#hard determinism

[limniads]

The universe is so clearly deterministic

[liskantope]

[Note: sloppy, random thought that I can’t confidently endorse.] One example of what bothers me in the mentality that comes with framing things from the hard determinist viewpoint is the implications of the assertion that “free will is an illusion”. This statement is somehow not symmetric enough. Because it seems to me that while we humans are inclined at some moments to wrongly perceive ourselves as having almost complete agency, at other moments we wrongly perceive ourselves as having almost no agency, and these errors are in roughly equal proportion.

(This isn’t really anything more than a reformulation of a position I’ve long felt and tried to express in other ways; it occurred to me today as I was grocery shopping and lamenting my feeling of near-complete “inability” to consistently cook and eat healthily.)

[liskantope]

A word on politics, free will, and God

A word on politics, free will, and God

[Content note: the topic of theism as it relates to free will is something I’m deeply interested in but on which I retired from debating long ago, and I’d much appreciate hearing from someone more knowledgeable.  Much discussion of conservative religion and abortion.] I. Free will and the political spectrum, revisited While I’m still on the subject of the whole social conflict between free-will…

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[liskantope]

Failure modes of determinist goggles

Failure modes of determinist goggles

[Content note: more free will / responsibility stuff, because apparently I never get sick of it.  Contains some qualifications on points I made last time which hopefully won’t be taken as defenses of what I criticized before.] Now it’s the other side’s turn. My last post was a diatribe of sorts against the societal values that I’m afraid free-will-leaning outlook on life will lead to (see…

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[philosophycorner]

I’m republishing the following because I didn’t realize at the time that I outlined an account that’s more or less in the spirit of what Schopenhauer intended. The distinction is hard to understand, but given my account, the language I use makes the distinction easier to see. I use the phrase thought of action, which means thinking about acting whether morally, socially, or what have you. I also the phrase willing to thought, which is the conscious choice to weigh one’s options. Then, of course, there’s the action itself, which makes clear what Schopenhauer intended to say. We can commit to thinking about and doing one of two or more actions. What we cannot do is create the circumstances that lead to one action or another or one outcome or another. Our will is entirely determined by physical forces, neuroanatomy, genetics, and circumstances lying completely out of our control. The account is as follows.

Before I share my thoughts, I want to iron out some terminology since I get the sense that might confuse some of my readers. I will use the term determinant when speaking of that which influences our thought of action. Clear examples will be mentioned below. I will also draw a distinction between thought of action, which is precisely what it sounds like: me thinking about acting; willing to thought, which is my conscious decision to entertain the thought that preserves, so to speak, the influence of the determinant(s); willing to action, which is my conscious commitment to a given action; and the action itself. These have a hard-to-pin-down causal relation, but I would hope the distinctions I make are clear. To think of an action, to entertain that thought, to transfer that thought into action, and the action aren’t the same things. Please keep these in mind as you read on.

I would identify as a compatiblist. Libertarian free will is out of style precisely because it doesn’t take determinism into account. Compatibilists don’t make that mistake. To act as though determinants don’t influence your thought of action is to miss the mark. Think of ads for instance. If I’m watching a Starbucks ad and suddenly I crave Caramel Macchiato or something that was explicitly advertised in the commercial, in what sense did I pull those thoughts out of thin air? I more than likely wouldn’t be thinking of Starbucks products if not for the commercial. The ad, in this case, would be the determinant. Now, it’s another thing entirely to act as though the determinants decide our actions for us. The fact that the ad made me crave something doesn’t mean it compelled me to make the decision I made. I didn’t go out to Starbucks solely because of the ad. There is, at the very least, a limited will to go out and get the product.

This is where I think we have a will. It isn’t, however, entirely free of the influence determinants have. There are cases, for instance, where we’re not conscious* of determinants, but that doesn’t mean none are present or more specifically, that no determinant(s) is influencing your thought of action to some degree. To introduce talk of degrees is vague, but to illustrate simply, think of it as follows. There’s no sense in where a determinant is 100% accountable for my thought of action. There’s no sense in where it has no accountability whatsoever. There is some measure in the direction of determinants. What remains is in the direction of my willing to thought—my conscious decision to entertain the thought.

Now, you’ll hear hard determinists invoke studies where the experimenter knew the decisions the participants were going to make before they made them. Sam Harris, for instance, speaks of this in his book Free Will. However, left and right, up and down, press or don’t press sort of decisions are overly simplistic and pale in comparison to the more sophisticated acts of volition we display day in and day out. Whether or not you cook tonight isn’t like going left or right or like pressing or not pressing the button. Also, the fact that neurons fire and nerve passageways flare up doesn’t imply that you knew my decision before I made it or acted on it. Like any simple motion, the brain registers your move before it is made and then, via the nervous system, sends signals to your limbs and extremities, so in theory, you can know whether or not I’m going to clench my fist before you see me doing it. Furthermore, there’s a delay between the thought of the act and actually committing the act. This, however, gets complicated when you think of a series of acts that constitute willing. As mentioned, cooking isn’t like up and down actions. It’s more complex. Sure, you can reason that I’ll get a teaspoon, a cup, a bottle of olive oil, etc., but you’re simply using common sense. In other words, you probably have some experience with cooking. That, however, is a far cry from knowing what I’ll do prior to my doing it.

The hard determinist is therefore without answers. Citing x amount of studies showing that you’ll know my simple choice before I make it doesn’t mean I don’t have will. My will isn’t free, I agree. The Libertarian version isn’t up to snuff. My will, however, can decide for or against existing determinants. That is to say that I can choose to heed the influence of the Starbucks commercial or not. Determinants, therefore, don’t have the final word.

Of course, the hard determinant has wiggle room and a bit of recourse. They’ll say that my deciding against the influence of the advertisement isn’t exactly my choice. They’ll say that other determinants play a role (e.g. I’m physically exhausted; I have a headache; I need sleep; it’s raining outside). Again, however, these haven’t the final say. Determinants neither encourage nor discourage my willing to action and they only have a degree of influence on my willing to thought. My willing to action, however, doesn’t serve any determinants no matter how influential they are over my thought of action since they can’t possibly have the causal power of, for instance, a natural force. If I will to jump vertically, the force of gravity will act on me. There is no sense in which determinants are like natural forces. They have an influence, sure. They cannot, however, act on me or more accurately, on my willing to action. They can’t, as it were, push me to decide or to be indecisive. 

In fact, the very fact that we have moments of indecision demonstrates both the influence of determinants over our thought of action, and our willing to action. If one still wants to argue that determinants are akin to causal forces, they’d be hard pressed to explain why some determinants are stronger than others. In other words, when determinants are competing against one another—i.e., the Starbucks ad versus the fact that it’s raining outside—one is more influential on my thought of action than the other. If they are equal forces, then I’d remain indecisive because my willing to thought would be acted on by two equal and competing forces. Therefore, my willing to thought will never transfer into a willing to action and the actual committing of that action. Since this isn’t the case, my willing to action must have some say or perhaps even the last word.

*To speak of determinants we’re not conscious of would make for quite a tangent. The discussion will no doubt include facts we know from cognitive science and psychology. I would say that there are determinants you cannot be conscious of no matter how much you attempt to locate them. In the end, however, these don’t behave like forces either. They’re not acting on you—moving you to act in one way or another.

[untitledcoffeeshopau]

so, on that note, agent, enjoy your "freedom" while it lasts (until youre dead)

[nilealligator]

idk recently ive been thinking of what does it mean to treat anyones life as valuable? everyones life as equally valuable? what does that take, what does it take from u, what does it give u? how can we see anyone and/or each other as valuable when we fail in these efforts (or don’t see their value in the first place)? what encourages us to do this, what discourages it? who’s doing it, why them, what does it look like to do it? are we all, is anybody? i guess it’s a new spin on the same eternal question, what do we owe each other, what do we owe ourselves? 

i really wish these were conversations i had more with other people and less in an eternal existential crisis with myself, less just scribbling in journals. and at the same time there’s definite real reasons i know not to, i don’t fully know what it would be like to do it, i can’t even say i know how. i do know whenever ive felt like ive come at least close i feel best. and if im viewing my self as valuable does that mean forgiving myself, pushing for better, ignoring it, focusing on something else maybe more important, all of the above? is anything more important, isn’t this part of everything?

[liskantope]

Recently I finally got around to watching the episode of Sam Harris’ podcast where he debates Daniel Dennett on free will. This is definitely one of the more unusual episodes: they were holding a back-and-forth discussion sharing a single microphone in a noisy bar during a conference, and Dennett in particular seemed quite halting and unpolished. It’s also a very striking example of two debaters mostly talking past one another, but I’m not going to hold that against Harris and Dennett -- from what I’ve seen it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to actually engage with one’s opponent in the battle between hard determinism and compatibilism, especially given that it’s mostly a question of defining terms.

Anyone who has read enough of my posts on free will might rightly guess that I’m completely on Dennett’s side here. Not that Dennett managed to fully articulate his position -- he was mostly focused on rebutting or deflecting particular points coming from Harris -- but just about everything he said strongly reflected my way of thinking about free will. Harris, on the other hand, kept making arguments that came across to me as weak or confused, which is uncharacteristic of my usual impression of him.

Below the cut are a couple of points in the conversation where Sam Harris brought up arguments which I’m pretty sure are quite wrong but are still interesting to mull over.

The first one is starting right before the 45-minute mark, when Harris says:

[T]his notion that the tiny micro-adjustment in the universe only really spells the difference in cases it’s a decision that could go either way [...] it wasn’t a diversion of that great consequence because it wasn’t something you were fully committed to, but I think there are probably many actions -- maybe “decisions” are the wrong category, but certainly actions -- where the difference between a life-changing action and not is just a matter of a tiny piece of real-estate in the brain being otherwise. So the difference between thinking something and saying it out loud to the person you’re thinking it about, or the difference between sending that angry e-mail you wrote to your boss or to your best friend and just deciding to scrap it -- that can be one of those tiny moments where, but for a little more sleep the night before, your life would be very different.

I don’t quite know what point Harris is trying to make here, and I’m not sure Dennett knew either, but it seemed to me when I first listened through the full podcast that Harris was bringing it up to suggest that our traditional sense of moral responsibility really doesn’t make sense in a deterministic world: some of our most character-defining moments are the ones most reliant on randomness. Except what he actually said above was that some of our most life-changing moments rely on near-randomness. I agree with the obvious truth of this! But I would say that just on the face of the examples he gives, it would seem like (in isolation) these are not particularly character-defining events and therefore don’t imply a strong degree of moral responsibility. On the other hand, it’s easy to see why Harris is tempted to say that they do! If you think about it, major character-defining moments in fiction are typically portrayed as climactic events where the character is feeling very torn between two choices, it’s almost 50-50, and then some slight but significant factor tips him/her one way or the other.

I think we could interpret those character-defining moments as they’re portrayed in fiction in another way, though: they are showing someone (let’s say, an emergent hero, although an analogous view works for emergent villains such as Walter White at the end of the second season) overcoming some major obstacle in the form of temptation and an emotional struggle. The odds were stacked against them in the first place, in the sense that doing wrong is the far, far easier path and the one that lesser people would almost certainly take. Our hero, representing the best among us, is able to overcome this obstacle, but in order for us to appreciate just how hard it is to overcome and perhaps also to make them both more relatable and more inspiring, we see that the hero just barely overcomes it. Thus, we witness a character-defining moment, but the character-definingness comes not from the fact that something tipped our hero to the right choice when their internal conflict had the choice at around 50-50, but the fact that the hero managed to get the choice between what’s right and what’s easy up to 50-50 in the first place when most of us would have simply taken the easy choice, no contest.

I’ve pondered this in particular for the case of Luke Skywalker, after seeing a lot of criticism of his portrayal in The Last Jedi where the critics argue that his momentary impulse and aborted attempt to murder Ben Solo is inconsistent with his character as established in the original trilogy. My response has always been to point out that his character-defining moment at the climax of Return of the Jedi was a case of an internal conflict reaching 50-50 and Luke just barely being pushed into choosing the light side -- after cutting off his father’s hand, he very nearly finishes the job at the Emperor’s urging. The right revelation passes through his mind at the right moment, and so he doesn’t, resulting in what’s certainly a life-changing moment not only for him but possibly for the whole galaxy. (And of course a similar thing could be said about Darth Vader’s character-defining moment shortly afterwards where he just barely manages to overcome the evil and hatred he’s been entrenched in for so long but that makes all the difference.) So Luke isn’t a god or a saint; he just managed to marginally swing in the right direction at a crucial moment. Therefore, the fact that Luke so nearly goes the other way makes it perfectly plausible, in my opinion, that sometime later on, Luke might still slide in the other direction, at least momentarily.

Now there are two ways to unpack my argument there. First, we can say that my argument implies that Luke isn’t really a hero after all -- his most consequential act doesn’t say that much about his character because it happened in a moment where things could have gone either way and luckily, some semi-random fleeting thought pushed things in the right direction. This argument would annoy the critics and for good reason: the original trilogy clearly didn’t intend the audience to come to such a lukewarm conclusion about Luke Skywalker. So I prefer a second unpacking, which is to consider what I argued in the paragraph above, and view Luke as a hero just for overcoming temptation (the Dark Side -- anger, hatred, greed -- is not stronger but the more seductive path!) and pushing the balance up to 50-50 in the first place, both when confronted by the two Sith lords at the end of Episode VI and when confronted with the titanic threat of his wayward nephew a generation later.

The other of Harris’ points that I thought seemed kind of confused was just after the 1:00 mark when he presented what he called “a bit of a paradox”. For this thought experiment, you take the “most competent agent”, say Tiger Woods at his peak strength in a golfing context, and you imagine that he’s attempting a 2-foot putt, for which it’s reasonable to assume he’ll have a 99.9% success rate, but this is the one time he doesn’t get it. Harris says that “on its face”, Tiger Woods is the one you can hold most responsible for missing such a putt, “the most culpable of any person on Earth”. And yet at the same time, since Tiger Woods is the most skilled golfer in the world who would normally always make the putt, luck must play a bigger role in his missing the putt than it would for you or me -- as Harris puts it, it “says the least about him” -- and makes Woods the least responsible person on Earth for missing it.

I’m pleased that Daniel Dennett responded by repeatedly affirming that there’s no paradox, but his explanation sounded garbled and in my opinion missed the point. The point is quite simply that Harris’ two interpretations that seem to contradict each other, the Most Responsibility view and the Least Responsibility view, are each arrived at through different external assumptions on how the event of Woods missing the putt unfolded. The Least Responsibility view is explicitly based on the assumption that Woods must have missed the putt through terrible luck. The Most Responsibility view is one that might instinctively be taken by most outsiders, precisely because such terrible luck seems vanishingly unlikely, so they assume that Woods didn’t have terrible luck and therefore must actually be at fault in some way: perhaps he was being lazy or careless, or starting to rest on his laurels out of a complacency brought on by his recent success, or made the foolish choice of staying out too late the night before (as Dennett suggests), or something else that we think of as implying moral culpability. Objectively speaking, Woods bears some well-defined degree of responsibility, which depends on the actual causes of his failure. But since none of us onlookers have complete information on those causes, we tend to assign high or low degrees of responsibility to him depending on our default assumptions as to whether either extremely bad/careless behavior or really terrible luck should be eliminated as possibility.