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Soul & Free Will Roundup Introduction - New Scientist - The Economist - New York Times: 1, 2
Yale psychologist Paul Bloom wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece back in 2004 that “The great conflict between science and religion in the last century was over evolutionary biology. In this century, it will be over psychology, and the stakes are nothing less than our souls.” Coming on the heels of the new atheism, there’s a growing awareness of the other major thrust of a fully developed naturalism: the challenge to the soul (the “little god”) and its companion concept of contra-causal free will. Extending our skepticism about the supernatural inward to the psyche is the next logical step for the naturalistically inclined. Below is a roundup of some recent articles, some of which raise determinist anxieties, some of which argue that we can safely naturalize ourselves without losing anything but our illusions. True, this takes a bit of conceptual and psychological rejiggering and no doubt some will miss the soul, just as some miss god. But the challenge to these last vestiges of dualistic supernaturalism might serve as a tonic for jaded sensibilities, and those that consider themselves tough-minded will get to test their mettle. At the very least it will be fascinating to watch what’s been a largely academic debate about free will play out in the public arena. Optimistically, the growing awareness of our fully natural nature might bring with it a second enlightenment, a true coming of age as a species, aware of itself as one of nature’s more interesting experiments in conscious agenthood. A few questions to keep in mind when reading these pieces:
********* In one of the clearest pieces on offer, neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland in “Do we have free will?” from New Scientist addresses all four questions. There’s one sort of free will we definitely don’t have, the uncaused variety, what philosophers call libertarian or contra-causal free will:
The significance of this of course relates to our notions of choice and responsibility:
Churchland’s proposal is to abandon the fruitless and illogical quest to find an uncaused causer, and instead take self-control as the basis for responsibility. This might give us, as she puts it, “a working concept of responsibility” that helps to maintain an orderly society. Healthy adults have neurologically-based capacities for self-control that allow them to be responsive to social norms, and it’s this that justifies holding them responsible. They exhibit “the neurobiological profile of a brain that has normal levels of control.” If this profile is significantly compromised by brain damage or disease, then we’re not dealing with a morally responsible agent. Note that there’s no causally free self that exerts control or is “in charge” in this picture – the person’s will isn’t free to choose itself. In fact, the will is reliably subject to control by social norms via reliable mechanisms in the brain. So, what is the self, if it isn’t an uncaused soul? It’s a functionally necessary, phenomenally felt neural construction:
For those used to thinking of themselves as soul-essences, this way of being real might seem a tad insubstantial. But not to worry, the phenomenal sense of being a self doesn’t evaporate just because you know it’s a construction – it’s an extremely robust construction, so long as your brain stays intact. And this is a rather remarkable sort of thing, or rather process, to be. As Churchland puts it:
Indeed. Abandoning the soul allows us to see that matter, properly organized, is capable of some pretty amazing tricks; we need not be mind-body or soul-brain dualists to keep our dignity. We’ll get along just fine as neurally instantiated selves, although we can’t at the moment avoid the limitations of being biological creatures. About these limitations, in the same issue of New Scientist Paul Broks has written a lovely, evocative science fiction meditation on the possibilities for more durable instantiations of the self. The story serves to frame a useful survey of recent developments in consciousness studies. He suggests that some of our descendents might feel, irrationally perhaps, nostalgia for the bad old days of the perishable, brain-based isolated conscious self. Don’t miss this. ********* In contrast to the naturalistic clarity and optimism of Churchland and Broks, a short piece in the December-January holiday issue of The Economist sows confusion about free will, tending toward moral panic. It suggests, rightly, that neuroscience is “emphasizing to a wider public that the brain really is just a mechanism, rather than a magician's box that is somehow outside the normal laws of cause and effect.” If we take a responsibility-entailing freedom to mean being exempt from causation, as the article says we ordinarily do, then the prospects are grim:
Such repercussions include, we are warned, the pre-emptive detention of those with personality disorders that increase the propensity for crime, and the heavy-handed regulation of addictive substances. Because people don’t have the contra-causal free will not to become criminals, or to refrain from making unhealthy choices to abuse drugs, junk food, or pornography, it’s OK for the state to prevent such behavior by any means necessary. But of course this is a complete non-sequitur. That people are completely caused to behave as they do isn’t a justification for abrogating civil liberties. After all, the freedom of voluntary action – the basis for our very real political and social freedoms – still remains a paramount value we’ll want to protect from an authoritarian state, even though voluntary action itself is just as determined as anything else in nature. Precisely because we’re hard-wired to want our liberty, we don’t become passive pawns in the face of determinism. So the death of the soul and it’s supernatural free will is nothing to panic about, so long as we don’t confuse political freedom with contra-causal freedom, as this article unfortunately does. Another instance of this worry is defused here. The same issue of The Economist also includes “Who do you think you are? A ten page report on the brain” that starts here, well worth a look. Note the refreshingly physicalist assumption in their approach to the question of the self: it’s a report on the brain. This is good progress. ********* As you probably know, Dennis Overbye in the New York Times science section wrote a wide-ranging and entertaining look at free will, quoting philosophers, physicists and psychologists. He does a creditable job of defining the libertarian, contra-causal conception of free will, and contrasts it with the “compatibilist” conception championed by Daniel Dennett and others, a free will compatible with determinism. As nearly all those quoted agree, the contra-causal conception – widely subscribed to by those outside the academy, most of whom are soul-brain dualists – is logically incoherent and empirically unwarranted, really just magical thinking. But even after it’s explained carefully, compatibilist free will leaves many feeling puzzled and unsatisfied, a “wretched subterfuge” Kant called it. Quoted by Overbye, William James agreed: many think that a real choice can’t be merely the “the dull rattling off of a [causal] chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.” So whether or not people will migrate to a notion of free will that leaves determinism undefeated is an open question. (Philosophers are engaged in a hot debate, informed by socio-metric research, about what ordinary folk believe about free will and how that bears, if at all, on what we should believe; see here for instance.) For those not taken with compatibilism, Overbye mentions two possible escape routes from determinism: quantum mechanics (QM) and emergence theory. QM theorists such as Henry Stapp and Stewart Hameroff say freedom is built into the very structure of reality as indeterministic micro-physics interacts with human consciousness. In contrast, emergence theorists say we’re free because at the level of complexity that results in consciousness, physical causation plays second fiddle to an individual's mental causation. But it seems unlikely that consciousness, which looks to be a function of macro-physical neural processes (not anything to do with QM), escapes being a fully determined phenomenon, even if it isn’t reducible to physics or chemistry (which it likely isn’t). Determinism holds reliably at many levels of description, including the mental level. And as philosopher Michael Silberstein rightly points out in Overbye’s piece, indeterministic randomness, for instance the QM variety, wouldn’t give us free will anyway. What people seem to want, of course, is for the self to fully determine its choices, but not itself be fully determined, except by - itself! We want to be, as Dennett once put it, “moral levitators.” But ultimate self-creation is a logical impossibility, and proximate self-creation is a deterministic process, as far as we know. So things don’t look good for contra-causal free will and the soul, at least not if we stick with science and logic. But, getting to the implications of all this, need we “freak,” as Silberstein says we might, at the news we’re soul-less “meat machines”? We need not. Although the debate about free will might well become another front in the culture wars, philosophers such as Churchland, Brok, Dennett and others (e.g., the Center for Naturalism) are working hard to defuse determinist anxieties. We can still be morally responsible, and held responsible, without being causal exceptions to nature. There’s no threat to our political liberties that stems from being organic mechanisms instead of immaterial souls. Moreover, Overbye quotes none other than Albert Einstein to the effect that not believing in free will keeps people humble, and quotes Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner to the effect that we’ll become more cognizant of the actual causes of evil once we stop chalking it up to self-made monsters (speaking of Hitler, of course). Wegner also suggests we might become “a bit more focused on helping people change rather than paying them back for what they’ve done.” So the seemingly depressing prospect of jettisoning free will might have substantial practical and moral benefits. In his response to readers, Overbye concurs, at least in one important respect:
To which naturalists will respond: precisely! ********* Last up, for dessert, New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Down riffs on free will and politics, referencing Overbye’s article. She wonders whether Bush, or anyone else for that matter, has free will, or are they just helpless puppets doomed to error:
And:
And so on, with five or six more examples about whether we should hold free will or fate accountable for our current crises. Fate, of course, is really short-hand for cause and effect: we can understand that Bush will likely continue his folly because he’s afraid of looking like a wimp, because he’s been taught to think we must win in Iraq at all costs. That gives us control, potentially, since if we could find a way for Bush to save face, that might save lives. On the other hand, free will allows us to blame Bush in a way we otherwise couldn’t, and that has its ignoble attraction. We don’t have to share in the responsibility for Iraq - it’s all his fault. However, chalking things up to free will has the major disadvantage that we’ll never understand why Bush chooses the way he does. If he evades determinism, then nothing, finally, determines or explains his choices. Likewise, supposing Shiites and Sunnis must choose of their own free will to stop fighting gives us no leverage at all, compared to admitting that there’s a full causal story to be told about their enmity. Understanding that story is key to resolving the conflict. So, if we can put our determinist anxieties to rest, it’s clear that abandoning free will of the contra-causal, supernatural variety is to our advantage, both in gaining control and becoming more compassionate (on the assumption that’s a virtue). Let’s hope the meme of causal understanding becomes the vogue soon, to replace the disabling and demonizing dualism of the supernatural soul. It won’t give Maureen Dowd as much latitude for gossip, but that’s the price we must pay. TWC 1/2007 Updates: One journalist's slightly perplexed reaction to Overbye's article: "On the way to choosing: furniture and free will." A vehement defense of free will in response to Overbye: "Think again: free will and its deniers."
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