Month: January 2012

This is a sequel to an earlier discussion.  You should read it first.  Coyne writes,

There's not much downside to abandoning the notion of free will. It's impossible, anyway, to act as though we don't have it: you'll pretend to choose your New Year's resolutions, and the laws of physics will determine whether you keep them. And there are two upsides. The first is realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains, and contemplating the notion that things like consciousness, free choice, and even the idea of "me" are but convincing illusions fashioned by natural selection. Further, by losing free will we gain empathy, for we realize that in the end all of us, whether Bernie Madoffs or Nelson Mandelas, are victims of circumstance — of the genes we're bequeathed and the environments we encounter. With that under our belts, we can go about building a kinder world.

This, Coyne's concluding paragraph, has it all: scientism, incoherence, and liberal victimology.

1.  Coyne realizes that we cannot deliberate, choose, and act without the belief in free will. He realizes that one cannot, say, choose to eat less in the coming year without believing (even if falsely) that one is freely choosing, without believing that the choice is 'up to oneself.'    But then Coyne immediately confuses this unavoidable false believing with pretending to choose.  He seems to think that if my choice is determined and not free (in the libertarian sense explained in the earlier post), then it is not a genuine choice, but a pretend choice.  But that is not the case.  A choice is genuine whether or not it is determined. 

People deliberate and choose.  Bicycles don't. That's part of the pre-analytic data.  It is also part of the pre-analytic data that people sometimes pretend to deliberate and pretend to choose.  It is a grotesque confusion on Coyne's part to think that if one is determined to choose then one's choice is not genuine but pretend.  (Note also that if determinism is true, then one's pretending to choose is also determined without prejudice to its being a real case of pretending to choose.)

Coyne is making a mistake similar to the one he made at the beginning of the piece.  There he implied that if a choice is not free then it is not a choice. But a choice is a choice whether free or determined.  Coyne was confusing the question, Are there choices? with the question, Are there free choices?  He now thinks that if a choice is determined, then it not a real, but a merely pretend, choice.  That is doubly confused.  Just as a pretend choice can be free, a real choice can be determined.

2. We are then told that consciousness, free choice, and the idea of the self are "illusions fashioned by natural selection."  This is nonsense pure and simple.

First of all, consciousness cannot be an illusion.  Consciousness cannot be an illusion for the simple reason that it is a presupposition of the distinction between reality and illusion. An illusion is an illusion to consciousness, so that if there is no consciousness there are no illusions either. There simply is no (nonverbal) distinction between the illusion of consciousness and consciousness. If one is under the illusion that one is conscious, then one is conscious, really conscious, and therefore not under any illusion about the matter.

The thesis that consciousness is an illusion is self-refuting.  If I merely seem to be conscious, but am not conscious, then I am conscious.  And if I do not merely seem to be conscious, but am conscious, then (of course) I am conscious.  Therefore, necessarily, if I seem to be conscious, then I am conscious. Here we bite on granite, and "our spade is turned" — to mix Nimzovich and Wittgenstein metaphors.  Or in the words of a German proverb, Soviel Schein, soviel Sein. 

Consciousness, in this regard, is analogous to truth.  If you try to say something about truth, you presuppose truth.  For if you try to say something about truth, presumably you are trying to say something true about truth.  So if you say that truth is an illusion, and that there are no truths, then you are saying that in truth there are no truths — which is self-refuting.  If, on the other hand, you are simply making noises or perhaps aiming to say something false, the we ignore you for those reasons.

3. I don't believe that one can show in the same clean 'knock-down' way that free will is not an illusion.  That consciousness is an illusion is a plainly incoherent idea; the incoherence of the notion that free will is an illusion is harder to uncover.  But suppose we ask, "In which sense of 'illusion' is free will an illusion?"  It is nothing like a correctable perceptual illusion of the sort we are subject to on a daily basis.  The 'illusion' of free will, if illusion it be, cannot be thrown off.  I cannot function as an agent without taking myself to be free, and I cannot cease being an agent short of suicide.  Echoing Sartre, I am condemned to agency and to that extent "condemned to be free."  Even a mad-dog quietist who decided to renounce all action, would be deciding to renounce all action and thereby demonstrating willy-nilly the ineradicable reality of his agency.  An 'illusion' that it constutive of my very being an agent is no illusion in any worthwile sense of the term. 

It's a bit like an Advaitin (an adherent of Advaita Vedanta) telling me that the multiple world of our ordinary sense experience is an illusion.  "OK, but what does that mean?  When we are at the shooting range, you are going to take care not to be down range when the shooting starts, right?  Why, if the world of multiplicity, the world of shotguns and shells and targets and tender human bodies is an illusion?  Why would it matter? Obviously, you are playing fast and loose with 'illusion' and don't really believe that this gun and your head are illusions.)

One cannot distinguish (except verbally) the mere appearance of consciousness and the reality of consciousness.  Similarly, I suggest that one cannot distinguish between the 'illusion' of free will and its reality.  This thesis of course requires much more development and support!  But hey, this is a blog, just an online notebook! 

Those who claim that free will is an illusion are simply playing fast and loose with the word 'illusion.' There are not using it in an ordinary way, in the sort of way that gives it its ordinary 'bite'; they are using it in some extended way that drains it of meaning.  It is a kind of bullshitting that scientists often fall into when they are spouting scientism in the popular books they scribble to turn a buck.  Doing science is hard; writing bad philosopohy is easy.  By the way, that is why we need philosophy.  We need it to expose all the pseudo-philsophy abroad in the world.

We need philosophy to bury its undertakers lest there be all those rotting corpses laying about.

4.  Finally, Coyne tells us we are all "victims of circumstance."  But I've had enough of this guy for one day.  I shouldn't be wasting so much time on him. 

It does not inspire much confidence when a writer begins his piece with a blatant confusion.  But that is what Jerry A. Coyne does in Why You Don't Really Have Free Will:

Perhaps you've chosen to read this essay after scanning other articles on this website. Or, if you're in a hotel, maybe you've decided what to order for breakfast, or what clothes you'll wear today.

You haven't. You may feel like you've made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. . . . And those New Year's resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you'll have no choice about whether you keep them.

Suppose you have chosen to read Coyne's essay and have decided on scrambled eggs for breakfast.  Well then, you have made a choice and a decision and it is nonsense for Coyne to claim that you haven't just done those things.  It is also nonsense to claim that you had no choice concerning your New Year's resolutions.  It is a plain fact that one chooses, decides, and deliberates.  What is debatable, however, is whether one freely chooses, decides, deliberates.  Coyne gets off to a rocky start by conflating these two questions:

1. Do human beings ever choose, decide, deliberate?
2. Do human beings ever freely choose, decide, deliberate?

Only the second can be debated reasonably, and this, to be charitable, is the question Coyne is posing.  His answer is that we never freely choose, decide, deliberate.  His thesis is that "free will is a complete illusion."

Suppose you ordered the scrambled eggs.  No one held a gun to your head: your choice was uncoerced and in that sense free.  So you made a choice and you made a free (uncoerced) choice.  But there is another sense of 'free' and it is the one with which Coyne is operating:

3. Do human beings ever freely choose, etc.  in the sense that they could have done otherwise even if all the antecedent conditions up to the point of the choice, etc. were the same?

Call this the libertararian sense of 'free' and distinguish it from the compatibilist sense of the word.  To refine Coyne's thesis, he is claiming that libertarian freedom of the will is an illusion.  Why should we believe this?  Coyne says that there are "two lines of evidence."

Although Coyne uses the word 'evidence' and postures as if empirical science is going to step in, do some real work, and finally solve a problem that philosophers in their armchairs merely endlessly gas off about, the first "line of evidence" he provides is just a stock deterministic argument that could have been given in the 18th century. Determinism is the thesis that the actual past together with the actual laws of nature render only one present nomologically possible. Determinism has two consequences: it deprives the agent of alternative future possibilities, and it insures that the agent is not the ultimate source of any action. For if determinism is true, the agent himself is nothing other than an effect of causes that stretch back before his birth, so that no part of the agent can be an ultimate origin of action.  Hence when you chose the scrambled eggs you could not have done otherwise given the actual past: you could not have chosen oat meal instead.  You made a choice all right; it is just that it wasn't a libertarianly-free choice.

There 's nothing new here.  We are just complex physical systems, and determinism is true.  So everything that happens in our bodies and brains is necessitated, and libertarian freedom of will cannot exist.  Hence our sense that we are libertarianly free is an illusion.

That's a nice philosophical argument that makes no appeal to empirical facts.  Amazing how so many of these scientistic science types with their contempt for philosophy cannot help doing philosophy (while disingenuously denying that that is what they are doing) and simply trotting out old philosophical arguments all the while displaying their ignorance as to their origin and how to present them rigorously.

The argument is only as good as its premises.  Even if we assume determinism, it is scarcely obvious that we are just complex physical systems:  "Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics."

Really?  I am now enjoying a memory of hippy-trippy Pam from the summer of '69.  So my memory state is identical to a brain state.  But that  is arguably nonsense: the one exhibits intentionality ,the other doesn't, and so by the  Indiscernibility of Identicals, they cannot be identical.  No materialist has ever given a satisfactory account of intentionality.

So the first argument is rather less than compelling despite Coyne's scientistic posturing: "And what they're [neuroscientists] finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion."

The other "line of evidence" is from neurobiology:

Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject "decides" to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity at least seven seconds before the subject is consciously aware of having made it. [. . .] "Decisions" made like that aren't conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think we've made them, then we don't have free will in any meaningful sense.

This argument is hardly compelling.  For one thing, it appears to confuse predictability with unfreedom.  Suppose I am able to predict accurately how Peter will behave in a range of situations.  It doesn't follow that he does not act freely (in the libertarian sense) in those situations.  On the basis of my knowledge of his character and habits, I predict that Peter will smoke a cigarette within an hour.  That is a prediction about the future of the actual world.  Suppose he does smoke a cigarette within an hour.  My correct prediction does not entail that could not have done otherwise than smoke a cigarette within an hour.  It does not entail that there is no possible world in which he refrains from smoking a cigarette within an hour.

So if, on the basis of unconscious brain activity, it is predicted that the subject will make a conscious decision, and he does, that does not entail that the decision was not free.  Furthermore, why should 'decision' be used to cover the whole seven second brain process? If 'decision' is used to refer to the conscious pressing of the button, then no part of the decision is unconscious, and Coyne's argument collapses.  What scientistic types don't seem to understand is that empirical science is not purely empirical.  It cannot proceed without conceptual decisions that are a priori.

If Coyne thinks that contemporary neuroscience has proven that there is no libertarian freedom of the will, then he is delusional: he is passing off dubious philosophy as if it were incontrovertible science while hiding the fact from himself.

In the sequel I will will adress the question whether libertarian free will could be an illusion.  Does that so much as make sense?

Companion post:  Free Will Meets Neuroscience.