The conversation took another bend as it became necessary to define our terms. Free will and metacognition are different things. Yes, we do not always make specific choices, that's true, but whether or not our ability to make decisions is an illusory facet of our lives, is something that we got into a lot more.
A few people were really uncomfortable with the idea of causal determinism: the idea that every cause is an effect and, in turn, another cause. Some of us felt that that was a sort of damning prognosis on life and an abnegation of responsibility. After all, if all of your decisions are the product of genetics, circumstance, and biology no one can really blame anyone for anything else, right?
Susan pointed out that understanding that a person does things because of a confluence of forces helps us to empathize with them, rather than believe them to label them.
This segued into a talk about the criminal justice system, and something that most of us - it seemed - could agree on: the idea of punishing criminals, rather than trying to figure out ways to prevent them from committing crimes or getting the to understand why wrong is wrong, etc. is not terribly beneficial. This is one of the things that Harris talks about specifically in this (long) video:
Some of us did feel that it might be impossible to get people to understand their own moral deficiencies. Psychopaths, for instance, may have neurological make up that does not allow them to be taught moral lessons - see Jon Ronson's The Pyschopath Test.
James and Suzy helped articulate a few of our linguistic problems a bit better. James pointed out that if we believe that everything in the universe is material and must follow material rules, then it must all be predictable. If we do not accept that everything in the universe must be material, then things may not be as predictable. The if clause here is the key: if we accept that. Our group was a bit divided on this point.
Suzy eloquently pointed out that we are talking about the difference between whether or not human beings are complex robots or there is, to borrow a phrase, a ghost in the shell, so to speak.
Laplace's Demon is a thought experiment - untestable because of practicality and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - pointing out that if - like James said - everything is physical and follows the same rules, and we could isolate every piece of matter in the universe and determine its velocity, we would be able to figure out everything that ever had happened and ever would happen. It's one way of talking about causal determinism (perhaps a better name than scientific determinism). It's also a character in a comic that I've been drawing. :D
Again, it was brought up (Lyn, I believe, pointed it out) that this is only true if we believe that everything in the universe is material.
Randy pointed out that to attempt to make changes in a world of causal determinism might be paradoxical - how does one influence a closed chain of causality when one is in said chain? Technically, it wouldn't be possible. The choices that we make would be our experience of that illusion. But even if choice is illusory, it isn't as cynical as it sounds. What we see as our choices are actually a confluence of neurological variables, shaped by biology and circumstance, it doesn't change the feeling of choosing. It would be important to make the best choices that we can because that would be part of the causal chain.
At a few points in the discussion, we talked about different religions' obsession with free will because without people being able to be judged good or evil based on their actions, punitive or rewarding afterlives make no sense... then again, Calvinists just sort of go there anyway.
My point in bringing this up is as a segue into our next topic:
SATAN!
The idea of evil creates a lot of problems, even in a non-religious world. It's much easier to chunk that which we think of as "bad" by ascribing it to a sentient evil being. A lot of religions have some manner of anti-god. Soooooooo... Let's discuss!
This is copied from a post on a previous blog. It more or less summarizes what I would have said if I had said anything at this meeting.
ReplyDeletehttp://web.archive.org/web/20150919065935/http://variationselectioninheritance.podbean.com/e/free-enough-will/
Free enough will
Neal Stephenson wrote an essay about an argument between Isaac Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz had invented this “theory of everything” to satisfy his intuitions about free will. He kind of invented the psion (the particles that compose psychic energy in Marvel Comics), only he went further and gave them not just mind but free will, because he thought that it was the single most important organizing principle of the universe. Called them Monads or something like that.
Now, I’ve been Christmas shopping, and since my wife works at Barnes & Noble, most of my presents are books, and since I’m a neuroscientist, a lot of those books are about the brain. There’s a LOT of new data driving new thinking about the organization of “the self.” I’ll do some mini-reviews on the blog over break as I’m skimming/wrapping these things.
But let’s ignore data for five minutes and just do some thought experiments like a philosopher would do.
First, let’s define what being completely free, with absolutely no constraints, actually means. That’s a random number generator with a flat distribution, like a d6, but bigger; let’s call it a d-infinity, or a d∞. This is a situation that sounds good, until you realize that the whole basis of learning is eliminating choices that don’t work well (evolution applies to thoughts and actions, too). In other words, intelligence, or knowledge, or the laws of physics, or whatever, is a constraint. We tend to think that more is better. More choices means more free, and more free means better. And that’s wrong. Absolute freedom of the d-infinity type is not something I’d want, if I actually had it. There’s such a thing as too many choices. I experience that every time I go book shopping. There are too many to read, too many to blurb, even, and so I have to choose based on incomplete information. Not to mention my limited budget . . .
On the other end of the spectrum we have complete determination, complete programming with no choice whatsoever. This doesn’t actually happen in the real world, either (a person with a gun to his head could theoretically choose to die, though that would usually be stupid), although in our social wranglings we pretty commonly claim “I had no choice!” because we don’t want to be blamed for some particular choice, or we say “We have no choice,” because we’re trying to convince someone to do what we want. It was refreshing to hear Bryan Cranston give it more nuance last night in Argo:
“There are no good options. This is the best bad option we have.”
So what do most people actually mean when they throw out the phrase free will? I think they mean free enough, a comfortable number of choices, a Goldilocks situation where there’s enough information to constrain away the stupid choices but enough choices to feel free. In other words, like for most things in biology, there’s an optimum, a happy medium, a Third Way (as the Buddha or Bill Clinton might say).