Dan Dennett Sam Harris Free Will Flashcards
Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas, and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent.
Compatibilists believe freedom can be present or absent in situations for reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics. They define free will as freedom to act according to one’s motives without arbitrary hindrance from other individuals or institutions.
For example, courts of law make judgments, without bringing in metaphysics, about whether an individual was acting of their own free will in specific circumstances. It is assumed in a court of law that someone could have done otherwise than they did—otherwise no crime would have been committed.
Daniel Dennet review:
Free will is a phenomenon that requires neither determinism nor indeterminism; the solution to the problem of free will lies in realizing this, not banking on the quantum physicists to come through with the right physics—or a miracle.
Harris does a fine job of making this apparently unpalatable fact accessible to lay people
We have a self-deluded idea of Ultimate Authorship of the good we do. We take too much blame, and too much credit, Harris argues. We, and the rest of the world, would be a lot better off if we took ourselves less seriously.
We think we can articulate and defend a more sophisticated model of free will that is not only consistent with neuroscience and introspection but also grounds a (modified, toned-down, non-Absolute) variety of responsibility that justifies both praise and blame, reward and punishment.
In this instance, the chances that Harris has underestimated and misinterpreted compatibilism seem particularly good, since the points he defends later in the book agree right down the line with compatibilism; he himself is a compatibilist in everything but name!
The first parting of opinion on free will is between compatibilists and incompatibilists. The latter say ( that free will is incompatible with determinism, the scientific thesis that there are causes for everything that happens.
Incompatibilists hold that unless there are “random swerves” that disrupt the iron chains of physical causation, none of our decisions or choices can be truly free. Being caused means not being free—what could be more obvious?
The compatibilists deny this; they have argued, for centuries if not millennia, that once you understand what free will really is (and must be, to sustain our sense of moral responsibility), you will see that free will can live comfortably with determinism—if determinism is what science eventually settles on.
Again, the popular notion of free will is a mess; we knew that long before Harris sat down to write his book. He needs to go after the attempted improvements, and it cannot be part of his criticism that they are not the popular notion.
Brains are, in all likelihood, designed by natural selection to absorb random fluctuations without being seriously diverted by them—just as computers are. But that means that randomness need not destroy the rationality, the well-governedness, the sense-making integrity of your control system. Your brain may even exploit randomness in a variety of ways to enhance its heuristic search for good solutions to problems.
If we are interested in whether somebody has free will, it is some kind of ability that we want to assess, and you can’t assess any ability by “replaying the tape.”
Incompatibilists thus tend to pin their hopes on indeterminism, and hence were much cheered by the emergence of quantum indeterminism in 20th century physics.
Quantum indeterminacy is the apparent necessary incompleteness in the description of a physical system, that has become one of the characteristics of the standard description of quantum physics.
This concern for varieties of indeterminism is misplaced, argue the compatibilists: free will is a phenomenon that requires neither determinism nor indeterminism; the solution to the problem of free will lies in realizing this, not banking on the quantum physicists to come through with the right physics—or a miracle. Compatibilism may seem incredible on its face, or desperately contrived, some kind of a trick with words, but not to philosophers.
Harris has considered compatibilism, at least cursorily, and his opinion of it is breathtakingly dismissive.
“More than in any other area of academic philosophy, the result resembles theology.” This is a low blow, and worse follows: “From both a moral and a scientific perspective, this seems deliberately obtuse.”
Harris is a compatibilist about moral responsibility and the importance of the distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, but he is not a compatibilist about free will since he thinks “free will” has to be given the incoherent sense that emerges from uncritical reflection by everyday folk.
The folk concept of mind is a shambles, for sure: dualistic, scientifically misinformed and replete with miraculous features—even before we get to ESP and psychokinesis and poltergeists. So when social scientists talk about beliefs or desires and cognitive neuroscientists talk about attention and memory they are deliberately using cleaned-up, demystified substitutes for the folk concepts.
Again, the popular notion of free will is a mess; we knew that long before Harris sat down to write his book. He needs to go after the attempted improvements, and it cannot be part of his criticism that they are not the popular notion.
Harris: The common conception of “free will” is: The conscious stream of thought is the very genesis chamber of decision.
This common conception is wrong in two senses:
1. Experimental data suggests that decisions seem to be final before subjects are aware of them (as thoughts)
2. The rise and awareness of thoughts has no authorship whatsoever built into it (this is evident through introspection)
Dennett: I fully agree. However, I want to preserve the term “free will” with a completely different meaning. We are free to act within the degrees of freedom we hold at any moment. “Free Will” labels nothing more than our ability to weigh competing “what to do next” impulses. The impulses them-self are determined and unauthored - as well as which of them wins out in the end. But the subjective experience of having choices and selecting among them - this is “free will” and our measurement of responsibility. Dropping “free will” as concept could yield bad outcomes and people would lose their sense of responsibility.
Harris: But responsibility, punishment can hold true even if we knew that no one really “truly” causes his deeds. If viewed mechanistically, punishment is simply a deterrent that promotes useful behavior like plowing a field promotes plant grow.
Dennett: I still would use “free will” to label that which i defined above solely due to the societal usefulness of labeling it “free will”
Once you stop thinking of free will as a magical metaphysical endowment and start thinking of it as an explicable achievement that individual human beings normally accomplish (very much aided by the societies in which they live), much as they learn to speak and read and write, this rhetorical question falls flat. Infants don’t have free will; normal adults do. Yes, those of us who have free will are lucky to have free will (we’re lucky to be human beings, we’re lucky to be alive), but our free will is not just a given; it is something we are obliged to protect and nurture, with help from our families and friends and the societies in which we live.
But, comes the familiar rejoinder, if determinism is true and we rewound the tape of time and put you in exactly the same physical state, you’d ignore the six of clubs again. True, but so what? It does not show that you are not the agent you think you are. Contrast your competence at this moment with the “competence” of a robotic bridge-playing doll that always plays its highest card in the suit, no matter what the circumstances. It wasn’t free to choose the six, because it would play the ace whatever the circumstances were whereas if it occurred to you to play the six, you could do it, depending on the circumstances.
Freedom involves the ability to have one’s choices influenced by changes in the world that matter under the circumstances. Not a perfect ability, but a reliable ability.
He is certainly claiming in his book that the dualism that is uncritically endorsed by many, maybe most, people is incoherent, and he is right—I’ve argued the same for decades.
Entirely missing from Harris’s account—and it is not a lacuna that can be repaired—is any acknowledgment of the morally important difference between normal people (like you and me and Harris, in all likelihood) and people with serious deficiencies in self-control. The reason he can’t include this missing element is that his whole case depends in the end on insisting that there really is no morally relevant difference between the raving psychopath and us.
Harris: Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
There is a fundamental difference between an environment with no competing agents and an environment populated with would-be manipulators.[7] The manifold of causes that determine our choices only intermittently includes other agents, and when they are around they do indeed represent a challenge to our free will, since they may well try to read our minds and covertly influence our beliefs, but the environment in general is not such an agent, and hence is no puppeteer.
It is one thing to bicker with your wife because you are in a bad mood; it is another to realize that your mood and behavior have been caused by low blood sugar. This understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet, of course, but it also allows you to grab hold of one of your strings. A bite of food may be all that your personality requires.
Sam Harris response:
And it would be disingenuous of me not to notice how your prickliness and preening appears: You write as one protecting his academic turf. Behind and between almost every word of your essay—like some toxic background radiation—one detects an explosion of professorial vanity.
When you are not causing problems with your own analogies, you are distorting mine. For instance, you write that you were especially dismayed by the cover of my book, which depicts a puppet theater. This cover image is justified because I argue that each of us is moved by chance and necessity, just as a marionette is set dancing on its strings. But I never suggest that this is the same as being manipulated by a human puppeteer who overrides our actual beliefs and desires and obliges us to behave in ways we do not intend.
You seem eager to draw this implication, however, and so you press on with an irrelevant discussion of game theory (another area in which you allege I haven’t done my homework). Again, I am left wishing we had had a conversation that would have prevented so many pedantic digressions.
We agree that human thought and behavior are determined by prior states of the universe and its laws—and that any contributions of indeterminism are completely irrelevant to the question of free will.
We also agree that our thoughts and actions in the present influence how we think and act in the future.
We both acknowledge that people can change, acquire skills, and become better equipped to get what they want out of life. We know that there is a difference between a morally healthy person and a psychopath, as well as between one who is motivated and disciplined, and thus able to accomplish his aims, and one who suffers a terminal case of apathy or weakness of will.
We both understand that planning and reasoning guide human behavior in innumerable ways and that an ability to follow plans and to be responsive to reasons is part of what makes us human.
However, it seems to me that we do diverge at two points:
- You think that compatibilists like yourself have purified the concept of free will by “deliberately using cleaned-up, demystified substitutes for the folk concepts.” I believe that you have changed the subject and are now ignoring the very phenomenon we should be talking about—the common, felt sense that I/he/she/you could have done otherwise (generally known as “libertarian” or “contra-causal” free will), with all its moral implications. The legitimacy of your attempting to make free will “presentable” by performing conceptual surgery on it is our main point of contention.
You believe that determinism at the microscopic level is irrelevant to the question of human freedom and responsibility. I agree that it is irrelevant for many things we care about, but it isn’t irrelevant in the way you suggest. And accepting incompatibilism has important intellectual and moral consequences that you ignore—the most important being, in my view, that it renders hatred patently irrational (while leaving love unscathed). If one is concerned about the consequences of maintaining a philosophical position, as I know you are, helping to close the door on human hatred seems far more beneficial than merely tinkering with a popular illusion.
The philosophical problem of free will arises from the fact that most people feel that they author their own thoughts and actions. It is very difficult to say what this feeling consists of or to untangle it from working memory, volition, motor planning, and the rest of what our minds are up to—but there can be little doubt that most people feel that they are the conscious source of their own thoughts and actions.
We should admit that a person is unlucky to be given the genes and life experience that doom him to psychopathy. Again, that doesn’t mean we can’t lock him up. But hating him is not rational, given a complete understanding of how he came to be who he is. Natural, yes; rational, no. Feeling compassion for him could be rational, however—in the same way that we could feel compassion for the six-year-old boy who was destined to become Jeffrey Dahmer. And while you scoff at “medicalizing” human evil, a complete understanding of the brain would do just that. Punishment is an extraordinarily blunt instrument. We need it because we understand so little about the brain, and our ability to influence it is limited.
More generally, however, you seem to think that the consequences of taking incompatibilism seriously will be pernicious:
“If nobody is responsible, not really, then not only should the prisons be emptied, but no contract is valid, mortgages should be abolished, and we can never hold anybody to account for anything they do. Preserving “law and order” without a concept of real responsibility is a daunting task.”
These concerns, while not irrational, have nothing to do with the philosophical or scientific merits of the case. They also arise out of a failure to understand the practical consequences of my view. I am no more inclined to release dangerous criminals back onto our streets than you are.
In my book, I argue that an honest look at the causal underpinnings of human behavior, as well as at one’s own moment-to-moment experience, reveals free will to be an illusion. (I would say the same about the conventional sense of “self,” but that requires more discussion, and it is the topic of my next book.) I also claim that this fact has consequences—good ones, for the most part—and that is another reason it is worth exploring. But I have not argued for my position primarily out of concern for the consequences of accepting it. And I believe you have.
This is one of the great scandals of intellectual life: The virtues of rational discourse are everywhere espoused, and yet witnessing someone relinquish a cherished opinion in real time is about as common as seeing a supernova explode overhead. The perpetual stalemate one encounters in public debates is annoying because it is so clearly the product of motivated reasoning, self-deception, and other failures of rationality—and yet we’ve grown to expect it on every topic, no matter how intelligent and well-intentioned the participants.
