Doubting Marcus

riffee asked:

"unconscious decisions" is logically contradictory. If it is unconscious, it isn't a decision. And the fact that people are able to choose doesn't mean that those choices aren't influenced by entirely deterministic stimulus. Compatabilists' ability to defend their belief of free will is no different than a fatalists ability to defend theirs or a theist to defend theirs. Just as the concept of Fate is unfalsifiable, so is free will. There is nothing scientific about the concept of free will.

*Follow up to Anon’s question from yesterday

I should have been more clear about what I meant by “unconscious decisions” but perhaps you’ll agree that they do exist after I clarify myself. If I kick my leg in response to a tap on the knee that would be a reflex, totally lacking in mental processing or assessment. However if I, without conscious deliberation, choose coffee over tea in the morning or go right rather than left on a basketball court that can hardly be said to be a reflex, it seems to me to be a decision. Those latter actions involve unconscious processing and assessment of information in the brain in a way not present in mere reflexes. However, perhaps you want to reserve the term “decisions” specifically for conscious reflection but I see no problem with calling a choice of action by my unconscious mind a decision. Still, as I said in my response to anon, the unconscious part of your mind is still you and hence whatever you choose to call its processes and their results are still part of you.

And the fact that people are able to choose doesn’t mean that those choices aren’t influenced by entirely deterministic stimulus.

I never said they weren’t. Even though if you press me I’ll tell you determinism isn’t even true, or at least that’s my best understanding of what quantum mechanics is tells us (Did I just commit the Deepak Chopra fallacy?). Compatibilists can and do accept that deterministic and random inputs effect the brain or even are the ultimate cause of their results. The claim is, as Daniel Dennett likes to put it, that we have the varieties of free will worth wanting. These include deliberative reasoning, imagining different futures and choosing to select a course of action that will bring about your preferred future, etc.

As for your last string of commentary I must admit I don’t know what you are talking about. Unlike fatalists, compatibilists aren’t making claims that would fit the data no matter what it showed. If you could demonstrate we don’t have the kinds of traits I listed above that would falsify compatibilists claims of free will. Nothing could, even in principle, contradict fatalism.

Lastly, science isn’t the sphere of all knowledge so even if it were true that free will wasn’t scientific that wouldn’t demonstrate that it didn’t exist. However, in this case neuroscience does have a significant role to play (in the future) about whether or not we really do have the capacity for executive control and it already has had a large impact on demonstrating our “will” isn’t the origin of our impulses (this is the type of subject the Libet experiments demonstrate).

Thanks for the question.

Anonymous asked:

I'm not quite sure where I stand on Sam Harris' book, but from what I read of it, when he mentioned conscious thought being unrelated to free will he was discussing the causes of conscious thought. We can't control it: have you ever tried to think of nothing, and random things came into your head? It was basically that. If thoughts are caused, then we don't control them: and if they're random, we don't control them, and it's hard to think of another source, It fascinated me.

Harris did indeed make this case in Free Will and I didn’t touch on it in my response. However, while I agree with his premise that there is nothing outside of random and caused to influence events I think, among other things, he is working from a very strange sense of self. If “I” doesn’t include unconscious decisions we’ll be forced into the bizarre scenario in which whenever we are engaging in an activity unconsciously it isn’t really “us” that is responsible. What would it even mean to say “I” am not running or driving unless “I” am consciously thinking about it? If “I” am not engaged in these activities then who is? My inner zombie?

The fact that ultimately we exist inside of physics doesn’t diminish, but rather enables, our ability to make decisions. A perfect decision maker would be entirely deterministic, input A would lead always lead to output B. Similarly with the case of executive control which requires our conscious deliberations to exert influence on the decisions we make. Unless we evolved the totally useless, but extremely costly, capacity for conscious reasoning (the brain processes that caused such abilities would have to be dead-ends) then our conscious decisions can influence our behavior. It’s these types of abilities which have been defended by compatibilists for hundreds of years and Harris’ book does nothing to demonstrate we don’t have these abilities. Instead he just declares (by fiat) that his definition of free will is correct and the only one that matters, even though he concedes, as I pointed out, that to lose these abilities would “greatly diminish us.”

So let’s try to get his view straight: Losing our ability of deliberative reasoning would harm us but it doesn’t really matter unless our conscious deliberation process was entirely independent of causality. According to this view we don’t have free will unless our conscious thoughts were the origin of our all conscious thoughts—don’t ask me how this would be possible!—which allows us to the freedom to make something different happen in a scenario in which everything that could conceivably influence the outcome is the same. Since we don’t have these abilities (despite the fact such views aren’t dominant or even majority view of free will in philosophy or the public) then we don’t have free will.

I submit, as Harris does when he (wrongly) chastises people who disagree with his view of morality, that I don’t know what he’s talking about. Worse yet, I’m afraid, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about either.

Again I recommend Russell Blackford’s article on Harris’ book (indeed I recommend all of Blackford’s work during the past couple months on the topic at Talking Philosophy which can be found archived under his name) and say thanks for the question.