Dennet’s wording is ambiguous. Dennet and Erasmus share the view that, should the doctrine of free will as an illusion become widespread, it would have negative consequences for society. This is revealing of Dennet’s motives for insisting on compatibilism even though he seems to fully accept determinism.

This doesn’t mean they agree on what free will us, but they both believe we have it. Dennet would not agree we have the kind of free will Erasmus believed in, which would have been contracausal free will.

Dennet seems concerned that people knowing our will is not free in the traditional sense of Erasmus, but rather fully caused by deterministic forces, would convince them they are helpless puppets, despite the abundance of evidence of actual observed human behavior, that even a child can see, which shows we are not puppets. Puppets are controlled by external forces, and humans are not.

I don’t really get Dennet’s fear here. It seems to me akin to the fear religious people hold that absence of the fear of god would make people immoral. I don’t think fear of god causes moral behavior, it’s just a rationalization for moral behavior. I think the causes of moral behavior are more deeply ingrained in human nature, and are driven by the need to have the approval of our family, our peers, and our communities.

Just because our will is caused rather than free doesn’t mean we have no will. But Dennet remains nervous and still insists on attaching the qualifier “free” because he thinks it makes people feel better.

I was interested to see your quote from Dennett that implies Erasmus believed free will is an illusion. I was of the understanding that Erasmus argued FOR common-sense free will against the Luterians who were advocating predestination.

Am I in error about this?

Thanks,

James

I will defer to the expertise in this group. I believe based on the facts that we are not “outside” the realm of causality. BUT, when I say “I am going to open the door.” and then do so this is what most of I consider “free will.” I can consistently propose hypotheses about what I will do in the future within a given framework of time and fulfill those hypotheses. The scientists can continue to argue about the plethora of physical interconnections that are necessary for an event to take place, i.e. dependency on the causal nexus, but this has no significant relevance on the average persons use of the phrase “free will.” I act as IF I can make decisions on “my own” and those decisions blossom to fruition.

I don’t think it much matters whether you assign the cause of rabies to the virus, to a compromised immune system, to the vector that caused infection, or to any number of other ultimate or proximate causes in the causal chain.

What matters to the organism is that the virus crosses it’s boundary with the world outside and infects it. In any case, I don’t think you achieve any kind of support for any compatibilist ideas however you look at this example.

This confusion about causes does illustrate that in macroscopic or “emergent” properties, especially in the crude course grained human language categorization of human subjective experience, causation is less clearly identifiable. If I buy something, is it because I thought it was pretty, because I needed it, because it resonated with some childhood memory, because I was victim of advertising suggestibility, because I smelled something appealing during the decision, or some combination of these things? Usually we don’t know what causes us to do things, but we think we do because our brain’s habit of rationalization always causes it to invent a narrative, a linguistic explanation for why we did what we did. There is often some truth in these rationalizations, but they also can omit much or invent much as well. This slippery set of human dreams, fantasies, and stories are the linguistic quicksand compatibilists seem to be willing to found their notion of freedom upon.

I sort of skipped over the argument from authority about Dennett. His authority is not what I’m interested in, just the actual ideas. I will read up on “multiple drafts”. No matter how much authority or respect he has, and I do respect, like, and admire the man, he can still be wrong about things.

How many people in the world will agree with you that Watson has free will?

Wait, is this now an argumentum ad populum?

You act as if you can toss this point aside, but you can’t have it both ways. Does it matter what people think the words “choice”, “intend”, “will”, “want”, “desire” mean? Does it matter what the English language or any human language means? Most certainly it does. And the meaning of a language is descriptive, contained in the minds of its users. Either people commonly believe that “free will” is a special human quality that gives us a freedom from divine determination and allows our unique personality and character to express itself without limits, a pure kind of mental freedom to materialize new thoughts out of nowhere, or else they don’t believe this. I think this is roughly what most people believe. In other words either people believe they have the “free will” humans have for millennia thought they had, what compatibilists are fond of calling “contra-causal free will”, or else they do not believe this. So it matters a lot what people believe “free will” means, because the whole premise of the claim that “free will” is compatible with determinism, is predicated on what the meaning of “free will” is. To me it is obvious that compatibilists have their own peculiar definition of “free will” because they think it is important to say “compatibilism is right”, or they think it is important to say “we have free will” (as Dennett evidently does, in his own words). The importance of these things seems to me to be very much more related to various peculiarities and frailties of humans than it is to how the human brain works. Compatibilists have often argued that what humans really think they have is the compatibilist kind of free will, which really isn’t freedom from anything, but it is ability to act in one’s own interests.

I suppose you could say “compatibilist free will” provides freedom from being like a passive rock or a bit of paper blowing in the wind, but that doesn’t rise to the level of what humans believe they have. Humans believe they have something that is not only beyond Watson in degree, as you indicated, I believe, is how Dennett would distinguish humans from Watson, but also fundamentally beyond Watson in kind. So I don’t think there is any evidence for the claim that humans believe they have “compatibilist free will”, and I think it’s a maneuver on the part of compatibilists to protect their shaky claim about what “free will” means. So you really can’t dismiss a discussion of what “free will” means, nor can you dismiss an appeal to what most humans think “free will” means. If we were to accurately survey the public at large in a questionnaire that avoids planting ideas or otherwise training or tainting the subjects, I sincerely believe that we would find the vast majority of human beings believe in some kind of “free will” that is contra-causal, and that they believe Watson could never have this or anything like it.

I think [Dennett] is correct that incompatibilists tend to make us “too small,” identifying the “me” with ONLY the moment of consciousness, rather than to the process as a whole. I continually see you guys doing this.

I think you are completely wrong here. This echoes the common anti-reductionism straw man, supposing that scientists who are analyzing something in detail blind themselves to the bigger picture. Of course we are humans, we are alive, we have the same feelings and experiences as others, so how could you seriously think for a second that scientists can’t perceive the continuity of the human individual over time? This is perhaps you engaging in the same “I’m the only adult here” tactic you criticized me for, or perhaps you are playing “Compatibilists are the only full and whole human beings here”.

I agree with you that humans have the attributes of desiring, planning, predicting outcomes of actions, assessing results, feeding that back into future decisions, thinking logically and imagining counterfactuals, but I don’t think there is any requirement that there be something “free” in the human mind in order to have those capacities. You can call this freedom, but I think it’s a weak notion of “free will” compared to how people generally think of it. I don’t think you are offering any real consolation to people, just a phony consolation, not very unlike in nature the consolation that “God has a plan for us,” which Darwin fretted over destroying by publishing his picture of life arising out of a brutal struggle for survival. Compatibilists, in a very real way, are replicating the struggle Darwin had about revealing the truth, which they avoid by playing equivocation on “free will”: the public notion, Descartes’ notion, “contra-causal free will” vs the “compatibilist free will” which effectively boils down to no freedom from the constraints of determinism, but the worthwhile features all human beings know they have, which is that ability to resist coercion and act in one’s own interests. You can call this a kind of freedom until you are blue in the face, it does not amount to what the traditional and most widely accepted meaning of “free will” is. Maybe if you guys hired Karl Rove you could massively re-engineer public conceptions of “free will”. But that would be a pyrrhic victory, merely appearance for appearance’s sake.

I’ve already responded to your vacation planning model in this post

Here is an analogy that I hope illustrates why I can’t say there is any freedom, even though the subjective apparitions of human emotion, logic, memory, and their linguistic correlates do paint lovely pictures about yearning, choice, reflection, and action that give a very convincing simulation of “free will” (which is exactly why people believe they have it).

If I have an algorithm to select one of a group of varying length sticks, let’s say to always select the longest of the bunch, is there any free will here? You may try to say there is in selecting the algorithm, but putting that aside, is there freedom in the algorithm driven choice itself? No there is not. The outcome is determined by the lengths of the sticks. By examining the sticks, you could easily predict in advance which stick the algorithm would select.

Now if my brain has an algorithm wired into it genetically (no choice here) for choosing from among a group of perhaps thousands or hundreds of thousands of parallel competing signals from different parts of the brain, based on say the strength of those signals, or based on the breadth of those signals as determined by number of connected synapses, whatever the actual process is, somehow it is filtering and weighting and comparing emotional signals and logical signals and coloring those signals with memory inputs in ways that we do not control. The unconscious mind is effectively mindlessly executing a competition between all the sources in our brain that impact what choice we might make, or what action we perform next. Here the brain is doing something essentially equivalent to, but more complex and hierarchical than, comparing the lengths of sticks and awarding “winner” status to the “longest” or “strongest” coherent combination of signals, like the horse race analogy I described in another post. We feel like we participate in a controlling role in the decision, but the actual valuing of options and the determination of which one is “best” happens, I’m convinced, beyond our control. We really aren’t choosing willfully and consciously, we feel like we are doing this willfully and consciously. We never really know the full explanation for why one choice seemed better than another.

And these facts are obscured by compatibilists incomprehensible need to insist that at some point the unfathomably complex fabric of neural connections and it’s range of capacities is so complex, so unpredictable to us, and so well suited to how we want to be, compared to say computers, that we christen it as “free willing” its behavior. I don’t know when a complicated network of neurons crosses that line into “free will land”. In fact, I don’t believe such a line exists, but compatibilists pretend as if it does exist because their main concern is, as I said before, not how the brain works, but how people feel about how the brain works. And for doing this, compatibilists are obscuring truth and doing humanity a disservice in my opinion.

I agree this could be easier in actual dialog, but on the other hand sometimes it helps to have the quiet time to reflect deeply. This is a complex and elusive subject, to be thinking about the brain using the brain, which I think creates at least part of the confusion.

Lessee, computer science example: Suppose I tell you I have a program that can solve the halting problem. You don’t need to see the details of how my program works in order to be sure it doesn’t work. You already know it doesn’t work because Turing’s proof is so strong that it doesn’t depend on the details of any proposed solution.

Similarly, you’ve seen many compatibilist arguments that the free-will question really doesn’t come down to the particulars of how the brain works, and that compatibilism isn’t a new response to the unsavory findings of modern neuroscience. People have been making compatibilist objections to the notion of contra-causal free will for a long time. New scientific findings that our minds aren’t contra-causal after all don’t refute those long standing compatibilist arguments, because those arguments have always been that our minds aren’t contra-causal.

“This nonsense about counterfactuals providing latitude for human freedom is simply loony in my opinion.”

Well, that’s not in response to me. And it is looney. And it’s not something anyone has said.

The point is that when people talk about freedom in every other context, no-one means “contra-causal” freedom. They only ever mean the the type and amount of freedom implied as when one employs counterfactuals. The only people who are concerned with contra-causal freedom are people with a naive aversion to determinism and what it might suggest about how we value our lives. Jeff, PLEASE NOTE: You do not seem to get this. To Jerry and other incompatiblists here, the question of free will is a question of VALUES, not just of the facts of the matter. Jerry for example seems to think that our lives would be richer if we had “real,” contra-causal freedom, and that discovering we don’t have that should crush our spirits. And for facing up to these facts, he’s much braver than, for example, compatiblists, who when confronted with this depressing realization run and hide behind their obtuse philosophical redefinitions and rationalizations. Actually, I guess you do get this because you wrote the comment Jerry promoted here: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/sunday-free-will-pseudo-dualism/.

So ok now we’re all on the same page. Everyone knows this is a question of values, not of facts or mere semantics, we can all try to engage each other honestly and maybe the incompatibilists can get around to making the argument that contra-causal free will is what everyone really should want, and why compatiblists are missing the point (or actually lying) when they say they’re satisfied with the deterministic freedom that we actually have.

Also, some days ago I wrote a response to you at post #21 below. I don’t know if you saw this, but if you did, you chose not to reply.