I told you that I would write about the "Moving Naturalism Forward" discussions about free will and consciousness later this week and I still would like to go through it, thought the actual discussions aren't that interesting. I've listened to them in total once and parts of them many times and am finding it hard going. Not due to the complexity and originality of any arguments put forward but due to them being predictable, dogmatic and, I'm sorry, but rather thoroughly banal. It's remarkably like listening to Biblical fundamentalists discussing evolution. The central issue in seriously discussing evolution involves the fact that the account in Genesis can't be literally true without extensive redefinition of terms. That is something that even serious thinkers among fundamentalists cannot do without purposely taking a devil's advocate role. Though, I will have to say, I've seen more of a willingness to address the opposition on the part of some Biblical fundamentalists*.
It is interesting that in having to deal with the necessarily deterministic consequences of their materialism, of having to face that many of the most important aspects of modern thought and life, not to mention traditional morality, are fatally damaged by that, they cover some ground that looks mightily like that covered by the earlier battles over predestination. Though I'd expect they'd just hate that idea.
In listening to these materialists discussing free will and consciousness, there is another possibility and it is exactly on the definition of free will. Since several of them give their definition of free will in the arguments, I'm going to start, not exactly with a definition but with a point. Free will, in order to be free, cannot be the product of causality because causality would render it determined and not free. Free will can't be addressed within the context of causality. My conception of free will, incomplete and contingent, would hold that science cannot address it because the entire methodology of science is to find causal relationships and to place phenomena within them. None of these materialists could discuss what I would hold is the only meaningful definition of free will within their ideological boundaries. As such, everything they say about it begins by being rather beside the point and I'm left with attacking their ideas of a substitute "free will" created out of their particular backgrounds and preferences. In retrospect, I think I could have predicted what some of those who I had never read on the subject would say. The physicists seem to be far less inclined to find the biologists ideas convincing, though I was surprised to find some were inclined to agree with some of what the philosophers said**. Though they don't seem to have anything that is really any better.
All of these people, who I would guess might welcome the designation of "free thinkers" come to the discussion denying that real free thought is even possible. Which, I hold, is a pretty good indication of the banality of thought that materialism has on this subject. As with Biblical or any other kind of fundamentalist creed will have whenever the subject falls outside of what they can believe is possible.
Daniel Dennett is first, presenting the most sophisticated arguments given and they're really not very good ones. Dennett wants to change the meaning of "free will" to a merely transactional analysis in which what one intends can be hidden while still placing that intention at the end point of a deterministic web of causation.
All you have to be is unpredictable to the agents you encounter. So let me sum up as a challenge. If you think indeterminism is required for free will, I think you're wrong. With one exception and one exception only. If you anticipate a future in which you think you're going to be playing rock, paper, sissors for big stakes with God then you better hope for quantum indeterminacy to play a role. Because otherwise it doesn't matter. A deterministic world is as good as an indeterministic world you have just as much free will in a deterministic world as in an undetermined world as long as you keep your list to yourself.
At one point one of the women, I can't tell which of the three in the discussion, seems to object that his reduction leaves out quite a bit of important stuff about free will, though that gets dropped immediately and isn't developed. Dennett does what is always done by ideologues having to deal with an idea they can't within their ideological framing, they reduce it to something they can, declaring a fuller definition of the concept to be "meaningless" or "incoherent" or using some other such pat dismissal It is typical of materialists dealing with questions of consciousness and thought that they diminish it to something that can fit into a mere form so they can present an academic statement about it. That they damage or destroy the idea in that attempt is not to be held to be important.
Dennett seems to think that replacing the "folk idea" of free will with the idea of a "poker face" (he uses the term several times) is sufficient to dispose of the truly difficult and perplexing questions around it. At no time does he deal with the idea of free will as a truly free act uncontrolled by physical determinism because that idea is repugnant to his ideological foundations.
But, having done that, Dennett is in a rather hard place because he is convinced that if people believe they are the "moist robots" as he asserts, they won't act as if they were morally obligated to not be totally depraved. What Dennett does is to deny the reality of free will as a truly free and non-determined act while presenting a substitute idea he calls "free will" because of experimental evidence that when people don't believe in free will, as debunked by Francis Crick, then they are more inclined to cheat than someone who hasn't been exposed to Crick's erudition. He presents free will as a beneficial lie because people who believe their choices are free will take responsibility for them***.
At several points during Dennett's presentation he seems to show his hand in repeating a warning that anything but a deterministic definition of "free will" opens the door for religion. He isn't alone in that. It's remarkable how often that clear obsession of this gathering comes out. The motive behind the poker-faced scholarly presentation is the denial of anything that could possibly lead to a consideration that God might be real, that religion might have some intellectual validity.
That, as anyone familiar with his frequently erratic and always antagonistically theophobic writing could guess, becomes quite clear when Jerry Coyne quite impatiently presents his arguments in the area. Those are the typical biologically based determinism, though pretending to an ultimateSean Carroll, though it's clear Carroll has an affinity for some of it. I suspect that is a difference in culture between two different generations of physicists and atheists. I will address that later.
As I started out saying, nothing that any of these materialists say really addresses free will because their ideological foundation denies that is possibly real. The interest in the discussion is in how they deal with the consequences of that position and they don't even consider a number of those consequences, some of them quite serious ones. More of that later.
* Consider the anecdote from Richard Lewontin about when he and a young Carl Sagan were sent by Hermann Muller to debate creationists in Little Rock, including a PhD in biology who was well versed in orthodox Darwinian evolutionary theory.
** One suppressed guffaw from Steven Weinberg seemed to be particularly suggestive. It came when Owen Flanagan pointed out that the Libet experiments that are almost universally cited by biologically inclined atheists these days, was fatally flawed by the fact that the subjects were paid and so could be reasonably expected to have a motive to try to please the researchers who were paying them. Which is a rather definitive and fatal defect in the experiment. I can well imagine that the physicists might not be terribly impressed with the experimental methods of the neuro-scientists and their allies in other behavioral sciences. Daniel Dennett rather sensibly pointed out that the "free choice" within the experiment was an absurdly artificial one that might well tell us nothing about choices made in real life. Why he doesn't consider that a problem when he likes the experiments and what he can be made to do is worth considering.
From what I understand, Benjamin Libet doesn't make the same claims that his experiments debunk free will that atheists have been using it for.
*** I don't find the study by Kathleen Vohs and Johnathan Schooler he cites any more convincing than the one by Libet that he rejects, though I would say that the suspicion that people who believe what they want to do is the product of biological and physical determinism are liable to act as if they weren't moral agents is hardly surprising. That it is more pleasant and easier to do what we want to do or which we suspect we will be rewarded to do when it harms other people is a rather common observation. When it's merely a question of violating an arbitrary rule, it will be even less likely that a belief in determinism will inhibit selfishness. In the end it is a belief that moral obligations are real and consequential that is the only effective inhibition of depravity and it isn't entirely effective in preventing it. In a world, where in those places and in those people who have biological determinism is their controlling faith, the results have been some of the most horrific atrocities in the history of our species.
Update: My allergy to red maple pollen is particularly bad this week and I'll blame the horrible editing to the Benadryl speaking. I will revise later, when I can believe a better result will happen.
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