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.

Dennett Willing to Abandon the term "Free Will"?

By Greg Caruso
Flickers of Freedom Blog
Originally posted March 19, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

But recently I have learned from discussions with a variety of scientists and other non-philosophers (e.g., the scientists participating with me in the Sean Carroll workshop on the future of naturalism) that they lean the other way: free will, in their view, is obviously incompatible with naturalism, with determinism, and very likely incoherent against any background, so they cheerfully insist that of course they don’t have free will, couldn’t have free will, but so what? It has nothing to do with morality or the meaning of life. Their advice to me at the symposium was simple: recast my pressing question as whether naturalism (materialism, determinism, science...) has any implications for what we may call moral competence. For instance, does neuroscience show that we cannot be responsible for our choices, cannot justifiably be praised or blamed, rewarded or punished? Abandon the term “free will” to the libertarians and other incompatibilists, who can pursue their fantasies untroubled. - See more at:

The entire blog post 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.

Decomposing the Will - Book Review

Andy Clark, Julian Kiverstein, and Tillmann Vierkant (eds.), Decomposing the Will, Oxford University Press, 2013, 356pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199746996.

Reviewed by Marcela Herdova, King's College London

Decomposing the Will is a collection of 17 papers that examine recent developments in cognitive sciences in relation to claims about conscious agency (or lack thereof) and the implications of these findings for the free will debate. The overarching theme of the volume is exploring conscious will as "decomposed" into interrelated functions. The volume has four sections. Part 1 surveys scientific research that has been taken by many to support what the editors refer to as "the zombie challenge". The zombie challenge stems from claims about the limited role of consciousness in ordinary behavior. If conscious control is required for free will, this recent scientific research, which challenges conscious efficacy, also undermines free will. In part 2, authors explore various layers of the sense of agency. Part 3 investigates how to use both phenomenology and science to address the zombie challenge and discusses a variety of possible functions for conscious control. Part 4 offers decomposed accounts of the will.

Due to limitations of space, I will offer extended discussion of only a handful of papers. I provide a brief description for the remaining papers.

The entire book review is here.

The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation by Peter Ulric Tse (MIT Press, 2013)

By Stephen L. Macknik | August 12, 2013
Scientific American Book Review

Here are two excerpts:

If our universe is deterministic in this way there can be no free will because you were destined to make that same decision—every single one of your decisions—from the very moment of the big bang. It’s not that you don’t make decisions: you do. But you’ll make them the same exact way in two different universes that have identical big bangs. It means that the universe conspired from its very inception to bring you and your significant other together. It’s quite romantic, actually, so long as you’ve been fortunate enough to have a nice life. But if not, you’re truly screwed, and the universe has been literally plotting your demise for the last 14 billion years.

(cut)

Tse has thought through this enormous problem and realized something important that brings free will back to the realm of the living. Remember that determinism is an unavoidable fact of the universe at the macroscopic but not the quantum level. Well what if the macroscopic universe is not deterministic because the brain is designed to amplify quantum level particle effects to the macroscopic level through the action of specialized neuronal channels that make decisions potentially truly stochastic?

The entire story is here.

Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility

Manuel Vargas, Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, Oxford University Press, 2013, 345pp., $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199697540.

Reviewed by Tamler Sommers, University of Houston & Very Bad Wizards

We all like to believe that the problem we happen to work on is "particularly intractable," more resistant to resolution than debates in any other area of philosophy. The free will debate has a legitimate claim to this title. (Of course, I work in this area myself so I would say that.) The source of the intractability is that our intuitions about freedom and especially moral responsibility do not come in a neat consistent package. It is enormously difficult to develop a coherent view that satisfies our own set of commitments and intuitions, let alone those of other cultures or time periods. Yet a successful theory is supposed to do precisely that: offer a set of general principles that can unify our seemingly inconsistent intuitions. One of the many contributions of Manuel Vargas' book is to offer a principled way of embracing a conception of free will and moral responsibility that does not require even the pretense of success so defined.

Vargas calls his approach revisionism because "it insists that what we ought to think about responsibility conflicts with important threads of how we do think about responsibility." (p. 15) His book is divided into two parts. The first defends his revisionist methodology against the more traditional way of theorizing in the existing literature. The second offers a revisionist theory of responsibility -- the "agency cultivation model" -- that is grounded in the revisionist approach defended in Part One. The volume is long and extraordinarily rich, the culmination of a project Vargas has been developing over many years. I will not pretend that I can address the book in all of its complexity. I will divide my remarks into three sections, each focused on a critical question for Vargas' project. I hope I can elucidate some central aspects of his arguments along the way.

The entire book review is here.