Determinism Is Self Defeating

[Angrboda]

I don't accept the idea that "substance dualism" (I'll use that word from now, though I just call it dualism) is an explanation of mind.

In a discussion such as this one, as most people are only acquainted with physical monism and substance dualism. However, there is another view which is often discussed in the context of cognitive science and that is 'property dualism.' So, to be clear, it's probably a good idea to explicitly specify which type of dualism you mean, if you are referencing a non-monist ontology. (And I've just discovered that there is another dualistic ontology called .)

The two primary foci for the dualist's conviction are the logical-meaningful dimension of cognition and the qualities of consciousness. The importance of these matters has struck dualist philosophers in different ways, with the consequence that some have gravitated to one focus and some to the other. One group has taken the nature of felt experience as the difficulty of paramount importance and hence has tended to side with materialists on the other question. That is, they expect that eventually the logical-meaningful dimension will ultimately have a causal neurobiological explanation. For these philosophers reasoning is not the stumbling block, partly because the idea that the logical-meaningful dimension of cognition is fundamentally noncausal is found objectionable. The second group has just the converse set of intuitions. Like reductionists, they think that ultimately consciousness and the qualities of felt experience will be explained in neurobiological terms. But for them, the difficulty of paramount importance lies in the logical-meaningful dimension of cognition. Here, they argue, are insurmountable problems for a reductionist strategy. The reductionist has been useful to both camps by providing reductionist arguments for each to use against the other. These dualist intuitions can be respectably sustained despite the hopeless problems of substance dualism in finding a coherent fit for the mind-substance in modern physics and biology. The general strategy in support of these intuitions has been to abandon the albatross idea of a distinct substance but to retain the idea of irreducibility. Thus, philosophers concerned with subjective experience have argued that subjective experience is an irreducible property, and philosophers concerned with the logical-meaningful dimension have argued for the irreducibility of cognitive theory. It is among these two, albeit inharmonious, groups that the most sophisticated antireductionist arguments are to be found, and characteristically they are not to be removed by a few casual rejoinders. …

… The nature of subjective experience has seemed to many people so striking and so extraordinary that it has been invoked repeatedly as the standing refutation of reductionism. The argument from subjective experience has been most powerful, not in the hands of the substance dualists, who have to contend with complications of their ghostly substance, but in the hands of the property dualists. Although there are nontrivial differences among the hypotheses advanced by assorted property dualists, the crux of the shared conviction is that even if the mind is the brain, the qualities of subjective experience are nevertheless emergent with respect to the brain and its properties. Subjective experience, goes the argument, has a character and a quality uniquely and irreducibly mental. Since the notion of a property's being emergent makes an appearance in this argument, an explication of "emergence " is in order. In general, whether a property is emergent is a function of the reductive relation that holds — or rather, fails to hold — between two theories or conceptual frameworks. More specifically, a property P specified by its embedding theory T1 is emergent with respect to the properties of an ostensibly reducing theory T2 just in case:

1. P has real instances,
2. P is co-occurrent with some property or complex feature recognized in T2 but nevertheless,
3. P cannot be reduced to any property postulated by or definable within T2 (Paul M. Churchland 1985)

As noted in the account of intertheoretic reduction outlined in chapter 7, the reducibility of one property to another depends on whether the theory that characterizes the property at issue reduces to the theory that characterizes the other. To put the matter informally, if a property of one theory has causal powers that are not equaled or comprehended by any property in the second, more basic theory, then the property is considered to be emergent with respect to the second theory. Accordingly, to claim that the qualitative features displayed in one's subjective experience are emergent with respect to the physical brain is to insist that the commonsense conceptual framework for apprehending and describing such psychological properties is not reducible to any future neuroscience.

Whether a property is emergent is therefore not a simple observational feature of the property, and so one cannot tell simply by inspecting a property whether or not it is emergent with respect to some other property, despite the conviction displayed by the occasional theorist lost in introspective reverie. (E. Nagel (1961) also points this out.) Nor of course do commonsense intuitions that two properties are substantially or even stunningly different entail anything about whether a future intertheoretic reduction might actually identify the two. Light may seem completely different from electromagnetic radiation, yet light turns out to be electromagnetic radiation. Having a high temperature seems supremely different from having a high mean molecular kinetic energy, yet it turns out that high temperture in a gas is high mean kinetic energy of the constituent molecules. Notice also that one does not provide independent evidence for the irreducibility of one property to another merely by claiming that the first is emergent relative to the second. That would be like saying of a property that it is irreducible because it is irreducible.

"Emergent property" is also used in the neuroscientific literature with a quite different sense roughly equivalent to "network property." Consider a set of cells in the retina that are wired so as to collectively constitute a movement detector, even though none of the individual cells is itself a movement detector. The functional property of being a movement detector may understandably be described as "emergent" relative to the individual neurons in the circuit. However, the functional property is certainly and obviously reducible to the neurophysiological properties of the network. Indeed, once we understand the network, we have the reductive story in hand. Although this is a useful sense of "emergence" (which Dennett calls "innocent emergence"), it is clearly not the sense intended by property dualists in their arguments against reductionism. Thus, when Sperry (1980) argues that mental states are emergent, he specifies that he means they are irreducible, not merely that they are network properties.

The claim that subjective experience is not reducible to brain states is to be understood within the wider framework of intertheoretic reduction, where it unpacks as the claim that psychology will not reduce to neuroscience; more specifically, that it will not reduce to neuroscience in such a way that subjective experiences can be identified with states of the brain. States of the brain are causally connected to subjective experience and give rise to the stream of events in awareness, the argument will agree, but the experience itself, with its unique qualities, cannot be identified with some process or aspect of neuronal activity. In contrast to the substance dualists, the property dualists do not believe there is a nonphysical substance in which experiences inhere. Rather, they claim that subjective experiences are produced by the brain and can in their turn affect the brain, but they are not themselves identifiable with any physical properties of the brain. On this view, we cannot say, for example, that feeling sad is a neuronal configuration in such and such a neuronal ensemble.

An analogy here may help. It has often been claimed that the blueness of (liquid) water is a property that is emergent relative to the microphysics of H2O molecules, on the grounds that no amount of microphysical information could allow us to predict or to deduce that liquid aggregates of such molecules would have the peculiar qualitative character we call "blue." Blueness may systematically co-occur with aggregates of H2O molecules, it is conceded, but it is a self-contained and irreducible property that appears in addition to the microphysical features of aggregated H2O. It is, in a word, emergent. Given the account of intertheoretic reduction outlined earlier, the fallacy of this reasoning is displayed with relative ease. For one thing, reduction does not require that reduced properties, as conceived within their older conceptual framework, be deducible or predictable from within the new reducing theory. Old frameworks are culturally idiosyncratic and highly various. It cannot be the obligation of new theories to predict how ignorant cultural epochs may happen to conceive of the complex phenomena in their explanatory domain. What they are obliged to do, if they are to achieve the reduction of earlier concepts, is nothing more and nothing less than to entail the existence of properties that systematically mimic the alleged causal powers of the properties to be reduced.

In the example at issue, the microphysics of H2O molecules does indeed entail that liquid aggregates of them will preferentially scatter incident electromagnetic radiation at a wavelength of about 0.46 μm. It is this complex property that proves to have all of the causal powers of blueness (at least as it is manifested in liquid water). This microphysical property affects human observers in all the same ways as does blueness. It affects nonhuman instruments in all the same ways as does blueness (for example, it projects light through a prism into the same spectral position as does blueness). And so forth. Because of these systematic parallels, it is reasonable to identify the blueness of an object with its disposition to scatter (or reflect, or emit) electromagnetic waves preferentially at about 0.46 μm. That is the property that humans have been visually discriminating for millennia, though without appreciating its fine-grained nature. The blueness of water, therefore, is not an emergent property. On the contrary, it reduces rather smoothly, and as a coherent part, of a systematic account in which the other colors are also reduced.

— Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy, pp. 322-26

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No, the notion that any physical system can have only one outcome is pre-destination, not determinism. Determinism is the view that future physical states are determined by past physical states; nothing more.

I'm not familiar with this refinement of the word "determinism." To me (and in philosophical discussions I've seen with Dennett and others), it refers to the idea that what is could not have been other than it is. Dennett likes to talk about things being inevitable and "evitable."

You may be being misled by the context of Dennett's remarks. Dennett is a compatibilist, which means that he believes that free will and determinism are compatible, if understood properly. Depending on when and where you read or heard Dennett, from his early work in Elbow Room to his later work, you may have been misled by his attempting to carve out a philosophical meaning of free will and choice that isn't at odds with determinism; this can result in some very fancy footwork. (Libertarian free-will theorists, not to be confused with the political philosophy, as well as hard determinists, both, see determinism as incompatible with free will, and resolve the dilemma by either denying determinism [libertarian theorists], or by denying free will [hard determinists]; compatibilists like Dennet try to split the baby, and thus may be using unorthodox or unfamiliar usage at different points in their rhetoric.) Anyway, It's been over a decade since I read Elbow Room in which the questions you are highlighting, evitability and could-have-done-otherwise, were pre-eminent. (His paper he co-authored with Taylor, I believe, talks about could-have-done-otherwise, but if I remember right, that was embedded in a framework of discussing counterfactuals in terms of possible worlds ala David Lewis. I read the majority of Freedom Evolves last year, but I don't recall specifically how prominent or not such analysis was in it.)

(ETA: An additional point to note is that Dennett is a physicalist (substance monist), and according to his understanding, the relevant features of the brain are all sufficiently macroscopic as to be described by classical mechanics and so forth — there is no indeterminacy, quantum or otherwise, to intervene and prevent state A from proceeding majestically to a classically predictable state B. That is why there is all the rather dense and convoluted talk in his texts on free will — he's attempting to preserve "the sense" of free will against a backdrop of assumptions [his] that most would conclude do not admit the possibility of free will.)