How free is our will?

Kevin Mitchell
Wiring The Brain Blog
Originally posted November 25, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Being free – to my mind at least – doesn’t mean making decisions for no reasons, it means making them for your reasons. Indeed, I would argue that this is exactly what is required to allow any kind of continuity of the self. If you were just doing things on a whim all the time, what would it mean to be you? We accrue our habits and beliefs and intentions and goals over our lifetime, and they collectively affect how actions are suggested and evaluated.

Whether we are conscious of that is another question. Most of our reasons for doing things are tacit and implicit – they’ve been wired into our nervous systems without our even being aware of them. But they’re still part of us ­– you could argue they’re precisely what makes us us. Even if most of that decision-making happens subconsciously, it’s still you doing it.

Ultimately, whether you think you have free will or not may depend less on the definition of “free will” and more on the definition of “you”. If you identify just as the president – the decider-in-chief – then maybe you’ll be dismayed at how little control you seem to have or how rarely you really exercise it. (Not never, but maybe less often than your ego might like to think).

But that brings us back to a very dualist position, identifying you with only your conscious mind, as if it can somehow be separated from all the underlying workings of your brain. Perhaps it’s more appropriate to think that you really comprise all of the machinery of government, even the bits that the president never sees or is not even aware exists.

The info is here.

Neuroscientific Prediction and Free Will: What do ordinary people think?

By Gregg D. Caruso
Psychology Today Blog
Originally published October 26, 2015

Some theorists have argued that our knowledge of the brain will one day advance to the point where the perfect neuroscientific prediction of all human choices is theoretically possible. Whether or not such prediction ever becomes a reality, this possibility raises an interesting philosophical question: Would such perfect neuroscientific prediction be compatible with the existence of free will? Philosophers have long debated such questions. The historical debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists, for example, has centered on whether determinism and free will can be reconciled. Determinism is the thesis that every event or action, including human action, is the inevitable result of preceding events and actions and the laws of nature. The question of perfect neuro-prediction is just a more recent expression of this much older debate. While philosophers have their arguments for the compatibility or incompatibility of free will and determinism (or perfect neuroscientific prediction), they also often claim that their intuitions are in general agreement with commonsense judgments. To know whether this is true, however, we first need to know what ordinary folk think about these matters. Fortunately, recent research in psychology and experimental philosophy has begun to shed some light on this.

The entire article is here.

Why Free Will Makes No Sense

By Daniel Miessler
danielmiessler.com
Originally posted June 3, 2015

In this short presentation I discuss the flaws with the common and Compatibilist views on Free Will. It covers the following topics:

Definitions
Absolute and Practical Free Will
Experience is Not Reality
Moral Responsibility
The Ability to Do Otherwise
Real-world Implications of Discarding Free Will

What is Free Will?

Closer to Truth
Interview with John Searle
PBS Series

What is Free Will? Our host Robert Lawrence Kuhn poses the question to John Searle, in an interview from our series "Closer To Truth," currently airing on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings for times.



Closer to the Truth web site.

Blame as Harm

By Patrick Mayer
Academia.edu

I. Introduction

Among philosophers who work on the topic of moral responsibility there is widespread agreement with the claim that when we debate over the nature and existence of moral responsibility we are not talking about punishment. To say that someone is morally responsible for a bad action is not to say that she ought to be punished for it, nor does saying that moral responsibility is a fiction imply that you think punishment is illegitimate. Moral responsibility is about praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. You are morally responsible for some action iff it is either appropriate to praise you, appropriate to blame or would have been so had the action been morally significant in one way or another.

In this paper ‘Incompatibilism’ will be the name of the view that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. So according to Incompatibilism it is never appropriate to praise or blame someone. Why? Different incompatibilists will give you different answers. One might answer by saying that it is a conceptual or linguistic fact that blameworthiness is incompatible with determinism. An example would be saying that the definition of ‘blameworthy’ or the concept of blameworthiness contains within it a claim that for an agent to be blameworthy for X it must have been possible for the agent to do something other than X. On this way of thinking about incompatibilism if someone believes that determinism is true and they believe that someone is blameworthy then they accept contradictory claims and are therefore irrational.

Another way to answer the question is to say not that believing someone blameworthy would be inconsistent with a belief in determinism but to say that to blame someone would be unfair if determinism were true. This second way to answer I will call ‘Fairness Incompatibilism.’ There are advantages to adopting Fairness Incompatibilism. One, and probably the historically most important reason, is that by adopting Fairness Incompatibilism one can answer a criticism made by P.F. Strawson against incompatibilism.  Strawson claims that the practice of reacting emotionally to people, a practice many have treated as equivalent to blaming and praising, stands in no need of an external metaphysical  justification. This is meant to rule out the demand, made by incompatibilists, that morally responsible agents have a form of agency that implies indeterminism. But considerations of fairness are internal to the practice of reacting emotionally to people, and so if the case for incompatibilism is made by appeal to the concept of fairness then whether Strawson’s claim about the immunity of our practice from purely metaphysical considerations, incompatibilism can still go through. Another motivation for accepting Fairness Incompatibilism is that many have the intuition that if determinism is true then when we blame people we are doing something wrong to them, treating them in a way they do not deserve.

The entire article is here.

Experimental Approaches to Free Will: Knobe and Nahmias

Joshuan Knobe and Eddy Nahmias

Knobe and Nahmias begin with an overview of the early history and aims of experimental philosophy. Then they discuss experiments on the contrast between bypassing and throughpassing intuitions about free will (8:57); Nahmias’s “theory lite view,” according to which ordinary people have no strong views about the relation between mind and brain (17:34); whether the folk have a causal or an interventionist view of agency (24:17); the effect of descriptions of determinism on folk intuitions (32:52); and Nahmias’s work on “willusionism,” inspired by his critical view of certain popularized versions of free-will skepticism (41:47). Finally, Knobe and Nahmias consider future results that could resolve some of their disagreements (48:49) and forecast the next big steps in experimental philosophy of free will (57:00).

Free Will, Responsibility, and Psychology

Greg Caruso and Bruce Waller Discussion
Philosophy TV
Originally posted December 16, 2013

Most people believe that we can and should be held morally responsible for our actions. Caruso and Waller both hold that this belief is not only false, but harmful. They recommend that we abandon the notion of moral responsibility. But they disagree about free will: Waller thinks that we can preserve a scientifically and philosophically respectable notion of free will without moral responsibility; Caruso thinks that free will and moral responsibility should both be rejected. They begin their discussion with an overview of the traditional problem of free will (1:09). Next, they discuss Waller’s view of free will (9:14) and debate whether the notion of free will ought to be given up (23:51). Then they lay out their reasons to be skeptical about moral responsibility (41:04) and consider some of the concerns that have been expressed by defenders of moral responsibility (54:05).




The original information is here.

Causes, Laws, and Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn't Matter

Book Review by Christopher Evan Franklin
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Book: Causes, Laws, and Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn't Matter
Oxford University Press, 2013, 284pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199795185.

Kadri Vihvelin offers a detailed and rigorous inquiry into the classic free will debate, defending four main theses: (1) that free will is possible, (2) that Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) fail to undermine the traditional debate about the compatibility of free will and determinism, (3) that there are no good arguments for incompatibilism, and (4) that we possess free will in virtue of both possessing a bundle of dispositions and being situated in environments in which there are no obstacles to the manifestation of these dispositions. She dubs the position that emerges from her discussion "commonsense metaphysical compatibilism" (32). Her position on free will is 'commonsense' because it agrees with commonsense that we have free will and are morally responsible (32-3). Her position is 'metaphysical compatibilism' because it contends that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism because the ability to do otherwise is compatible with determinism (18). Her metaphysical compatibilism is to be contrasted with "moral compatibilism", which defends the compatibility of moral responsibility and determinism by denying that the ability to do otherwise is necessary for moral responsibility.

The entire book review is here.

Incompatibilism and “Bypassed” Agency

By Gunnar Bjornsson
Academia.edu

Introduction

Both compatibilist and incompatibilist theories of moral responsibility are largely supported with reference to intuitions about cases. However, such intuitions vary among philosophers and laymen alike, and even people theoretically committed to compatibilism or incompatibilism can often feel the pull of intuitions in line with the opposite view. While our understanding of various arguments and of practices of holding responsible has made tremendous progress over the last few decades, it is fair to say that the basic disagreements over incompatibilism have remained.

One way to try to break this stalemate is to look not at the direct arguments for or against incompatibilism, but at the intuitions that seem to drive the debate. For example, if it could be shown, empirically, that pre-theoretical incompatibilist commitments are typically based on some clearly identifiable mistake, this might give us reason to doubt intuitions that flow from such commitments. (Similarly, of course, for compatibilist commitments.)

In earlier work, Karl Persson and I have argued that a certain independently supported general account of responsibility judgments gives us reason to disregard the basic intuitions grounding incompatibilist or skeptical convictions (Björnsson 2011, Björnsson and Persson 2009, 2012, 2013). According to this account, the Explanation Hypothesis, attributions of responsibility are implicit explanatory judgments, understanding the object of responsibility as straightforwardly explained by the agent’s motivational structures. Incompatibilist intuitions arise from shifts in salient explanatory models, shifts that, we argue, are predictable but epistemically weightless side effects of mechanisms the function of which is to keep track of mundane relations between agents and outcomes.

The entire article is here.

Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?

By Eddie Nahmias
The New York Times
Originally published November 13, 2011 and still relevant today

Is free will an illusion?  Some leading scientists think so.  For instance, in 2002 the psychologist Daniel Wegner wrote, “It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do… It is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion.” More recently, the neuroscientist Patrick Haggard declared, “We certainly don’t have free will.  Not in the sense we think.”  And in June, the neuroscientist Sam Harris claimed, “You seem to be an agent acting of your own free will. The problem, however, is that this point of view cannot be reconciled with what we know about the human brain.”

Here, I’ll explain why neuroscience is not the death of free will and does not “wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility,” extending a discussion begun in Gary Gutting’s recent Stone column.  I’ll argue that the neuroscientific evidence does not undermine free will.  But first, I’ll explain the central problem: these scientists are employing a flawed notion of free will.  Once a better notion of free will is in place, the argument can be turned on its head.  Instead of showing that free will is an illusion, neuroscience and psychology can actually help us understand how it works.

The entire story is here.

Why you don't really have free will

By Jerry Coyne
USA Today
Originally published in January 2012, but still relevant today.

Here are two excerpts:

The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.

The issue of whether we have of free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons.

(cut)

But two lines of evidence suggest that such free will is an illusion.

The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the "choosing." And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. 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.

True "free will," then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain's structure and modify how it works. Science hasn't shown any way we can do this because "we" are simply constructs of our brain. We can't impose a nebulous "will" on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.

The entire, interesting article is here.  Feel free to read it or not, but I know some of you have no choice but to read it, while others not.

Interview with Paul Russell on Free Will and Responsibility

Many philosophical theories try to evade the uncomfortable truth that luck and fate play a role in the conduct of our moral lives, argues the philosopher. He chooses the best books on free will and responsibility.

By Nigel Warburton @philosophybites
Five Books
Originally published December 2, 2013

What is free will?

Our interest in free will starts from our self-image. We are conscious of being agents in the world, capable of doing things and being active. We believe that we can intervene and order our own fate. We’re in control of the trajectory of our own life. That self-image immediately tracks something that is deeply important to us, which is our sense that we are also moral agents. We are accountable to one another for the quality of our actions and what flows from them.

So the problem of free will starts off at a very general level with the question ‘Are we really in control?’ In particular, is our view of ourselves as accountable, moral, ethical agents — which is intimately connected with that self-image — really accurate?

Most people feel, to some degree, in control of how they behave. There may be moments when they become irrational and other forces take over,  or where outside people force them to do things, but if I want to raise my hand or say “Stop!” those things seem to be easily within my conscious control. We also feel very strongly that people, including ourselves, merit praise and blame for the actions they perform because it’s us that’s performing them. It’s not someone else doing those things. And if we do something wrong, knowingly, it’s right to blame us for that.

That’s right. The common sense view — although we may articulate it in different ways in different cultures — is that there is some relevant sense in which we are in control and we are morally accountable. What makes philosophy interesting is that sceptical arguments can be put forward that appear to undermine or discredit our confidence in this common sense position. One famous version of this difficulty has theological roots. If, as everyone once assumed, there is a God, who creates the world and has the power to decide all that happens in it, then our common sense view of ourselves as free agents seems to be threatened, since God controls and guides everything that happens – including all our actions. Similar or related problems seem to arise with modern science.

The scientific challenge is that for everything that we do, we can explain it causally. There’s some prior cause that made us do that — you can go back to childhood, to genetics, early conditioning, environmental factors. When you give the full picture, it seems there is no room for freedom.

Exactly. As in a lot of other familiar philosophical problems, critical reflection and self-consciousness about our commitments erodes our natural easy confidence, or, if you want, our complacency.

The entire interview is here.