… so that we can cope with the world around us effectively—if we are normal. There are unfortunate human beings who for one reason or another cannot, and they must live among us in a reduced status, rather like pets, at best, cared for and respected, restrained if necessary, loved and loving in their own limited ways, but not full participants in the human social world, and, of course, lacking morally significant free will. [1]
I have not had the opportunity to get into Daniel Dennett’s work until I got into free will. Dennett’s view on free will is mechanical, and so I naturally gravitated towards it. Although I like Dennett’s ideas and approach, I was taken aback by his insensitivity towards those deemed as inadequate and undesirable. Despite the description being accurate, it could have been stated in a way that maintains the “unfortunates'” dignity. Dennett does say, however, that the unfortunates aren’t ultimately responsible for their actions.
In Dennett’s writings, he often uses the term psychopath as a caricature of the abnormal person that can’t live within the bounds of society. Can I have compassion for the psychopath? Probably not but I could have empathy, which would allow me to separate my disdain from their problem. I don’t claim to have a solution to the problem of moral living, but I don’t think I like the implications of Dennett’s. I don’t see much compassion towards “designs” in nature that are not competent enough to meet society’s standards.
This doesn’t affect the merit of Dennett’s analysis. Dennett says that free will exists, but it’s not what we think it is. Since free will doesn’t explain much of anything and has too much baggage to be used, then why keep it? The only reason to not scrap the concept is so that we can be blamable for our actions. But we can make a case for accountability without positing the existence of free will. We don’t need to be ultimately responsible for an action because there is no shortage of good reasons to be accountable.
Dennett’s Free Will
There is not much to find wrong with Dennett’s work if you like science. He equates free will to be nothing more than self-control and deliberation. If freedom is to be found anywhere, then it must be found within these two concepts. To Dennett, free will is compatible with determinism. Determinism is the idea that given the past and laws of nature, that only one possible future exists. Dennett accomplishes this by telling us that the stipulation for free will to exist, which is could have done otherwise, doesn’t matter.
Dennett says that events are not inevitable but evitable; that is, we are designed by natural selection to avoid situations that could interfere with our survival. Dennett claims that the problems of free will go away if we view it through a biological framework as agents. Although he shows through thought experiments and computer simulations how complexity arises at a higher-level, which gives the appearance of indeterminism, he never labels it as an indeterministic system like many other philosophers seem to do.
We know at the quantum level that nature is indeterministic, but at the macro level it is deterministic. Even though we may not be able to observe the causes at a high-level, we assume that there are causes. For example, a coin toss is random because we can’t identify and predict its complex motion, yet it is deterministic. Philosophers aren’t clear on whether or not indeterminism is meant in the stochastic sense or in the uncaused causes sense. Dennett does agree though that high-level randomness is deterministic.
If all of our actions are predetermined by our biology and the inputs of our environment, which they are, then how can we be free? It has to do with the framework or level of description we are using. There is no ghost in the machine or mysterious force controlling us but rather an agent. Relative to the agent, there are possibilities presented that we control the outcome of because we can deliberate with reasons to act or not to act. But this is nothing more than self-control and deliberation. Why force a fit with free will?
References:
[1] Dennett, Daniel C.. Elbow Room
[2] Dennett, Daniel C.. Freedom Evolves
I prefer to drop the term “free will” for the reasons you state, and use “agency” instead.
How can this be so? It is possible to set up a system so that some macro-level result (like killing Schroedinger’s cat) will depend on whether there was a quantum-level event, such as the decay of a radioactive atom, within a certain period. Moreover, there is no reason to think such micro-to-macro causal chains do not occur without human intervention – for example, by causing a mutation within a DNA strand, leading to cancer or (if the DNA is in the germ line) the birth of a phenotypically different organism. I don’t think this makes any obvious difference to the “free will” issue – why are you any more (or less) free if your actions depend on indeterministic events rather than on deterministic ones?
Incidentally, as I understand it, the question of whether quantum-level events are deterministic or indeterministic is not a simple one: the evolution of the wave equation for a given quantum system is deterministic. It is when one considers the system’s interaction with something else that one can only give probabilities for where a particle will be found, whether an atom will decay, etc. – but at least in principle, the wave equation for the larger system including the original and whatever it is interacting with would again evolve deterministically, so the commonsesne dichotomy between “deterministic” and “indeterministic” may be inadequate to deal with quantum reality. But I may have misunderstood something here.
I have always suspected that the concepts of determinism and indeterminism are probably inadequate to explain nature and force us to a dichotomy. For brevity, I was oversimplifying a problem that is much more complex, as you point out, than I wanted to get into. I should have put that at the macro level science operates as if nature was deterministic though. I follow what you are saying in the second paragraph, but the first isn’t clear to me what you mean. To be honest, it’s been years since I’ve had interest in quantum physics, but you may have rekindled something in me which may cause me to pick up some old text books. I agree that it probably doesn’t make a difference what nature turns out to be, but people are stuck on the idea that if biology (high-level abstraction of physics) determines our actions, then how can we be free? The solution is to think at the appropriate level. With a physical framework, we are not free from physics, but viewed as agents options do appear to us and we are to some degree free. But I would argue that this freedom is best characterized as an experience of the will because free will is a metaphorical concept. I would then say that we don’t even need it because we end up using it against each other as a shorthand explanation for our actions, which denies the person to tell their unique experience. We end up forgoing empathy and want to punish because it was but a “simple choice”. Life is more complicated than that.
Can you say more specifically what was unclear in my first paragraph? If so, i’ll try to clarify it!
I’ll get back to this later this evening. Thanks.
Yes, the wave function evolves deterministically, but that evolution includes branching between different outcomes, and branch selection is indeterminate.
Proponents of the Bohmian interpretation trumpet its inherent determinism. They are correct, in a limited technical sense. If you know the original position of a particle, its future is determined completely. The catch is that you can’t know the original position, so even this case is effectively indeterminate.
Thanks for that Rob. As I said @1 ” I may have misunderstood something here.” :-p
Re Quantum theory indeterminism. Basically, you have to understand the different interpretation of quantum theory and the alternative theories of quantum theory which aren’t mere interpretations. Here’s a brief recap.
Originally, there were two rules for the evolution of the wave-function. This is traditional Copenhagen interpretation. The first rule was the deterministic evolution of the wavefunction according to the Schrodinger wave function when there are no “observers”. When there’s an observation, then the second rule is applied: the wavefunction is collapsed. Afterwards, the collapsed wavefunction continues to evolve according to the Schrodinger wave function. What exactly is an “observation”? Answering that question is the “measurement problem” of quantum theory.
What is the measurement problem? Consider the classic Schrodinger’s cat experiment. The problem is that you apply quantum theory without a collapse rule, Schrodinger’s wave equation predicts that the cat will be in a superposition of states, alive and dead, and that seems to violate our real observations of the world. We never see a cat be both alive and dead. Macroscopic superpositions seem to violate our observations of the world. The second rule of Copenhagen, the collapse rule of the evolution of the wave function, was meant to solve this. Collapse of the superposition happens when there is a “measurement”. The problem then becomes: What exactly is a measurement?
Here are some proposed solutions to the measurement problem.
Everett suggested that collapse never happens. Aka manyworlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Everything that can happen by the Schrodinger wave function does happen. We don’t see the other paths taken because of decoherence. Collapse simply does not happen in this model. (You do have to insert some additional rule of probably to get the same probability predictions of standard Copenhagen. However, the probability rules are about determining which branch of the universal wave function we find ourselves in, as opposed to probability rules about the evolution of the wave function over time.)
Bohmian mechanics is a purely deterministic reformation of quantum theory in terms of deterministic behavior of real particles instead of in terms of wavefunctions. Collapse does not happen in this model. (Of course, any initial state is not perfectly discoverable, and so we’re left with standard Copenhagen probabilistic predictions.)
The inherent problem with the Copenhagen interpretation is that it’s borderline incoherent specifically because for most of the history of quantum theory, no one was able to give a precise definition of what constitutes a measurement for the purposes of invoking the collapse rule for evolution of the wave function. With the benefit of hindsight, it was really pathetic, and they needed better philosophers. They went back and forth for decades, using new terms that were no better than the old, using words such as micro vs macro, big vs small, etc.
Eventually, someone broke through the confusion, and provided a concrete and precise answer to the question, and thereby invented an alternative theory to quantum theory – not a mere interpretation like Bohmian mechanics and Everett Manyworlds. I speak of objective collapse theories, a family of hypothesized models, starting with the first model GRW. It’s not a single model, but rather a family of models. The models make *almost* the same predictions as standard quantum theory, but in certain corner cases, they make very different predictions. These corner cases are very, very difficult to test.
What is an objective collapse theory? The simplest way to describe the family is to describe the first such model, GRW. Basically, they took the Schrodinger wave equation, and modified it. They have exactly one rule for evolution of the wave function – not two. They don’t have a separate collapse rule. Rather, they carefully modified – mathematically – the Schrodinger wave function to include collapse. How did they do it? The key lies in the micro-macro and big-small distinctions. They found a mathematical formalization. The basic idea is that every particle has a certain chance per second to undergo a “hit”. When a particle undergoes a hit, it and every other particle in a superposition with it undergo collapse. For a single particle or a small enough collection of particles in a superposition, the chance of collapse in the next billion years is astronomically small, and we get the same predictions as standard quantum theory. For a very large collection of particles in a single superposition, the chance of collapse in the next microsecond is almost 1, and so it collapses immediately, and we also get the same predictions as standard Copenhagen quantum theory.
Most physicists seem to hate objective collapse theories because of reasons of mathematical beauty and elegance. Objective collapse theories are mathematically ugly, and that turns off many (most?) physicists. Having said that, objective collapse theories are the obvious formalization of the original two rules of quantum theory. Is it right? No one knows right now. In the future, we might be able to devise better experimental tests and find out.
To bring this back around, current objective collapse theories are inherently nondeterministic. They bring in an inherent “chance” per second of collapse (which some physicists also find inelegant and ugly).
When I read Dennett, it appeared to me that he was defining “Free will” as the sense of making a decision. I.e.: I feel that I can choose pizza or a hot dog for lunch, therefore I have a form of free will in that situation. But I am unconvinced that merely feeling that I have a choice is the same thing as having a choice. I’m not even going to try to say what “having a choice” might mean because I don’t think we actually do and I don’t know what it would look like if we did. But it’s easy enough to hypothesize a robot that is programmed to print “I have chosen pizza” whenever it obeys its programming and grabs a slice of pizza. Can that robot be said to have a choice? I could get more elaborate with the robot and even give it an AI-based text interactor that will argue all day that, no, it really did choose the pizza – but, did it?
I felt that Dennett was wasting his time and mine with that book. It seemed to depend, to me, on narrowly defining “Free Will” so he could point at a place where we have it and then shuffle back to his armchair. In my reading, it seemed to me that he actually did not think “Free Will” was a concept that could be defended, as it’s commonly imagined, and he could have stopped there with a few paragraphs.
I couldn’t agree more with you because at certain points in the book, I thought the reading was a waste of my time. The robot analogy can help, but in some senses, it is not a good representation of how the mind works. But I like when you say “programmed to print” a choice. I will edit this comment further later this evening when I have time.
KG mentioned Schroedinger’s cat. Here’s another example of quantum indeterminism having macro effects; an electron is prepared in a state in which its spin is positive along some axis. Two experimenters make a bet as to the outcome of a measurement of the spin along an axis 90 degrees to the original axis. That is a genuinely random 50/50 situation. If A loses, they can’t make their mortgage payment that month. Quantum bite in macroscopic arse!
I would say it’s not merely that they’re compatible. If your actions were not determined, that implies they were not willed.
At that point, whether you should regard that as “free” in some sense is kind of beside the point. (But I don’t think this could even offer the kind of moral/political freedom that people are interested in anyway. So, you’d have neither.)
Rob Grigjanis:
I don’t know how much Many-Worlds types may “trumpet” it, but things are deterministic according to them too. (Problem is, they have trouble making sense of any of the probabilities. If all those troubles went away, maybe they would do some more trumpeting.)
The only kinds of interpretations with genuine indeterminism that are maybe worth taking seriously are objective collapse theories like GRW…. Needless to say, it’s not exactly a mainstream proposal, so I definitely wouldn’t say “that’s how things are according to quantum mechanics.”
If instead they’re offering something along the lines of Copenhagen (actually a variety of loosely connected views and attitudes), they’re just bullshitting you and don’t have (or don’t want to give) a coherent answer to the question. So, even if some of those people do say there’s some kind of indeterminism, according to them, it’s not what I’d consider useful or relevant factual information.
The word “effectively” is doing some incredible work there.
If it were the case that “I don’t know” the location of my car keys, that clearly doesn’t mean the keys have no determinate location. They are in fact somewhere, and it’s not “effectively” true (or “practically” so, etc.) that they are not anywhere in particular.
It would simply be the case that somebody (me) doesn’t happen to know something (where the keys are). That’s quite an ordinary and unremarkable occurrence, nothing to base your whole worldview on, and it says more about what somebody is capable of doing than it says about the structure of the entire physical world itself … that latter being the actual thing which needs to be correctly described here.
So, it’s just a silly mistake to take that kind of epistemological distinction (regarding what you may know, believe, observe, measure, etc.) and confuse it for an ontological one (regarding what’s actually the case in reality).
As interesting as the quantum level is, I don’t think it’s relevant to free will. I wish I could engage more at that level, but it’s been years since I’ve had an interest in it. But please explain to me why you think we don’t have moral and political freedom. And how does “freedom” become irrelevant after we say that our will is caused by something?
CR,
I think you misunderstand the meaning of the word “will”. What is a decision made by will? A longer expression is “made according to the *determinations* of the will”. Free will, and will and willful choices in general, only make sense in a mostly deterministic framework. Random “choices” are not choices at all. Only mostly determined choices can be choices. Choosing is a mechanical act of a mechanical agent. Random choices are not choices at all. Coinflips are not choices. Choices according to a careful deliberation are real choices.
cr @4:
Depends who you read. I’m sure your conclusion is based on a careful, unbiased reading of the literature, founded on a deep understanding of decoherence, entanglement, etc. Yes, that’s sarcasm.
Every interpretation has problems. If one of them didn’t, it wouldn’t be an interpretation.
So you’re pretending to not understand the difference between “don’t know” and “can’t know”. I’m not in the least surprised.
Feel free to have the last word.