than your conscious self. You’re identical to the totality of what goes on inside your body, whether you are conscious of it or not. But you can’t honestly take credit for your unconscious mental life. In fact, you are making countless decisions at this moment with organs other than your brain, but you don’t feel responsible for these decisions. Are you producing red blood cells right now? If your body decided to stop doing this, you would be the victim of this change, not its cause. To say that you are responsible for everything that goes on inside your skin because it’s all “you” is to make a claim that bears absolutely no relationship to the feelings of agency and moral responsibility that have made the idea of free will a problem for philosophy in the first place.

And to treat red blood cell production the exact same way you treat conscious deliberation by human beings is (as I said in my last post) to sink to a level of dehumanisation that is truly troubling. To say no one is responsible for anything that goes on inside your skin also bears absolutely no relationship to the feelings and facts that have made free will a problem for philosophy. Guess what. We aren't responsible for it all. And we aren't responsible for nothing. Let the hard work of philosophy begin.

Okay, that’s enough from Sam. He has helped me see more issues that need to be discussed, but it’s time for me to put them all on the table in my next and final post in this short series about free will.

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Another Free Will Debate — Kaufman v. Harris (Part 2/2)

4/7/2021

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In the last post, I covered Part 1 of Sam Harris' recent conversation with Scott Barry Kaufman. Sam didn't come off very well in that one, but Scott left him with an excellent cliffhanger question so maybe he can redeem himself. Let's remind ourselves what that question was and then jump right into Part 2 and pick out some interesting bits from the rest of their conversation.

Scott: Of course we are just our biology. What else would we be? But isn’t it the point that our biology encompasses all the interesting stuff that we are? You could still say that it means something for the robot to be a unique robot. But don’t you think that the interesting thing is that the biology encompasses all the unique aspects of what Sam Harris is and who Sam Harris is including your unconsciousness and your consciousness?
Sam: Hmmm. I’m trying to think of how to make this point land…
<<< ROLL PODCAST CREDITS >>>
<<< NEXT EPISODE PICKS UP RIGHT FROM THERE >>>
Sam: All of the causes of what I’m conscious of were first unconscious. I’m not aware of what my brain is doing at the synaptic level. I’m not a dogmatic materialist [but] let’s just talk in terms of materialism. ... So, my mind is what my brain is doing. … What we’re talking about is information processing in a physical system. In my case, the computer is made of meat. In a robot’s case, it’s silicone. In neither case is there something extra which is emerging or being added which gives a degree of freedom beyond just the impressive complexity of the system in dialogue with its environment.
Scott: I think there is. Let me try to pinpoint precisely what I think that extra thing is. Cognitive control includes things like implementation of intentions. ... You are right, in the moment we don’t really have free will but we have the capacity to shift our behaviour in the future so that we can learn from our mistakes so that we can even make moral reasoning decisions. Turtles, chimps, apes, and robots right now don’t have a great capacity for moral reasoning about an action they already made so that they can change their behaviour in the future. To me, that conscious control is free will. But I don’t think I can convince you to use that label for that phenomenon.

I think Sam is correct here, but the "impressive complexity of the system in dialogue with its environment" is actually just a very good description of what Dan Dennett calls "the free will worth wanting." And Scott's "cognitive control" and "implementation of intentions" is just more of the same. In my Summary of My Evolutionary Theory of Consciousness, I gave the following short definition:

Consciousness, according to this evolutionary theory, is an infinitesimally growing ability to sense and respond to any or all biological forces in order to meet the needs of survival. These forces and needs can vary from the immediate present to infinite timelines and affect anything from the smallest individual to the broadest concerns (both real and imagined) for all of life.

So, when Scott notes that the capacity of humans to change their behaviour is much greater than the capacity for turtles, chimps, and robots, I would say he's describing points on the spectrum of what all of these (living or non-living) systems are able to process with their levels of consciousness. The more you can sense, and the more responses that are available to you, the more degrees of freedom you have. And compatibilists may wish to call this your free will. Much like consciousness, this isn't an on/off switch. It's an infinitesimally growing (or shrinking) amount of freedom. As Dan Dennett said towards the end of his review of Sam's book, "You can't be 'ultimately responsible' (as Galen Strawson has argued) but so what? You can be partially, largely responsible." Equivalently, you can't have Ultimate Libertarian Free Will, but so what? There is a growing sense of freedom along the way towards that, which we might agree to call free will.

But Sam doesn't think we actually have that sense! And that is a big part of his argument that needs to be addressed.

Sam: [People] think they are having an experience of being a self that can author its own actions. The experience of having free will and the experience of being a self...are two sides of the same coin. ... Meditation, successful meditation, absolutely proves to you from the first-person side that that is a false point of view. [The] point of view that gives motivation to this claim about free will [is] how you feel when you feel that you are the conscious upstream cause of the next thing you think and do. [But that is] because you are not noticing that the next thing you think or intend to do is simply coming out of the darkness behind you which you can’t inspect. It is genuinely mysterious.

This is the kind of argument you make when you see consciousness as an on/off switch and you put far too much stock in meditating on conscious awareness (which is actually level 5 in my hierarchy of consciousness). Sam is right that "you" are not "the" conscious upstream cause of the next thing you think and do. But I would say that "you" are also an unconscious upstream cause! And these bleed back and forth into one another. There is bi-directional feedback between our unconscious activities and our conscious activities. If this was genuinely mysterious, the thoughts that came out of the darkness would be shocking and unrecognisable to us. But, of course, that's not what we experience. That only appears to happen in genuine cases of psychosis, which we diagnose and try to treat if that occurs. Why exactly does Sam think this way? He draws on two examples over the rest of the talk, so let's present them both at once and consider them together.

First Example:

Sam: Take a moment of conscious deliberation. I have a glass of water and I can decide to pick it up and have a drink now or I can decide to wait. This is a prototypical case of me being in the driver’s seat. I’m free to do this. No one’s got a gun to my head. I don’t have some kind of compulsive water-drinking behaviour. I’m a little bit thirsty, I’m conscious of thirst, but I can choose to resist my thirst. That seems to be me prosecuting my freedom there. But the more you pay attention to what it’s like to make that choice out of your own free will, the more you will discover that it is absolutely mysterious, in every particular, why and how you do what you do and when and how you do it. Subjectively, I have no idea why or how I do any of these things. I have no idea why or how one particular moment becomes decisive.

Second Example:

Sam: [I can provide a long description of someone becoming a classically trained musician because of a love of Bach.] That’s true of somebody. But not me. Why not? Why don’t I care about Bach? All of these things have reasons, they have explanations, causally...
Scott: Those are the things that make you who you are, even if you don’t know why they were caused. [They are part of your] environmental and biological confluence.
Sam: Yes. It’s deterministic or random, but it’s some pattern of causation. But so what does it mean to say that I am free to take a deep and all-encompassing interest in classical music? … The problem is, I have almost no interest in playing the cello. The fact that I don’t is something that I did not author. ... I am as I am with respect to classical music. Now, just imagine that by force of this conversation, you said something that inspired me to be different than I’m tending to be, this would really be the ultimate instance of free will because this would be kind of a surmounting of all my prior tendencies into this new commitment. What would it be like for me to experience that awakening in my own consciousness? That would be totally compatible with the evil genius in the next room saying “We’re going to give him the cello desire here.” It would not demonstrate anything like free will. It would be like, “What came over me?” This would have come from outside of consciousness. It’s not me.

These are not persuasive. In the first case, facts from our evolutionary history show that we humans are animals who only generally need water. We don't need to constantly drink, and there is a large range of hydration within which we can function perfectly well. Therefore, there is rarely, if ever, one instantaneous all-encompassing need to drink NOW. When Sam says he has "no idea why or how one particular moment becomes decisive," he is looking for something that just isn't there. Why not? Because it doesn't need to be there! Like Buridan's Ass, random noise is all that's necessary to decide to drink at any one second vs. another. However, let's say I'm a spy and I pre-arrange to have a drink in a bar at precisely 15 seconds after 8:00PM because that will be a signal to my counterpart that "everything has been arranged." Guess what. As long as everything goes as planned, I'm going to have that drink at precisely that time. And that particular action is going to feel very authored. Sam is trying to stack the deck with his meaningless example, but a meaningful counterexample drives an entirely different intuition.

Similarly, the second example isn't as mysterious as Sam claims either. A love for classical music and a drive to play the cello are very clearly driven by a bit of genetic variance (constitutive luck) and a bit of environmental conditions (situational luck). If you were born tone deaf and 500 years before the invention of the cello, you aren't going to have a drive to play the cello. If you are born with perfect pitch into a family of professional musicians who lead happy lives and have instruments all over the house, you may very easily develop a drive to play the cello. If your situation is somewhere in between these extremes but, at some point along the path of your life, cello-playing looks like a promising path to meet one or several of your Maslow's hierarchy of needs, then it is very possible a drive will develop to lead you down that path. That's how one might convince Sam to play the cello—by showing him he can, and that doing so would solve a very important need he has, over and above all the other need-fulfilling activities he already undertakes. That's a pretty high bar at this point in Sam's life because of his particular path dependence. But if we managed it, these causal explanations would be nothing at all like an "evil genius in the next room saying 'We're going to give him the cello desire here.'"

Are we "Ultimately Free" to choose all of these factors in our lives? No. No one should ever think that we are. But is there freedom in discovering who we are and exploring the "impressive complexity of the system in dialogue with its environment"? Yes. And I think that's a satisfying way to look at life. What is stopping Sam from taking this big picture perspective? Towards the end of the podcast, Sam shows that it comes from his personal history placing a laser focus on meditation and the tiniest details of neuroscience.

Sam: In certain cases, [conscious experience is] not descriptively mysterious at all. We know causally that we can tell a story about it. It’s just two different levels of connecting to the phenomenology here. When I say mysterious, I mean like, I can move my hand, right. This is one of the most prosaic things about me that I can move my hand. I can do this. I have no insight into how I do this. If I suddenly couldn’t do this, that would be flabbergasting. But the fact that I can do it is also flabbergasting. I have literally no insight. I know something about the neurology of this. I can talk about muscle fibres, actin, and the transduction in motor nerves and…I can vomit my concepts.
Scott: You kind of get it.
Sam: So, I’m not saying you can’t have any insight into this, but there is still something, however deep you go, however atomised your experience consciously becomes of a phenomenon, there is just simply this fact of first something wasn’t there and then it’s there. You can shatter your subjective experience down to its atoms and notice that things are just appearing out of the darkness. Sights, sounds, thoughts, emotions, intentions, or their microconstituents. Things can get incredibly pixelated when you spend months on retreats doing nothing but paying attention to mostly sensory perception. It can break down, especially if you are doing it strategically, so as to look for its kind of smallest and briefest aspects, which is one style of meditation. Things become amazingly pixelated. You don’t feel that you have a body anymore. You feel that you have a cloud of sensation, of temperature, and pressure, and movement, which just doesn’t have the shape of a body at all. You don’t feel “hand”, you feel these micro-changes of primary sensation at each moment. But again, whatever you are noticing is there and then it’s not there. And then something else is there and then it’s not there. And “you” are not doing any of it. That’s the crucial point. “You”, the one who is witnessing, aren’t doing any of it.

This perfectly captures Sam's walled-off dualism. If "you" are only "the one who is witnessing" then of course you aren't going to be able to understand everything moving in and out of that perspective. To expect differently would be like what the ecological philosopher Arne Naess calls "trying to blow a bag up from the inside." There are limits to what conscious awareness has access to and you have to examine the facts outside of those limits in order to understand it. And that's okay! The view from the interior—no matter how pixelated—only gives you so much. But a holistic view adds nicely to the picture, and it lets you understand more of the interior even if you don't have access to what is outside of it. For biological phenomena like us, Tinbergen's four considerations of (1) evolutionary histories and (2) personal histories, along with (3) functions and (4) mechanisms, add up to this big and informative picture.

In some ways, it's just philosophical wordplay to decide to call these perspectives free will or not, or free will worth wanting, but whatever label you use, the ideas you attach to that label have real consequences for the way you navigate through life. Let's examine a few of those.

I mentioned in my last post that Sam's views lead him to a very dehumanised place. In this episode, he puts that on display even further. Here are five examples of that which add up to something quite disturbing:

First Example:

Sam: Almost no one understands this. Dan Dennett does not understand this. He obviously doesn’t. He obviously feels like a self. And that is the string upon which all this controversy is strung. Most of the people listening right now are thinking, “what the fuck is he talking about?” But that voice in your head that says, “what the fuck is he talking about?”…that isn’t you! That is not a self.
Scott: What do you mean that’s not you? It’s you! Again, you’re a dualist when you say that.
Sam: It’s no more you than the bead of sweat that drips down your forehead is you. It is an object.
Scott: I disagree! People don’t identify themselves with their hand, but they identify themselves with their conscious desires and motivations so we can have gradations of things, of parts of our body that people identify themselves with.
Sam: From the point of view of consciousness, there is simply consciousness and its contents.

Second Example:

Sam: [Trump’s election] is a little bit analogous to if we elected a rhinoceros to be president. I’d be fucking tearing my hair out over how awful that is. At no point am I imagining that the rhinoceros can be anything other than a rhinoceros and at no point am I wishing suffering upon the rhinoceros. I don’t hate the rhinoceros. The rhinoceros just shouldn’t be president of the United States. That’s a catastrophe to do that. And in some sense, we elected a rhinoceros president.

Third Example:

Sam: Someone comes into your house and wants to kill you and your kids. By all means, shoot that person in the head. That is what guns are for. You should do it if it’s a grizzly bear and you should do it if it’s a person who seems to think he has free will to kill you and your kids. That’s morally uncomplicated in my view.

Fourth Example:

Sam: Hatred really does require an attribution to someone that they could and should have done otherwise. It’s like you really do believe they are the authors of their bad actions. The moment you find that they have a brain tumour that makes them exculpatory then you change your response. You think, well I did hate Charles Whitman for getting up in that clocktower and killing all those kids but once they performed an autopsy on him and found that massive brain tumour pressing on his amygdala, well then, okay, I have to recognise that I can’t hate the guy. He was as unlucky as the kids he shot. On some level that happens to everybody, once you recognise that free will is an illusion.

Fifth Example:

Sam: Every instance of [voluntary control], the sufficiency of my strength of will in one case, the weakness of my will in another case, every bit of it is being determined by states in my brain which I didn’t author, which I didn’t create.
Scott: It’s still you! It’s still you!
Sam: But my liver is still me and it gives me absolutely no sense of free will. If my liver stops, if my liver is working exactly the way it is in this moment and no other way, if it works better tomorrow, or stops completely on Friday, I am a mere victim of those changes, or witness to their consequences. It’s not within the domain of my autonomy or agency. But so it is with states of my brain. So it is with each instance of neurochemistry in my brain. And yet that produces everything that I experience including my preferences, my goals, my impulses that are in conformity with my goals, and then my sudden subversion of those impulses with some alternate impulse. That’s getting piped up from below and ... the fact that that comes online in that moment and doesn’t in another, that’s mysterious. The fact that it comes on to the degree that it does, and not one degree further, is also mysterious. It’s probably dependent on other things that seem completely adventitious to my character like whether I got enough sleep the night before or whether I had a full lunch or whether I got enough sunlight.

Bollocks! There are hard evolutionary facts that differentiate human minds from beads of sweat, rhinoceroses, bears, and brain tumors. Dan Dennett already answered this with an extended reply in his podcast conversation with Sam. It's helpful to read that in its entirety:

That’s very useful. Tom Wolfe has this passage where he says what we’ve learned from neuroscience is that we’re wired wrong. Don’t blame me. Don’t blame us. We’re wired wrong. No! What neuroscience shows us is that we’re wired. It doesn’t show us we’re wired wrong. Some people like poor Whitman are wired wrong. ... You’re saying it’s brain tumours all the way down. Well, I find that extrapolation doesn’t move me at all. I don’t think it’s a logical argument. I think it is a mistaken extrapolation. It’s like a mathematical induction gone wrong. [Free will libertarians also] say, we're all that way. Well, no. That’s precisely what we understand — that we are not all disabled. Nobody’s an angel. Nobody’s perfect. So, if anything short of perfection counts as being disabled to the point of being exculpatorily disabled, then you’re right. But that’s a very strange view. The idea that you couldn’t be able enough to be held responsible is the crux of the issue right now between us. I say that the boundaries are always porous, and as we learn more about neuroscience, we may very well move some people that are exculpated into the guilty / not excusable category and others will move in the other direction. But we’ll still keep the distinction between those who are basically wired right and those that are wired wrong.

This is similar to a point I made in my review of Just Deserts about how a Tinbergen view of free will challenges the view that luck "swallows everything" in our considerations.

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.

Sam has taken the giant step-change introduced by Charles Whitman's brain tumor and tried to apply its conclusion to each and every step-change up or down the evolutionary ladder from there. To him, nothing is responsible all the way down to beads of sweat, and nothing is responsible all the way up to billions of average humans. This is a very blunt and useless view of the world. And in the wrong hands, it could be used to wipe away humans as easily as one would wipe away a bead of sweat. I'm not at all suggesting Sam is that kind of a monster, but it would take a weird view of morality to intervene here and save us from such dehumanisation. As you might expect, Sam has exactly that kind of weird view.

[Scott and Sam start to have a giant discussion about the is-ought divide. Sam thinks it’s a language trick we should just ignore. He thinks the only thing you need to boot up morality is to agree that “we don’t want the worst possible misery for everyone.”]
Scott: The way I think about it is that there is no “should” without “in order to,” which is a goal. If someone says you should do X, that necessarily implies that you should do X in order to get Y. There can be no should without reference to a goal.
Sam: What if the goal is to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone?
Scott: But “better” or “worse” are value judgments. I don’t know why you don’t see that.
Sam: Put your hand on a hot stove and then tell me that.
Scott: If it was in order to achieve a broader goal, and putting my hand on that hot stove would help me to achieve that broader goal, I would do that and deal with the suckiness of the feeling.
Sam: [...stammers, then...] To say that “the worst possible misery for everyone is bad is a value judgment,” is to say nothing!
Scott: You’re accepting a particular definition of well-being.
Sam: No, no, no. You’re just not understanding my claim.
Scott: How are facts going to lead me to action?
Sam: The facts are that there are very different experiences on offer here and you will helplessly find yourself preferring the good day at Esalen over the rat-filled dungeon, just to take the fairly parochial differences that we can notice here on Earth.
Scott: But good can only be used in relation to a goal. How are you divorcing it from the goal? You disagree with that?
Sam: No, it’s just the valence of certain experiences within consciousness that have no necessary reference to a goal. You can be so happy or unhappy that it has no reference point in past or future. You can have the best possible acid trip or the worst possible acid trip and there’s no goal there. The sheer extremis of your physiology pushed to the breaking point.
Scott: There are pleasurable and there’s unpleasant. But I don’t think they map onto good or bad in the way that you claim.
Sam: Dial them up and give them enough time. What if existence was just that? [Sam then presents a poor analogy about how a physicist who doesn’t believe in math doesn’t get to have a vote at a physics conference, and he claims that is the same as the Taliban not getting to have a vote about morality.] They’re imbeciles. They have a shitty culture. We know this. And it shouldn’t be taboo to say this.

Ugh! Scott is 100% right here. His "in order to" is another way of restating my argument on how to bridge the is-ought divide with a want. For example, I say: Life is. Life wants to remain an is. Therefore life ought to act to remain so. Scott would put it: Life is. In order for life to remain an is, life ought to act to remain so. These are equivalent arguments that both require additional arguments as to why the "want" or the "goal" are correct.

Sam, on the other hand, has a viciously circular argument that tells us nothing about hard choices between where we are today and his worst possible outcome. How is one to judge whether one is moving towards or away from "helplessly preferring things that have no reference point"? He has no facts to consider for that! And his worst possible outcome is wrong too. I wrote about this in my response to Sam's Moral Landscape challenge, but I don't suppose he saw that. He was too blinded by the kind of thinking you get when you mistake a meaningless acid trip for profundity and then add in the woo-ey Buddhist claptrap that emotions should only flow through you. Sam wants to divorce morality from consequences but that's just not possible. The "valence of certain experiences" were given to us by our evolutionary histories and they help us reach our evolutionary goals. Am I free to choose whether or not I experience Jaak Panksepp's seven basic emotions of FEAR, RAGE, SEEKING, LUST, CARE, PANIC, AND PLAY? No, I am not. But they drive competing needs that I must meet if I want to reach my goals (in order to reach my goals), which I have freedom to discover and freedom to choose between.

Are those goals and choices mine? Am I responsible for the choices that get made? Not ultimately, whatever that is supposed to mean. I do not stand outside of life's evolutionary history. But those needs are felt by me, and those choices are not made anywhere else, so I don't see why they're not mine. Sam sees things differently, abdicating all goals, choices, and responsibilities (to the universe?), but that ends up tying him in knots and eventually making Dan Dennett's case even stronger.

Sam: There are paradoxes here. The responsibility paradox is real, and I still don’t know what I think about it. … When you take a truly competent person who then does something horrible, that person is really responsible. That’s the true case of responsibility. But the paradox for me is that the more competent you make the person, the more their failures to behave well become inscrutable. … This is very clear in parenting. I have daughters who I’m certainly not browbeating about the illusoriness of free will. No, I’m trying to raise them to be competent self-regulating human beings. So, when I talk to one of my daughters, if I say, “you really should have done otherwise,” …it’s never a claim that in this instance, if I rewound the universe, they might have done otherwise. No, this is a causally determined outcome that was always the way it was going to be. But, it’s a conversation about what I want them to do next time. And saying that is further input into the clockwork of their lives. So, that will change them. Ultimately, my daughters are going to become civilised human beings who will not behave the way they did at 7-years-old or 12-years-old when they are in their 40s. And those changes will be causally affected on the basis of demands imposed on them. But again, there’s no place for the folk psychological notion of free will to land there.
Scott: You wouldn’t give your daughter any credit if she became president of the United States some day?
Sam: I do feel like pride is a virtue that has an expiration date in a human life. Developmentally, there’s like a critical period where pride is not an ethical error or a sign of psychological confusion. It’s actually something you want to get into the code. … But at a certain point, I think you clearly want to outgrow it. … It’s not a basis for compassion for oneself and others. … I don’t feel pride about anything in my life now. I have all kinds of outcomes I prefer. Sometimes I realise them and sometimes I don’t. And the obverse of pride is something like shame. Again, shame is an important thing to be able to feel, but ultimately, I think it reaches its shelf life. You want to be able to transcend shame. Not too early. This is an interesting topic. I’m not sure what I totally believe about it. … You’re just telling yourself a story about the past in both cases. You’re thinking thoughts in the present that nominally refer to the past and they’re making you feel a certain way. It’s like you are watching a movie about your past and you’re being entranced by it and it’s kindling an emotional response that has a certain half-life and it’s incredibly boring. It’s an incredibly boring thing to do with your attention. It’s masturbatory on the pride side, a pseudo-source of gratification, which sets up a system of comparison between yourself and others that ultimately is not a source of well-being. If you are comparing yourself to others and feeling good about that, then five minutes later you are going to be comparing yourself unfavourably to other people who are doing yet more impressive things and you are going to feel bad about that. That pinballing between those two things is not the right algorithm to live a truly self-actualised life. I do think pride and shame ultimately get outgrown. At what point, that’s an interesting question.

Yes, Sam, that is an interesting question, because you are precisely describing the development of a person into a unique and responsible self. This is what Dan Dennett meant when he said that Freedom Evolves. We have the freedom to learn from our experience. If I rewound the universe so that every brain state and environmental influence was exactly the same, it’s true that “I couldn’t have done otherwise,” but that’s not the point. You will never face the same exact situation twice. The universe moves on. But you can learn from the first instance and do something different the next time in a similar situation. This ability to review the past is one of the most important capabilities of consciousness that has developed. And it does not have to be boring, masturbatory, or self-flagellating when done correctly. You cannot change the past, but you can have a growth mindset about the future. You should not continually cry over spilt milk, but you are not doomed to be clumsy forever either. And the emotional feelings generated from your own introspection (or in reaction to those expressed by others), are mechanical cranes that help make the necessary changes in your neural wiring to help reach our goals. See my post on where emotions come from to understand this in more detail. This larger view renders the "fully competent person who does something horrible" much less inscrutable. They've usually just learned something from the past and decided to pursue a new goal.

Once again, you cannot choose the universe you were born into or the particular characteristics and situations that affect you, but the needs, desires, and goals that you feel do not belong to anyone else, so they are yours to own. The beliefs you hold about this are important drivers of your ability to learn and navigate the world. The emotions that drive us should not be too hot from believing in libertarian free will and ultimate responsibility, but they must not be too cold either, holding no one responsible for anything. Sam’s arguments would literally drain the passion out of compassion for ourselves and others, which removes a crucial tool from our ability to learn and grow.

What terms should be used in the most helpful sets of personal beliefs about these issues? Perhaps the use of “free will” comes down to semantic choices between psychologists and philosophers. That’s something Scott and Sam explored briefly.

Scott: We can want to want things. You’re not distinguishing between first-order goals and second-order goals. What gives us free will as a human species? … It’s the wanting to want. It’s our capacity to use implementation of intentions to get out of the bed in the morning and go to the gym even if we don’t want to. I don’t want to do that, but my freedom lies in my capacity to use my consciousness and change my environment in all sorts of ways so that it’s easier, so that the constraints aren’t as big. Don’t you see that as an important part of free will that matters to people?
Sam: I see no reason to call that free will.
Scott: [After a short digression.] There’s a really interesting paper about smokers and free will by Roy Baumeister. He found that in almost every case, people overestimated the extent to which they wouldn’t be able to quit. They wouldn’t be able to have free will [to eliminate] the urge, but it turns out humans have much more self-control than they realise they are capable of.
Sam: There’s a difference between voluntary and involuntary action. There’s a difference between behavioural self-control and lacking that capacity. Let’s say that…my goal is to stop smoking but I’m completely incapable of not smoking. That’s one way to be. The other way to be is that I have a goal to stop smoking and I can actually veto the impulse and stop smoking when it comes online. But every instance of this, the sufficiency of my strength of will in one case, the weakness of my will in another case, every bit of it is being determined by states in my brain which I didn’t author, which I didn’t create.

There goes Sam again with his dualist "I" sitting outside of his embodied self. But I read the Baumeister paper after I listened to this podcast and found it really interesting. I especially liked the following list of definitions from the front of the paper:

Agency is the capacity to initiate and control action. It is related to the term agent, as in someone who acts. It encompasses choosing, initiating action on one's own, and accepting responsibility for one's chosen actions.
Voluntary control has multiple meanings. For present purposes, it can be understood as indicating that the person is capable of choosing between performing the action and not performing it. Voluntary control means that the power to decide resides within the individual: the person is capable of making a conscious decision and implementing it. Loss of voluntary control means that the person is incapable of acting differently, either because of external forces or unconscious causes. With regard to addictive smoking, loss of voluntary control means that smokers cannot stop themselves from smoking.
Free will is understood as the capability to act in different ways, subject to the person's own control and serving the person's reasons, goals, wishes, and choices. A recent and authoritative definition, based on an interdisciplinary committee working for a granting foundation, defined free will as the capability of performing free actions. Free actions, in turn, were defined in two ways. One was “any intentional action performed on the basis of informed, rational deliberation by a sane person in the absence of compulsion and coercion.” The other invoked multiplicity of possible actions (i.e., the person could do two or more different things) in a given situation as constructed by all prior causes and events. Thus, in simple terms, free will is the capacity to act in different ways in the same situation. It thus overlaps considerably with voluntariness. Shepherd (2012) showed that most people do not accept unconscious free will, so free will entails conscious control of action. The term “free will” is a traditional usage but modern theorists generally do not postulate “will” as a distinct psychological entity, so it would be more precise to speak of free action.

I quite like these definitions. They are thoughtful, careful, fully drained of extreme libertarian notions, and compatible with the facts of a naturalistic and deterministic universe. They also overlap with a lot of what Sam thinks is going on in the world, despite his controversial and confused labelling.

Sam: None of this is to deny that certain outcomes in life are better than others and worth wanting. None of this is to deny that there are ways to get what you want out of life and ways to fail to get what you want. None of this is to deny that there is this vast landscape of experience and we need to navigate one part of it so as to be happy and functional and we should avoid navigating so as to be captured by another part which leads to the worst forms of misery. All of that is true, and we can talk about how to do all of that. And all of that includes the prospect that people can learn, and people can improve themselves.
Scott: I don’t think what you are saying is wrong. I think you are confusing the hell out of people because you make such great points. The kind of free will that matters to humans—we have all of that. … My point is this. The cybernetic system wants to reach a goal that it desires. … Don’t you think that’s a sensible form of the term free will, that you have free will to write a book? You want to do so, and you use your consciousness to make that a reality. You don’t see that as the kind of free will that people truly care about?
Sam: People care about realising their goals in life. And there are causal ways to succeed at that, and causal ways to fail at that. Learning to play the cello is not going to happen by accident. My denying free will is not the same thing as endorsing fatalism. … This is how people misunderstand this criticism of free will. They think, well, if I have no free will, then why do anything? Why not just wait to see what happens? If I accidentally wait to see if I learn to play the cello, we know what’s going to happen there. I’m not going to learn to play the cello. The only way to learn is to intend to learn, to practice, to seek instruction. All of that. People care about outcomes in life that are worth caring about. None of that requires free will to talk about that.

Well, it sure seems like we do need some notion of free will to talk about this stuff. As soon as you deny free will, fatalism, dehumanisation, and coercion creep into the conversation. So, until free will skeptics like Sam come up with a better term, I think we’re stuck with Dan Dennett’s free will worth wanting or the more clinical definitions of free will from psychologists like Scott and Baumeister.

Feel free to propose something different though! I always look forward to the opportunity to learn and improve my own beliefs. Next time, I'll take a brief look at Sam's "final thoughts" on all this and then I ought to be in a good position to offer my own current thoughts.

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Another Free Will Debate — Kaufman v. Harris (Part 1/2)

4/5/2021

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On March 22nd, 3 Quarks Daily published my review of Gregg Caruso and Dan Dennett's new book Just Deserts: Debating Free Will. Ten days earlier, Sam Harris released his Final Thoughts on Free Will on his Making Sense podcast. Was he trying to scoop me? I wish! Did he even mention Just Deserts in his podcast? Surprisingly no! Why not? Probably because he and Dan Dennett have already had several heated conversations about free will. There was Dan's dismissive review of one of Sam's books, Sam's pissed-off response to that review, and then a 2-hour podcast discussion trying to smooth the water between them. No need to go back to all that!

So, what prompted Sam to speak out about free will now? Well, I think the real reason Sam posted his thoughts when he did was because it was fresh on the heels of a 3-hour discussion he had with Scott Barry Kaufman on The Psychology Podcast. Scott published his amazing book Transcend last year, which has the sub-title "The New Science of Self-Actualization". In other words, having a self that is free to be actualized is kind of an essential part of Scott's project. But Sam is famous for denying these things in his work, including his 2012 book Free Will.

Since I'm deeply immersed in the topic of free will right now, I thought I'd spend a few posts on these recent discussions. I'll get to Sam's "final thoughts" in a few posts, but first, let's take a closer look at Part 1 of Sam's conversation with Scott, which was posted on February 25th. Next time, I'll delve into Part 2, which was posted on March 4th. I won't bother transcribing all three hours of these free podcasts, so please listen to them for yourself for the full story. But here are some important bits that I'd like to comment on.

Sam: When I was in college, a girlfriend broke up with me and I just became this machine that was producing unhappiness until an MDMA experience showed me that that could be interrupted with no reason attached.

Sam has become a strong proponent of psychedelic drug use after this early experience kicked off his life as a contemplative and public intellectual focusing on consciousness and free will. I haven't used such drugs myself personally, but as a 49-year-old-man now, I have to say that every time Sam talks about the important lessons he got from the experience, I think I've already learned those lessons from other experiences. (Notably, in grand nature spots, but also while studying astronomy, geology, and deep evolutionary history.) Could I have learned these lessons earlier in my life on a drug trip? Maybe. But I tend to agree with Abraham Maslow who thought such experiences were cheating to try to get to self-actualization. Better to have reasons for your emotions and learn from those.

[Sam] studied for years with the leading Buddhist meditation thinkers. There are dualistic vs. non-dualistic forms of awareness meditation, with different sets of instructions for each one as to what to pay attention to and why. With these exercises, you aren’t meditating yourself into perfection; you are just learning to recognize something that is already there.

I've not been on any lengthy retreats yet, but I have done a fair bit of reading about meditation, and I have practiced it on my own for nearly 20 years now with the help of many guided meditation sessions along the way (including lots from Sam's Waking Up app). Meditating has been a good and useful experience in my life, but, a bit like using psychedelics, I think it's an artificial experience that doesn't have quite the relevance to everyday life that Sam thinks it does. I'll say more about that in the next post, but I wanted to flag that I have meditated and enjoyed it.

Scott: I want to read a sentence you wrote because I have issues and questions with it “Consider what it would actually take to have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions and you would need to be in complete control of these factors.” This sentence reads like you are an implicit dualist. Who is the “you” in that sentence?

This is a great observation that I also notice whenever I read or listen to Sam. He continually toggles back and forth between his cold declarations about the lack of a self or free will and then his hot instructions about what "you" need to do or notice about "your consciousness and its contents". In Dan Dennett's review of Free Will, Dan pointed this out too. He noted a sentence on p9 that said "I, as the conscious witness of my experience, no more initiate events in my prefrontal cortex than I cause my heart to beat." Dan said, "If this isn't pure Cartesianism, I don't know what it is. His prefrontal cortex is part of the I in question." That's exactly right. Consciousness is embodied and should not be spoken of so separately as Sam is wont to do.

What does Sam say about this sentence when Scott asks him how to understand it? He shifts into Zen Koan mode.

Sam: Yeah. It’s not really understandable in that way. What you’ve really just landed on is the problem with the concept of free will. It’s an incoherent idea. ... As you know, Dan Dennett has tried to purify the concept so as to have in his terms a “free will worth wanting”. ... [But] you’re not acknowledging just how many important things shift ethically once you let go of that spooky free will. Things really do change. And they change in ways that are important not just for our justice system and our concept of justice, they are important for ethical intuitions about what it means to be a good person and how we should feel in the presence of all the misadventures we have in life...and Dan Dennett’s project acknowledges none of that. That’s why he and I have never agreed on this topic.

This is an incredibly disingenuous reading of Dan's work and his previous exchanges with Sam. If anything, it's the other way around as Sam has not done the hard work of trying to really see what goes away when the concept of free will disappears. As one example, Dan noted in is review of Free Will that "entirely missing from Harris's account...is any acknowledgement of the morally important difference between...the raving psychopath and us." Perhaps this is why Dan has just moved on to debate Gregg Caruso instead, since he's actually a serious thinker who has tried to develop a Public Health Quarantine Model to replace our current retributive justice system. Poking at the holes in Caruso's model took up a significant portion of Just Desesrts. Sam doesn't even have a model to poke at. And it's not just psychopaths he doesn't see as any different than the rest of us.

Sam: The rules, ethically and psychologically, seem to change entirely for people, when you are talking about [other] people. They don’t think this way about chimpanzees. They don’t think this way about people with certain kinds of brain damage. ...The problem is that it doesn’t make any sense. ... It’s very difficult to make sense of this in terms of the streams of causality that I’m not aware of, in terms of gene transcription, and neurotransmitter behaviour, and all of the causes reaching back to the Big Bang that I didn’t author.

I'll point this out again in the next post, but the way Sam speaks about humans is literally dehumanising. In case it's not obvious how dangerous that is, David Livingstone Smith has done excellent work on the subject. (See this book review by Smith for some examples of Nazi dehumanisation.) I get that Sam is merely recognising here that the "folk" have different intuitions about people compared to their intuitions about chimpanzees and brain damaged people, but by saying this doesn't make sense, he is opening up the door to some very bad attitudes.

Scott: You are really hung up on the magical part of free will.
Sam: It’s not hung up! It is what people mean when they feel that someone should be punished, really punished, because they deserve their punishment. That is “just deserts.” That is someone who feels that the logic of retribution is anchored to libertarian free will.

It's sad to hear that Sam is still stuck repeating these points even though Dan Dennett took them apart several years ago. In his review of Free Will, Dan noted that Sam said, "However, the 'free will' that compatibilists defend is not the free will that most people feel they have" (p16). But Dan countered, "First of all, he doesn't know this. [And experimental philosophy suggests he's wrong.] But even if it is true, maybe all this shows is that most people are suffering from a sort of illusion that could be replaced by wisdom. After all, most people used to believe the sun went around the earth. They were wrong, and it took some heavy lifting to convince them of this." And in Just Deserts, Dan and Gregg do lots of this kind of lifting. Both agree there are reasons to get rid of retribution and libertarian free will, and you can do so as a free will skeptic (Gregg's project) or as a compatibilist (Dan's project).

Scott: It seems like people can do all the things they care about. If they think they care about making choices that are somehow uncaused, they just aren’t literally understanding what that means, as you point out. What people really mean when they insist that free will is important is they don’t want to feel coerced. They think of causes as sources of coercion, but that’s a confusion. I think people want to make choices that are consistent with their own goals and be able to deliberate about the causes where their desires aren’t totally clear, and they can do those things. And it’s pretty clear their consciousness participates causally in that process.
Sam: I would dispute that. ... For much of what we seem to do consciously, it remains mysterious why consciousness need be associated with any of these things. We can imagine building robots that could pass the Turing test that could do all of these things without there being something that it is like to be those robots.

Ah, now we're getting to another root problem with Sam's view of the world. I think that all his meditation training focused on "consciousness and its contents" has left him with his dualist language and a fundamental misunderstanding of what consciousness is. I've spent the past year looking at the definitions and studies of consciousness (summarised here) and found it requires a much more nuanced understanding of how consciousness emerges to varying degrees via a hierarchy of activities. Along the way, there is clear evidence that conscious awareness is required for certain types of learning. (This kind of awareness is possibly what Sam means by "consciousness" but that's not at all clear considering his dabbling in panpsychism.) Also, Dan Dennett's paper on The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies shows just how unimaginable Sam's robots really are.

Scott: Of course we are just our biology. What else would we be? But isn’t it the point that our biology encompasses all the interesting stuff that we are? You could still say that it means something for the robot to be a unique robot. But don’t you think that the interesting thing is that the biology encompasses all the unique aspects of what Sam Harris is and who Sam Harris is, including your unconsciousness and your consciousness?
Sam: Hmmm. I’m trying to think of how to make this point land…
<<< ROLL PODCAST CREDITS >>>

Wow, what a cliffhanger ending! I shouted, "Yes!" to Scott's question, but let's see what Sam says next time.

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A Few Further Thoughts on Just Deserts

3/29/2021

3 Comments

I got quite a lot of nice comments last week on my review of Just Deserts. The authors of the book—Gregg Caruso and Dan Dennett—both told 3 Quarks Daily that it was a good review so I consider that a real feat to have satisfied both sides in such an argumentative book.

One of the comments I saw was a wish to hear a debate between Dan Dennett and Sam Harris, who recently posted his "Final Thoughts On Free Will." I can't make that happen, but while I'm focused on this topic, I thought I should write a little something about Sam's position.

I'll get to that soon, but first, I just thought I'd share a quick post with a few of the paragraphs that had to get cut from my 2,500-word review. I may want to refer to these later, and they really were darlings I hated to kill. Enjoy! I'll be back soon with more on this topic.

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The fear of determinism is an ancient one, stretching back to early religious questions about whether gods or the fates foresaw and controlled everything we humans do. When the Enlightenment came along, and Newton showed us the mechanical workings of the cosmos, and Darwin showed us the blind nature of natural selection, our fear of control shifted from warm and (hopefully) friendly gods to the cold and calculating inevitability of logic and mathematics. Dostoyevsky wrote a wonderful passage about this in Notes from Underground in 1864:

“You say, science itself will teach man that he never had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. … [But I] would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, a propos of nothing, [a man were to arise and] say to us all: ‘I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!’”

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If you’d prefer to just form your own opinion and cast your own vote, go read Just Deserts now. If you want to hear what I think, here goes. But it helps to put my cards on the table first, so you know where I’m coming from. I call myself an evolutionary philosopher. I think paying close attention to the history of evolution gives us new insights into age-old philosophical questions. So, I’m obviously a huge fan of Dan Dennett. But I’ve also seen Gregg debate free will at a local event, and I got to have a few beers with him in the pub afterwards while he continued the debate informally. I found him extremely impressive and persuasive. (He’s also just a very nice guy.) When I found out about Just Deserts, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it and see how the two of these guys got on with things.

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In some sense, both of these are quite radical positions, and both of them are conservative as well. Gregg is simply doing standard analytic philosophy—dissecting definitions and logically analysing their properties and relationships—while driven by a commonly held desire to reform a prison system we almost all agree is not working. But his conclusions demand that we drop all longstanding usages of free will, desert, responsibility, blame, and punishment. He thinks they are all too tainted and has built an entire replacement for them that he calls a Public Health-Quarantine Model. (There is much more on this in his forthcoming book Rejecting Retributivism.) Dan is never one to shy away from an unpopular opinion (c.f. “consciousness is an illusion”), but he is deeply skeptical of such radicalism here. He maintains that respect for the law “is a foundational requirement of stability in a state” (JD p.164). Instead, he would rather propose deep changes to philosophy “because we cannot do the job right while sequestered in our ivory towers” (JD p.165). He seems to think folk terminology is worth holding onto here, even if their meanings must unavoidably shift.

Ultimately, this may just be a choice in strategy between Dan’s position and Gregg’s. If so, that would mimic a story Dan told in his 2008 essay “Some Observations On the Psychology of Thinking About Free Will.” Regarding Daniel Wegner’s book title The Illusion of Conscious Will, Dan wrote, “Our disagreement was really a matter of expository tactics, not theory. … Should one insist that free, conscious will is real without being magic, without being what people traditionally thought it was (my line)? Or should one concede that traditional free will is an illusion—but not to worry: Life still has meaning, and people can and should be responsible (Wegner's line)? The answer to this question is still not obvious.” Perhaps Dan is still wrestling with this choice, although it’s clear Gregg thinks his choice is the right one judging by the weight of recent books and articles he has put behind it.

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Overview of Knowledge and Its Limits by Timothy Williamson

Overview of Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch

Consciousness 24 — The FAQs of Consciousness

Not My Final Thoughts on Free Will

Summary of Freedom Evolves

North East Humanists — Beliefs and Values

Some Thoughts on Sam Harris' Final Thoughts on Free Will

Another Free Will Debate — Kaufman v. Harris (Part 2/2)

Another Free Will Debate — Kaufman v. Harris (Part 1/2)

A Few Further Thoughts on Just Deserts

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