The question has been asked for thousands of years, ever since the ancient Greeks became obsessed with 'cause'. The problem is, there is nothing that happens that doesn't have a cause. If you decide to have a glass of water, it was probably for the thirst, maybe caused by the completely moistureless Nature Valley granola bar you ate at lunch. You eating that pitiful snack was caused by its being on sale when you went to get groceries, and you care that it is on sale because it is a chance to save money. And so-on down the line of causes until you get to the good ol' big bang. The point is, every action you make has a nearly endless line of causes, and therefore your every move was determined long ago. This has serious implications for punishment under the law, because if someone is not accountable for their actions (that is, if they are carried along by a stream of cause), how is it just to punish them?
In recent times there have been experiments that would seem to support the idea that we are pulled along by the waves of cause and effect. In 1983 Benjamin Libet used electroencephalography to study the what happens in the brain when someone makes a decision. He found that there was activity in the relevant areas of the brain before the decision was consciously made. This activity was called the "readiness potential". The study has been controversial, and there are good reasons to be critical of it, but it does seem to have some truth in it.
Then there are those who say that determinism is compatible with free-will; this philosophical idea is called "compatibilism". Daniel Dennett, for example, thinks that determinism actually allows for more freedom:
"...if determinism is true, then there's less randomness. There's less unpredictability. To have freedom, you need the capacity to make reliable judgments about what's going to happen next, so you can base your action on it."
Here is an interview with him from 2003 - http://reason.com/archives/2003/05/01/pulling-our-own-strings
I think that compatibilism is sensible, and likely to be closest to the truth. It would be very difficult to disprove determinism, there is simply too much evidence for it, but it would be equally difficult to prove that every choice we make is predetermined. We "feel" very much in control of our actions, we experience freedom of will - it will take more than has been done to discredit that experience. Perhaps there are degrees of freedom in our action: the simple decision to close a door, tie your shoe-laces, or turn on a light may very well be determined in some very real sense, but more complicated decisions, which take into account a myriad of causes in order to make the best possible choice, seems to me to be under our control.
I am partial to almost any theory that proposes degrees of difference over stark extremes. The debate over free-will has been raging for millennia but there is no more resolution to the question now than there was over 2000 years ago. This must be because the language used has been inadequate, or the questions asked have been badly worded. Maybe the right question is not "is there free-will", but "what are the degrees of free-will"?
Back to the matter of lawful punishment, how accountable are we for our actions? According to compatibilism we are very much accountable for a decision to harm someone, since these sorts of choices are usually premeditated and considered at length. But, the video I will link to at the end of this post presents an interesting story: a man was charged and found guilty of molestation who had no history of committing such a vile act. Afterwards a tumour was found on his brain which, when removed, caused the cruel urges to disappear. Later on the man went back to his doctors claiming that these urges were returning. Sure enough, it was seen that the tumour had returned. I am not saying that this justifies his action, but it does raise interesting questions about accountability, and perhaps indicates that our penal system needs to do more to assess the physiological well-being of those charged with crimes which are uncharacteristic of them.
Anyway, here is a decent video lecture about this very topic:
I'm anxious to watch the video you posted. While on the topic, Sam Harris has a good talk on this too "Sam Harris on Free Will":
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g
I'll ping you back when i've found the time to watch the video posted.
Watched the video. You know, I think he's right up to a point, there's no real getting around determinism. The genetic, societal, and parental influences we were born into play no small part in the decisions we make even now. But I still have some questions:
ReplyDelete- He uses a lot of trivial examples such as thinking of the name of a city or touching your nose. These things have relatively simple causes, but I wonder if there is something to be said about simple vs complex causes, and if there is what does that mean for the question of free will? Is there anything to be said for making a decision where there are many different causes pulling you either way? In those cases don't you have to consider all those causes and make the choice you think if most reasonable? In the end, the choice you make may be determined in some way, but it seems hard to think of it as purely determined.
- I'm a little confused by something. He says everything we do is part of a string of causes, but that thoughts "simply appear". Is this contradictory?
- These studies that show activity in the brain before we are conscious of making the decision may have other explanations. "Readiness potential" could explain this activity - perhaps the brain is 'getting ready' for motor activity while not knowing exactly what the activity will be. Harris does say that these studies may be overstated though.
I guess I have to be careful at the same time of not simply wishing something into existence because I really want it to exist!
Short Dennett video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHyev5-l4Tk
I have thought about this a bunch lately, and I am just as muddled as before I started. I did encounter a couple of interesting ideas, however.
ReplyDeleteThe first for determinism: Some studies of game theory have shown that it is sometimes beneficial for a species to act "randomly". One of the many reasons is that it makes them less predictable to predators and competitors. Therefore we could have evolved to be creatures that act randomly, not led by reason. This leads into a theory called epiphenomenalism that says something like, what we think is our conscious brains and ourselves making decisions is actually just a kind of symptom of a very complex organism. Perhaps we think and feel that we are in control, but we are more or less watching our lives unfold, as one would watch a hockey game on tv. You have an emotional tie to the game, but very little affect on its outcome.
The second is for compatibilism: Modern physics has moved on from Newtonian physics where indeed everything is deterministic. Quantum physics shows that the world at a small scale behaves probabilistically. I don't know how this weighs on the argument, but it seems to me that if there is an element of true indeterminism in the physical world, there may be yet undiscovered forces at work.