Daniel Dennett - Is Free Will an Illusion? What Can Cognitive Science Tell Us?

Daniel Dennett recently spoke on free and cognitive science at the Santa Fe Institute. He has argued against Sam Harris's rejection of free will, but he does not reject determinism, making him a compatibilist. 

Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas, and that it is possible to believe both without being logically inconsistent.^[1] Compatibilists believe freedom can be present or absent in situations for reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics.

Here is a summary of his position from his Wikipedia page:

Free will

While he is a confirmed compatibilist on free will, in "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want"—Chapter 15 of his 1978 book Brainstorms,^[17] Dennett articulated the case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views.

The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.^[18]

While other philosophers have developed two-stage models, including William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, and Henry Margenau, Dennett defends this model for the following reasons:

1. First ... The intelligent selection, rejection, and weighing of the considerations that do occur to the subject is a matter of intelligence making the difference.
2. Second, I think it installs indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all.
3. Third ... from the point of view of biological engineering, it is just more efficient and in the end more rational that decision making should occur in this way.
4. A fourth observation in favor of the model is that it permits moral education to make a difference, without making all of the difference.
5. Fifth—and I think this is perhaps the most important thing to be said in favor of this model—it provides some account of our important intuition that we are the authors of our moral decisions.
6. Finally, the model I propose points to the multiplicity of decisions that encircle our moral decisions and suggests that in many cases our ultimate decision as to which way to act is less important phenomenologically as a contributor to our sense of free will than the prior decisions affecting our deliberation process itself: the decision, for instance, not to consider any further, to terminate deliberation; or the decision to ignore certain lines of inquiry.

These prior and subsidiary decisions contribute, I think, to our sense of ourselves as responsible free agents, roughly in the following way: I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: "That's enough. I've considered this matter enough and now I'm going to act," in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.^[19]

Leading libertarian philosophers such as Robert Kane have rejected Dennett's model, specifically that random chance is directly involved in a decision, on the basis that they believe this eliminates the agent's motives and reasons, character and values, and feelings and desires. They claim that, if chance is the primary cause of decisions, then agents cannot be liable for resultant actions. Kane says:

[As Dennett admits,] a causal indeterminist view of this deliberative kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For [the agent] does not have complete control over what chance images and other thoughts enter his mind or influence his deliberation. They simply come as they please. [The agent] does have some control after the chance considerations have occurred.

But then there is no more chance involved. What happens from then on, how he reacts, is determined by desires and beliefs he already has. So it appears that he does not have control in the libertarian sense of what happens after the chance considerations occur as well. Libertarians require more than this for full responsibility and free will.^[20]

I do not buy the determinist argument and I tend to support conditional free will (perhaps limited is a better word).

Daniel C. Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking (2013), Breaking the Spell (2006), Freedom Evolves (2003), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Consciousness Explained (1992), and many other books. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987. His latest book, written with Linda LaScola, Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind (2013).

Is Free Will an Illusion? What Can Cognitive Science Tell Us?

Published on May 17, 2014


Daniel Dennett
May 14, 2014

Serious thinkers contend that free will cannot exist in a deterministic universe -- one in which events are the singular outcomes of the conditions in which they occur. The alternative view, that free will is prerequisite for personal responsibility and morality, is the basis of our legal and religious institutions. Philosopher Daniel Dennett unravels this conundrum and asks whether we must jettison one of these notions, or whether they can co-exist. He then asks: if free will is an illusion, as many scientists say, should we conclude that we don't need real free will to be responsible for our actions?

Free Will - Sam Harris vs. Dan Dennett

Back in 2012, Sam Harris published a monograph on free will, a complete rejection of the notion of free will based on out-dated research that has been broadly misinterpreted. Free Will was popular among those who associate notions of free will with religious doctrine, but many other people - including some leading neuroscientists - reject the absolutist position Harris presents.

Here is a brief synopsis of the book from its Amazon page:

A BELIEF IN FREE WILL touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion.

In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.

Among those who reject this position is Michael Gazziniga, author of Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (2011). Here is the synopsis of his book:

The father of cognitive neuroscience and author of Human offers a provocative argument against the common belief that our lives are wholly determined by physical processes and we are therefore not responsible for our actions.

A powerful orthodoxy in the study of the brain has taken hold in recent years: Since physical laws govern the physical world and our own brains are part of that world, physical laws therefore govern our behavior and even our conscious selves. Free will is meaningless, goes the mantra; we live in a “determined” world. 

Not so, argues the renowned neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga in this thoughtful, provocative book based on his Gifford Lectures——one of the foremost lecture series in the world dealing with religion, science, and philosophy. Who’s in Charge? proposes that the mind, which is somehow generated by the physical processes of the brain, “constrains” the brain just as cars are constrained by the traffic they create. Writing with what Steven Pinker has called “his trademark wit and lack of pretension,” Gazzaniga shows how determinism immeasurably weakens our views of human responsibility; it allows a murderer to argue, in effect, “It wasn’t me who did it——it was my brain.” Gazzaniga convincingly argues that even given the latest insights into the physical mechanisms of the mind, there is an undeniable human reality: We are responsible agents who should be held accountable for our actions, because responsibility is found in how people interact, not in brains.
 
An extraordinary book that ranges across neuroscience, psychology, ethics, and the law with a light touch but profound implications, Who’s in Charge? is a lasting contribution from one of the leading thinkers of our time. 

Two more recent arguments in favor of free will, however limited said free will might be, come from Thomas Metzinger ("The myth of cognitive agency: Subpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy," 2013; Frontiers in Psychology: Perception Science) and Gregory Bonn ("Re-conceptualizing free will for the 21st century: Acting independently with a limited role for consciousness," 2013; Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology). There was also a recent article at The Emotion Machine blog in support of free will.

Okay, so that is some of the background supporting an idea Harris rejects completely and which philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett rejects mostly.

In fact, one of the critics on Harris's books was his fellow atheist (and horseman), Dennett. Here is the beginning of Dennett's LONG reply to Harris's book, followed by the beginning of Harris's reply to Dennett. For the record, I also think Dennett is wrong (again, see the article by Metzinger).

Reflections on FREE WILL

A Review by Daniel C. Dennett


(Photo via Steven Kersting)

Sam Harris’s Free Will (2012) is a remarkable little book, engagingly written and jargon-free, appealing to reason, not authority, and written with passion and moral seriousness. This is not an ivory tower technical inquiry; it is in effect a political tract, designed to persuade us all to abandon what he considers to be a morally pernicious idea: the idea of free will. If you are one of the many who have been brainwashed into believing that you have—or rather, are—an (immortal, immaterial) soul who makes all your decisions independently of the causes impinging on your material body and especially your brain, then this is the book for you. Or, if you have dismissed dualism but think that what you are is a conscious (but material) ego, a witness that inhabits a nook in your brain and chooses, independently of external causation, all your voluntary acts, again, this book is for you. It is a fine “antidote,” as Paul Bloom says, to this incoherent and socially malignant illusion. The incoherence of the illusion has been demonstrated time and again in rather technical work by philosophers (in spite of still finding supporters in the profession), but Harris does a fine job of making this apparently unpalatable fact accessible to lay people. Its malignance is due to its fostering the idea of Absolute Responsibility, with its attendant implications of what we might call Guilt-in-the-eyes-of-God for the unfortunate sinners amongst us and, for the fortunate, the arrogant and self-deluded idea of Ultimate Authorship of the good we do. We take too much blame, and too much credit, Harris argues. We, and the rest of the world, would be a lot better off if we took ourselves—our selves—less seriously. We don’t have the kind of free will that would ground such Absolute Responsibility for either the harm or the good we cause in our lives.

All this is laudable and right, and vividly presented, and Harris does a particularly good job getting readers to introspect on their own decision-making and notice that it just does not conform to the fantasies of this all too traditional understanding of how we think and act. But some of us have long recognized these points and gone on to adopt more reasonable, more empirically sound, models of decision and thought, and we think we can articulate and defend a more sophisticated model of free will that is not only consistent with neuroscience and introspection but also grounds a (modified, toned-down, non-Absolute) variety of responsibility that justifies both praise and blame, reward and punishment. We don’t think this variety of free will is an illusion at all, but rather a robust feature of our psychology and a reliable part of the foundations of morality, law and society. Harris, we think, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

He is not alone among scientists in coming to the conclusion that the ancient idea of free will is not just confused but also a major obstacle to social reform. His brief essay is, however, the most sustained attempt to develop this theme, which can also be found in remarks and essays by such heavyweight scientists as the neuroscientists Wolf Singer and Chris Frith, the psychologists Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, the physicists Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein, and the evolutionary biologists Jerry Coyne and (when he’s not thinking carefully) Richard Dawkins.

The book is, thus, valuable as a compact and compelling expression of an opinion widely shared by eminent scientists these days. It is also valuable, as I will show, as a veritable museum of mistakes, none of them new and all of them seductive—alluring enough to lull the critical faculties of this host of brilliant thinkers who do not make a profession of thinking about free will. And, to be sure, these mistakes have also been made, sometimes for centuries, by philosophers themselves. But I think we have made some progress in philosophy of late, and Harris and others need to do their homework if they want to engage with the best thought on the topic.

I am not being disingenuous when I say this museum of mistakes is valuable; I am grateful to Harris for saying, so boldly and clearly, what less outgoing scientists are thinking but keeping to themselves. I have always suspected that many who hold this hard determinist view are making these mistakes, but we mustn’t put words in people’s mouths, and now Harris has done us a great service by articulating the points explicitly, and the chorus of approval he has received from scientists goes a long way to confirming that they have been making these mistakes all along. Wolfgang Pauli’s famous dismissal of another physicist’s work as “not even wrong” reminds us of the value of crystallizing an ambient cloud of hunches into something that can be shown to be wrong. Correcting widespread misunderstanding is usually the work of many hands, and Harris has made a significant contribution.

The first parting of opinion on free will is between compatibilists and incompatibilists. The latter say (with “common sense” and a tradition going back more than two millennia) that free will is incompatible with determinism, the scientific thesis that there are causes for everything that happens. Incompatibilists hold that unless there are “random swerves”[1] that disrupt the iron chains of physical causation, none of our decisions or choices can be truly free. Being caused means not being free—what could be more obvious? The compatibilists deny this; they have argued, for centuries if not millennia, that once you understand what free will really is (and must be, to sustain our sense of moral responsibility), you will see that free will can live comfortably with determinism—if determinism is what science eventually settles on.

Incompatibilists thus tend to pin their hopes on indeterminism, and hence were much cheered by the emergence of quantum indeterminism in 20th century physics. Perhaps the brain can avail itself of undetermined quantum swerves at the sub-atomic level, and thus escape the shackles of physical law! Or perhaps there is some other way our choices could be truly undetermined. Some have gone so far as to posit an otherwise unknown (and almost entirely unanalyzable) phenomenon called agent causation, in which free choices are caused somehow by an agent, but not by any event in the agent’s history. One exponent of this position, Roderick Chisholm, candidly acknowledged that on this view every free choice is “a little miracle”—which makes it clear enough why this is a school of thought endorsed primarily by deeply religious philosophers and shunned by almost everyone else. Incompatibilists who think we have free will, and therefore determinism must be false, are known as libertarians (which has nothing to do with the political view of the same name). Incompatibilists who think that all human choices are determined by prior events in their brains (which were themselves no doubt determined by chains of events arising out of the distant past) conclude from this that we can’t have free will, and, hence, are not responsible for our actions.

This concern for varieties of indeterminism is misplaced, argue the compatibilists: free will is a phenomenon that requires neither determinism nor indeterminism; the solution to the problem of free will lies in realizing this, not banking on the quantum physicists to come through with the right physics—or a miracle. Compatibilism may seem incredible on its face, or desperately contrived, some kind of a trick with words, but not to philosophers. Compatibilism is the reigning view among philosophers (just over 59%, according to the 2009 Philpapers survey) with libertarians coming second with 13% and hard determinists only 12%. It is striking, then, that all the scientists just cited have landed on the position rejected by almost nine out of ten philosophers, but not so surprising when one considers that these scientists hardly ever consider the compatibilist view or the reasons in its favor.

Harris has considered compatibilism, at least cursorily, and his opinion of it is breathtakingly dismissive: After acknowledging that it is the prevailing view among philosophers (including his friend Daniel Dennett), he asserts that “More than in any other area of academic philosophy, the result resembles theology.” This is a low blow, and worse follows: “From both a moral and a scientific perspective, this seems deliberately obtuse.” (18) I would hope that Harris would pause at this point to wonder—just wonder—whether maybe his philosophical colleagues had seen some points that had somehow escaped him in his canvassing of compatibilism. As I tell my undergraduate students, whenever they encounter in their required reading a claim or argument that seems just plain stupid, they should probably double check to make sure they are not misreading the “preposterous” passage in question. It is possible that they have uncovered a howling error that has somehow gone unnoticed by the profession for generations, but not very likely. In this instance, the chances that Harris has underestimated and misinterpreted compatibilism seem particularly good, since the points he defends later in the book agree right down the line with compatibilism; he himself is a compatibilist in everything but name!

Seriously, his main objection to compatibilism, issued several times, is that what compatibilists mean by “free will” is not what everyday folk mean by “free will.” Everyday folk mean something demonstrably preposterous, but Harris sees the effort by compatibilists to make the folks’ hopeless concept of free will presentable as somehow disingenuous, unmotivated spin-doctoring, not the project of sympathetic reconstruction the compatibilists take themselves to be engaged in. So it all comes down to who gets to decide how to use the term “free will.” Harris is a compatibilist about moral responsibility and the importance of the distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, but he is not a compatibilist about free will since he thinks “free will” has to be given the incoherent sense that emerges from uncritical reflection by everyday folk. He sees quite well that compatibilism is “the only philosophically respectable way to endorse free will” (p. 16) but adds:

However, the ‘free will’ that compatibilists defend is not the free will that most people feel they have. (p. 16)

First of all, he doesn’t know this. This is a guess, and suitably expressed questionnaires might well prove him wrong. That is an empirical question, and a thoughtful pioneering attempt to answer it suggests that Harris’s guess is simply mistaken.[2] The newly emerging field of experimental philosophy (or “X-phi”) has a rather unprepossessing track record to date, but these are early days, and some of the work has yielded interesting results that certainly defy complacent assumptions common among philosophers. The study by Nahmias et al. 2005 found substantial majorities (between 60 and 80%) in agreement with propositions that are compatibilist in outlook, not incompatibilist.

Harris’s claim that the folk are mostly incompatibilists is thus dubious on its face, and even if it is true, maybe all this shows is that most people are suffering from a sort of illusion that could be replaced by wisdom. After all, most people used to believe the sun went around the earth. They were wrong, and it took some heavy lifting to convince them of this. Maybe this factoid is a reflection on how much work science and philosophy still have to do to give everyday laypeople a sound concept of free will. We’ve not yet succeeded in getting them to see the difference between weight and mass, and Einsteinian relativity still eludes most people. When we found out that the sun does not revolve around the earth, we didn’t then insist that there is no such thing as the sun (because what the folk mean by “sun” is “that bright thing that goes around the earth”). Now that we understand what sunsets are, we don’t call them illusions. They are real phenomena that can mislead the naive.

To see the context in which Harris’s criticism plays out, consider a parallel. The folk concept of mind is a shambles, for sure: dualistic, scientifically misinformed and replete with miraculous features—even before we get to ESP and psychokinesis and poltergeists. So when social scientists talk about beliefs or desires and cognitive neuroscientists talk about attention and memory they are deliberately using cleaned-up, demystified substitutes for the folk concepts. Is this theology, is this deliberately obtuse, countenancing the use of concepts with such disreputable ancestors? I think not, but the case can be made (there are mad dog reductionist neuroscientists and philosophers who insist that minds are illusions, pains are illusions, dreams are illusions, ideas are illusions—all there is is just neurons and glia and the like). The same could be said about color, for example. What everyday folk think colors are—if you pushed them beyond their everyday contexts in the paint store and picking out their clothes—is hugely deluded; that doesn’t mean that colors are an illusion. They are real in spite of the fact that, for instance, atoms aren’t colored.

Read more . . . .

And then here is the reply by Harris to Dennett's schooling of him on philosophy and free will (and it really does feel like a "master" painstaking trying to get through to a stubborn "student" who refuses to see beyond his own theory).

The Marionette’s Lament

A Response to Daniel Dennett

(Photo via Max Boschini)

Dear Dan—

I’d like to begin by thanking you for taking the time to review Free Will at such length. Publicly engaging me on this topic is certainly preferable to grumbling in private. Your writing is admirably clear, as always, which worries me in this case, because we appear to disagree about a great many things, including the very nature of our disagreement.

I want to begin by reminding our readers—and myself—that exchanges like this aren’t necessarily pointless. Perhaps you need no encouragement on that front, but I’m afraid I do. In recent years, I have spent so much time debating scientists, philosophers, and other scholars that I’ve begun to doubt whether any smart person retains the ability to change his mind. This is one of the great scandals of intellectual life: The virtues of rational discourse are everywhere espoused, and yet witnessing someone relinquish a cherished opinion in real time is about as common as seeing a supernova explode overhead. The perpetual stalemate one encounters in public debates is annoying because it is so clearly the product of motivated reasoning, self-deception, and other failures of rationality—and yet we’ve grown to expect it on every topic, no matter how intelligent and well-intentioned the participants. I hope you and I don’t give our readers further cause for cynicism on this front.

Unfortunately, your review of my book doesn’t offer many reasons for optimism. It is a strange document—avuncular in places, but more generally sneering. I think it fair to say that one could watch an entire season of Downton Abbey on Ritalin and not detect a finer note of condescension than you manage for twenty pages running.

I am not being disingenuous when I say this museum of mistakes is valuable; I am grateful to Harris for saying, so boldly and clearly, what less outgoing scientists are thinking but keeping to themselves. I have always suspected that many who hold this hard determinist view are making these mistakes, but we mustn’t put words in people’s mouths, and now Harris has done us a great service by articulating the points explicitly, and the chorus of approval he has received from scientists goes a long way to confirming that they have been making these mistakes all along. Wolfgang Pauli’s famous dismissal of another physicist’s work as “not even wrong” reminds us of the value of crystallizing an ambient cloud of hunches into something that can be shown to be wrong. Correcting widespread misunderstanding is usually the work of many hands, and Harris has made a significant contribution.

I hope you will recognize that your beloved Rapoport’s rules have failed you here. If you have decided, according to the rule, to first mention something positive about the target of your criticism, it will not do to say that you admire him for the enormity of his errors and the folly with which he clings to them despite the sterling example you’ve set in your own work. Yes, you may assert, “I am not being disingenuous when I say this museum of mistakes is valuable,” but you are, in truth, being disingenuous. If that isn’t clear, permit me to spell it out just this once: You are asking the word “valuable” to pass as a token of praise, however faint. But according to you, my book is “valuable” for reasons that I should find embarrassing. If I valued it as you do, I should rue the day I wrote it (as you would, had you brought such “value” into the world). And it would be disingenuous of me not to notice how your prickliness and preening appears: You write as one protecting his academic turf. Behind and between almost every word of your essay—like some toxic background radiation—one detects an explosion of professorial vanity.

And yet many readers, along with several of our friends and colleagues, have praised us for airing our differences in so civil a fashion—the implication being that religious demagogues would have declared mutual fatwas and shed each other’s blood. Well, that is a pretty low bar, and I don’t think we should be congratulated for having cleared it. The truth is that you and I could have done a much better job—and produced something well worth reading—had we explored the topic of free will in a proper conversation. Whether we called it a “conversation” or a “debate” would have been immaterial. And, as you know, I urged you to engage me that way on multiple occasions and up to the eleventh hour. But you insisted upon writing your review. Perhaps you thought that I was hoping to spare myself a proper defenestration. Not so. I was hoping to spare our readers a feeling of boredom that surpasseth all understanding.

As I expected, our exchange will now be far less interesting or useful than a conversation/debate would have been. Trading 10,000-word essays is simply not the best way to get to the bottom of things. If I attempt to correct every faulty inference and misrepresentation in your review, the result will be deadly to read. Nor will you be able to correct my missteps, as you could have if we were exchanging 500-word volleys. I could heap misconception upon irrelevancy for pages—as you have done—and there would be no way to stop me. In the end, our readers will be left to reconcile a book-length catalogue of discrepancies.

Let me give you an example, just to illustrate how tedious it is to untie these knots. You quote me as saying:

If determinism is true, the future is set—and this includes all our future states of mind and our subsequent behavior. And to the extent that the law of cause and effect is subject to indeterminism—quantum or otherwise—we can take no credit for what happens. There is no combination of these truths that seems compatible with the popular notion of free will.

You then announce that “the sentence about indeterminism is false”—a point you seek to prove by recourse to an old thought experiment involving a “space pirate” and a machine that amplifies quantum indeterminacy. After which, you lovingly inscribe the following epitaph onto my gravestone:

These are not new ideas. For instance I have defended them explicitly in 1978, 1984, and 2003. I wish Harris had noticed that he contradicts them here, and I’m curious to learn how he proposes to counter my arguments.

You see, dear reader, Harris hasn’t done his homework. What a pity…. But you have simply misread me, Dan—and that entire page in your review was a useless digression. I am not saying that the mere addition of indeterminism to the clockwork makes responsibility impossible. I am saying, as you have always conceded, that seeking to ground free will in indeterminism is hopeless, because truly random processes are precisely those for which we can take no responsibility. Yes, we might still express our beliefs and opinions while being gently buffeted by random events (as you show in your thought experiment), but if our beliefs and opinions were themselves randomly generated, this would offer no basis for human responsibility (much less free will). Bored yet?

You do this again and again in your review. And when you are not misreading me, you construct bad analogies—to sunsets, color vision, automobiles—none of which accomplish their intended purpose. Some are simply faulty (that is, they don’t run through); others make my point for me, demonstrating that you have missed my point (or, somehow, your own).

Read more . . . .

Steven Handel - 5 Scientific Reasons You Should Believe in Free Will

 

Without free will, there seems little point in making a New Year's resolution. After all, why bother if we have no conscious control of our behaviors and their outcomes? While there are many philosophers and neuroscientists who dismiss the notion of free will as fantasy or illusion, the best research suggests that, on average, about 80-90% of what our brain does is outside of our awareness, while 10-20% is based in conscious choice.

The first type of brain activity is known as fast thinking (Type I), essentially automated processes that are performed without conscious thought. The second type of brain activity is known as slow thinking (Type II), actions based in deliberation. Daniel Kahneman's outstanding book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, outlines and explicates these ideas.

What often does not get discussed in philosophical or neuroscientific dismissals of free will is that we can increase the percentage of brain function that is slow thinking through mindfulness practices (especially learning to be mindful of emotions that can often generate reactive responses rather than thoughtful or deliberative responses). 

Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz advocates for something he calls “self-directed neuroplasticity,” the ability to rewire your brain with your thoughts. While he employs this to help those suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) regain control of their behaviors, it also supports the idea that we can develop greater degrees of free will. The foundation for self-directed neuroplasticity is mindfulness.

Scientific Foundation

Neuroscientist Edmund Rolls had revealed, in a largely overlooked study, that the orbitalfrontal cortex (OFC) acts as an error detection circuit. After reading Rolls' study, Schwartz suggested that the caudate nucleus, a tail-shaped structure near the OFC that serves as the habit center of the brain, might also be involved of OCD rituals and compulsions. 

 The caudate nucleus, he thought, might act as a kind of nexus for OCD — a traffic hub where rational thinking in the cerebral cortex meets the more primitive, emotion-ruled centers of the brain’s limbic system. It would be a natural ground zero for the noxious brew of repetition and terror to collide.

This is where Schwartz brought in his interest in mindfulness:

In this sense, OCD reflects a key aspect of mindfulness meditation — granting the patient a detached perspective from his or her own thoughts. Schwartz speculated that this awareness could enable a mindfulness-based treatment strategy. After all, if the point of mindfulness is to stand back dispassionately from all our ideas and impulses, couldn’t an OCD patient use mindfulness to step back even from mortal fears and compulsions? Perhaps mindfulness could help rewire the OCD circuit in the brain.

Schwartz asked his group of people dealing with OCD to try to recognize an OCD-related thought as soon as possible and relabel it as unreal — merely a symptom of their OCD — without giving in to it. Doing so would allow them to experience the goal of directed mindfulness, to gain experiential distance from their symptoms.

As Schwartz initial work with the OCD group progressed, the subjects did gain more control, but they still experienced the intrusive thoughts. When one of the members mentioned this, Schwartz showed them the brain scans of the OFC and the caudate nucleus, what he calls the OCD circuit:

“This region of the brain is hugely overactive,” he said, and then Pop! He saw a change in his patient’s face and the excitement in everyone listening. Paula was one of the patients who experienced this eureka moment and felt liberated. These strange thoughts about her boyfriend’s drug addiction were no longer a sign of insanity. They were no longer even a product of her self. They were just the faulty transmissions of a malfunctioning brain.

Schwartz called this process reattribution - defining the symptom as something non-useful or unimportant, just a product of faulty brain wiring.

The next step was to help the group members replace the OCD thoughts with something more healthy, such as going for a walk gardening (refocusing). It helped. The final step, then, was the reframe the OCD thoughts as unimportant (revaluing).

So Schwartz had his four-step model: relabel, reattribute, refocus, and revalue.

We do not have to have OCD to use this model to gain more control of our thoughts and actions, thereby increasing our experience of free will. You can learn more about this model and the research behind it in Schwartz's books, Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior and The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force.

Okay, I did not intend to get so far off track here, since the point of this post is a new article by Steven Handel at The Emotion Machine blog on 5 scientific reasons to believe in free will.

5 Scientific Reasons You Should Believe in Free Will 

December 30th, 2013
by Steven Handel


One of the most popular philosophical debates is the question of “free will” vs. “determinism.”

Free will is the belief that you have free choice over your actions, while determinism is the belief that your actions are influenced by your biology and environment.

As with most philosophical questions, I find the answer to be somewhere in the middle. It’s true that our biology and environment play a large role in how we choose to act, but I believe it’s also true that we have some degree of choice within these circumstances.

Most psychologists and neuroscientists seem to take a similar compatibilist approach, which seeks to find a healthy middle ground between both “free will” and “determinism.”

Recent studies show that some belief in free will is very important for our psychology and mental health. Here are 5 scientific reasons you should believe in free will.

1. It gives you more self-control – One study found that weakening an individual’s belief in free will led to a decrease in self-control and willpower.
2. It makes you more pro-social – Another study found that disbelief in free will can also lead to an increase in aggression and reduction in helpfulness toward others.
3. It improves job performance – A recent study also shows that a belief in free will predicts better career attitudes and overall job performance.
4. It makes you more honest – Another study shows that weakening a belief in free will leads to more dishonesty and cheating.
5. It makes your brain less automatic – One interesting study reveals that a belief in free will makes our brains less automatic.

These are just a few examples of how not believing in free will can negatively influence your behavior. Whether you want to debate about the existence of free will or not, there are definitely some practical benefits to holding this belief.

Think about it: if you believe you have no real control over your circumstances then there’s nothing motivating you to try to do something positive. You just sit back and passively watch life happen.

Overall, a belief in free will is very important in taking more responsibility, power, and control over your behaviors, and the results you get in life.

Massimo Pigliucci - Essays on Emergence (4 Parts)

Over at his Rationally Speaking blog, Massimo Pigliucci recently posted a 4-part series on Emergence, a still-controversial theory of higher-order properties. One of the earliest proponents of emergent properties was J.S. Mill:

All organized bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state; but the phenomena of life, which result from the juxtaposition of those parts in a certain manner, bear no analogy to any of the effects which would be produced by the action of the component substances considered as mere physical agents. To whatever degree we might imagine our knowledge of the properties of the several ingredients of a living body to be extended and perfected, it is certain that no mere summing up of the separate actions of those elements will ever amount to the action of the living body itself. (A System of Logic, Bk.III, Ch.6, §1)

In this series Pigliucci explores a variety of contemporary treatments of the idea.

Massimo Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. 

His research focuses on the structure of evolutionary theory, the relationship between science and philosophy, and the relationship between science and religion. He received a Doctorate in Genetics from the University of Ferrara in Italy, a PhD in Botany from the University of Connecticut, and a PhD in Philosophy of Science from the University of Tennessee. 

He has published over one hundred technical papers, and a number of books for both technical audiences and the general public.

Pigliucci has won the Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution. He has been elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science “for fundamental studies of genotype by environment interactions and for public defense of evolutionary biology from pseudoscientific attack.” He is also editor in chief of Philosophy & Theory in Biology and associated editor of Biology & Philosophy. He can be reached on the web at www.platofootnote.org.

On to the main event - I have included a couple of paragraphs from the beginning of each article. Follow the title link to read the whole article.

Essays On Emergence Part I

By Massimo Pigliucci | October 19th 2012 

 

Massimo Pigliucci 

I am about to go to an informal workshop on naturalism and its implications, organized by cosmologist Sean Carroll. The list of participants is impressive, including Pat Churchland, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Rebecca Goldstein, Alex Rosenberg, Don Ross and Steven Weinberg. You may have recognized at least four names of people with whom I often disagree, as well as two former guests of the Rationally Speaking podcast (not to mention Don Ross’ colleague, James Ladyman).

The list of topics to be covered during the discussions is also not for the faint of heart: free will, morality, meaning, purpose, epistemology, emergence, consciousness, evolution and determinism. Unholy crap! So I decided — in partial preparation for the workshop — to start a series of essays on emergence, a much misunderstood concept that will likely be at the center of debate during the gathering, particularly as it relates to its metaphysical quasi-opposite, determinism (with both having obvious implications for most of the other topics, including free will, morality, and consciousness).

It’s a huge topic, and the way I’m going to approach it is to present a series of commentaries on four interesting papers on emergence that have appeared over the course of the last several years in the philosophical (mostly philosophy of physics) literature. Keep in mind that — although I make no mystery of my sympathy for the idea of emergence as well as of my troubles with reductive physicalism — this is just as much a journey of intellectual discovery for me as it will be for most readers. (A good overview can be found, as usual, in the corresponding entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

That said, let us begin with “Emergence, Singularities, and Symmetry Breaking,” by Robert W. Batterman of the University of Western Ontario and the University of Pittsburgh. The paper was published in Foundations of Physics (Vol 41, n. 6, pp. 1031-1050, 2011), but you can find a free downloadable copy of an earlier version here.

* * * * *

Essays On Emergence Part II

By Massimo Pigliucci | October 26th 2012 

 

Massimo Pigliucci

 
Last time we examined Robert Batterman’s idea that the concept of emergence can be made  more precise by the fact that emergent phenomena such as phase transitions can be described by models that include mathematical singularities (such as infinities). According to Batterman, the type of qualitative step that characterizes emergence is handled nicely by way of mathematical singularities, so that there is no need to invoke metaphysically suspect “higher organizing principles.” Still, emergence would remain a genuine case of ontological (not just epistemic) non-reducibility, thus contradicting fundamental reductionism.

This time I want to take a look at an earlier paper, Elena Castellani’s “Reductionism, Emergence, and Effective Field Theories,” dated from 2000 and available at arXiv:physics. She actually anticipates several of Batterman’s points, particularly the latter’s discussion of the role of renormalization group (RG) theory in understanding the concept of theory reduction.

Castellani starts with a brief recap of the recent history of “fundamental” physics, which she defines as “the physics concerned with the search for the ultimate constituents of the universe and the laws governing their behaviour and interactions.” This way of thinking of physics seemed to be spectacularly vindicated during the 1970s, with the establishment of the Standard Model and its account of the basic building blocks of the universe in terms of particles such as quarks.

* * * * *

Essays On Emergence Part III

By Massimo Pigliucci | October 29th 2012 

 

Massimo Pigliucci

So far in this series we have examined Robert Batterman’s idea that the concept of emergence can be made more precise by the fact that emergent phenomena such as phase transitions can be described by models that include mathematical singularities, as well as Elena Castellani’s analysis of the relationship between effective field theories in physics and emergence. This time we are going to take a look at Paul Humphreys’ “Emergence, not supervenience,” published in Philosophy of Science back in 1997 (64:S337-S345).

The thrust of Humphreys’ paper is that the philosophical concept of 'supervenience', which is often brought up when there is talk of reductionism vs anti-reductionism, is not sufficient, and that emergence is a much better bet for the anti-reductionistically inclined.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines supervenience thus: “A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan form, ‘there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference.’”

A typical everyday example of supervenience is the relation between the amount of money in my pockets (A-property) and the specific make up of bills and coins I carry (B-property). While I am going to have the same amount of money (say, $20) regardless of the specific combination of coins and bills (say, no coins, 1 $10 bill and 2 $5 bills; or 4 25c coins, 9 $1 bills and 1 $10 bill), it is obvious that the total cannot possibly change unless I change the specific makeup of the coins+bills set (the opposite is not true, as we have just seen: we can change the composition of coins+bills without necessarily changing the total).

Again according to the SEP, “Supervenience is a central notion in analytic philosophy. 

* * * * *

Essays On Emergence Part IV

By Massimo Pigliucci | November 2nd 2012 

 

Massimo Pigliucci

The previous three installments of this series have covered Robert Batterman’s idea that the concept of emergence can be made more precise by the fact that emergent phenomena such as phase transitions can be described by models that include mathematical singularities; Elena Castellani’s analysis of the relationship between effective field theories in physics and emergence; and Paul Humphreys’ contention that a robust anti-reductionism needs a well articulated concept of emergence, not just the weaker one of supervenience.

For this last essay we are going to take a look at Margaret Morrison’s “Emergence, Reduction, and Theoretical Principles: Rethinking Fundamentalism,” published in 2006 in Philosophy of Science. The “fundamentalism” in Morrison’s title has nothing to do with the nasty religious variety, but refers instead to the reductionist program of searching for the most “fundamental” theory in science. The author, however, wishes to recast the idea of fundamentalism in this sense to mean that foundational phenomena like localization and symmetry breaking will turn out to be crucial to understand emergent phenomena and — more interestingly — to justify the rejection of radical reductionism on the ground that emergent behavior is immune to changes at the microphysical level (i.e., the “fundamental” details are irrelevant to the description and understanding of the behaviors instantiated by complex systems).

Morrison begins with an analysis of the type of “Grand Reductionism” proposed by physicists like Steven Weinberg, where a few (ideally, one) fundamental laws will provide — in principle — all the information one needs to understand the universe [1]. Morrison brings up the by now familiar objection raised in the ‘70s by physicist Philip Anderson, who argued that the “constructionist” project (i.e., the idea that one can begin with the basic laws and derive all complex phenomena) is hopelessly misguided. Morrison brings this particular discussion into focus with a detailed analysis of a specific example, which I will quote extensively:

“The nonrelativistic Schrodinger equation presents a nice picture of the kind of reduction Weinberg might classify as ‘fundamental.’ It describes in fairly accurate terms the everyday world and can be completely specified by a small number of known quantities: the charge and mass of the electron, the charges and masses of the atomic nuclei, and Planck’s constant. Although there are things not described by this equation, such as nuclear fission and planetary motion, what is missing is not significantly relevant to the large scale phenomena that we encounter daily. Moreover, the equation can be solved accurately for small numbers of particles (isolated atoms and small molecules) and agrees in minute detail with experiment. However, it can’t be solved accurately when the number of particles exceeds around ten. But this is not due to a lack of calculational power, rather it is a catastrophe of dimension ... the schemes for approximating are not first principles deductions but instead require experimental input and local details. Hence, we have a breakdown not only of the reductionist picture but also of what Anderson calls the ‘constructionist’ scenario.”

Morrison then turns to something that has now become familiar in our discussions on emergence: localization and symmetry breaking as originators of emergent phenomena, where emergence specifically means “independence from lower level processes and entities.”

Galen Strawson - “YOU CANNOT MAKE YOURSELF THE WAY YOU ARE”

An interesting interview with prominent philosopher Galen Stawson was that was posted at The Believer. I know Strawson from his panpsychism model, which he presented last spring at the Science of Consciousness conference here in Tucson - I blogged his presentation here.

This interview was from 2003, but it's still interesting. The begin by discussing Strawson's Freedom and Belief (a new edition was just released in October, 2010).

Anyone who quotes Vonnegut is generally pretty cool - even if he doesn't believe in free will.

GALEN STRAWSON

[BRITISH ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHER]

“YOU CANNOT MAKE YOURSELF THE WAY YOU ARE”

Things that do not exist:

Freedom
Pride
Blame
Praise
Love (maybe)

“You sound to me as though you don’t believe in free will,” said Billy Pilgrim.

“If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by free will. I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”

—From Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Imagine for a moment that instead of Timothy McVeigh destroying the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it had been a mouse. Suppose this mouse got into the wiring of the electrical system, tangled the circuits and caused a big fire, killing all those inside. Now think of the victims’ families. There would, of course, still be enormous grief and suffering, but there would be one significant difference: There would no resentment, no consuming anger, no hatred, no need to see the perpetrator punished (even if the mouse somehow got out of the building) in order to experience “closure.” Why the difference? Because McVeigh, we think, committed this terrible act out of his own free will. He chose to do it, and he could have chosen not to. McVeigh, then, is morally responsible for the death of the victims in a way that the mouse would not be. And our sense of justice demands that he pay for this crime.

There is an undeniable human tendency to see ourselves as free and morally responsible beings. But there’s a problem. We also believe—most of us anyhow—that our environment and our heredity entirely shape our characters (what else could?). But we aren’t responsible for our environment, and we aren’t responsible for our heredity. So we aren’t responsible for our characters. But then how can we be responsible for acts that arise from our characters?

There’s a simple but extremely unpopular answer to this question: We aren’t. We are not and cannot be ultimately responsible for our behavior. According to this argument, while it may be of great pragmatic value to hold people responsible for their actions, and to employ systems of reward and punishment, no one is really deserving of blame or praise for anything. This answer has been around for more than two thousand years; it is backed by solid arguments with premises that are consistent with how most of us view the world. Yet few today give this position the serious consideration it deserves. The view that free will is a fiction is called counterintuitive, absurd, pessimistic, pernicious and, most commonly, “unacceptable,” even by those who recognize the force of the arguments behind it. Philosophers who reject God, an immaterial soul, and even absolute morality, cannot bring themselves to do the same for the dubious concept of free will—not just in their day-to-day lives, but in books, and articles and extraordinarily complex theories.

There are a few exceptions and one of them is the British analytic philosopher Galen Strawson. Strawson is one of the most respected theorists in the free will industry and, at the same time, a bit of an outsider. Two main philosophical camps engage in a technical and often bitter dispute over whether free will is compatible with the truth of determinism (the theory that the future is fixed, because every event has a cause, and the causes stretch back until the beginning of the universe). But if there is one thing that both sides agree on, it’s that we do have free will and that we are morally responsible. Strawson, with a simple, powerful argument that we will discuss below, bets the other way.

Strawson’s was not always such a minority view. Enlightenment philosophers like Spinoza, Diderot, Voltaire, and Holbach challenged ordinary conceptions of freedom, doubted whether we could be morally responsible, and looked to ground theories of blame and punishment in other ways. Strawson is a descendant of these philosophers, but still incorporates the British analytic tradition into his work. His views are clear and honest and there are no cop-outs, quite unusual in a literature mired in obscure terminology and wishful thinking. And his essays are always deeply connected to everyday experience. One of the main issues Strawson addresses is why we so instinctively and stubbornly see ourselves as free and responsible. What is it about human experience that makes it difficult, impossible maybe, to believe something that we can easily demonstrate as true?

Galen Strawson is the son of perhaps the most respected analytic philosopher alive, the great metaphysician and philosopher of language, P.F. Strawson. Though not primarily concerned with the topic of free will, P.F. Strawson has written one of the classic papers of the genre, an essay called “Freedom and Resentment.” Galen (not from Oedipal motives, he assures us) is one of its most effective critics. In addition, Strawson is author of Freedom and Belief (Oxford University Press, 1986), The Secret Connection (OUP, 1989), Mental Reality (MIT Press, 1994), and numerous papers on free will, causation, and philosophy of mind. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading.

—Tamler Sommers

Read the interview.

Tags: Philosophy, identity, morality, free will, determinism, Galen Strawson, The Believer, You cannot make yourself the way you are, interview, Freedom and Belief

Galen Strawson - Your Move: The Maze of Free Will

Galen Strawson presented an interesting and challenging talk on panpsychism at the 2010 Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference here in Tucson last spring - I was a little less than convinced, yet I wanted to be - he is a brilliant man, I just couldn't get on board.

One of his most recent books is, Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (2009).

Most recently (July 22, 2010), he has contributed an article to the New York Times' column, The Stone, "a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless." He presents one of his detailed arguments here on the nature of free will / determinism. Have fun.

Your Move: The Maze of Free Will

By GALEN STRAWSON

You arrive at a bakery. It’s the evening of a national holiday. You want to buy a cake with your last 10 dollars to round off the preparations you’ve already made. There’s only one thing left in the store — a 10-dollar cake.

On the steps of the store, someone is shaking an Oxfam tin. You stop, and it seems quite clear to you — it surely is quite clear to you — that it is entirely up to you what you do next. You are — it seems — truly, radically, ultimately free to choose what to do, in such a way that you will be ultimately morally responsible for whatever you do choose. Fact: you can put the money in the tin, or you can go in and buy the cake. You’re not only completely, radically free to choose in this situation. You’re not free not to choose (that’s how it feels). You’re “condemned to freedom,” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase. You’re fully and explicitly conscious of what the options are and you can’t escape that consciousness. You can’t somehow slip out of it.

You may have heard of determinism, the theory that absolutely everything that happens is causally determined to happen exactly as it does by what has already gone before — right back to the beginning of the universe. You may also believe that determinism is true. (You may also know, contrary to popular opinion, that current science gives us no more reason to think that determinism is false than that determinism is true.) In that case, standing on the steps of the store, it may cross your mind that in five minutes’ time you’ll be able to look back on the situation you’re in now and say truly, of what you will by then have done, “Well, it was determined that I should do that.” But even if you do fervently believe this, it doesn’t seem to be able to touch your sense that you’re absolutely morally responsible for what you do next.