Free Will Debate
November 23, 2021 at 2:32 pm
(This post was last modified: November 23, 2021 at 3:53 pm by Alan V.)
I saved this post from The Thinking Atheist forum and posted it three years ago at Atheist Discussion.
This is a short summary of the points covered in The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will by Kenneth R. Miller. Miller is a professor of biology at Brown University, where he teaches biology and general biology. He was the lead witness against "intelligent design" in the 2005 Kitzmer v. Dover federal trial in Pennsylvania. Although a Roman Catholic, he follows Augustine in saying that Christians' first priority should be the truth, and that since evolution is a fact, they should "get over it."
Prologue: Our Story
Much of the religious opposition to evolution is based on the reductionism which seems to follow from it. The author maintains that a better understanding of evolution makes this opposition unnecessary, since evolution does not necessarily imply reductionism.
Chapter 1: Grandeur
For many religious people, evolutionary theory still seems like an assault on human dignity which must result in "increased selfishness and racism, decreased spirituality, and a decreased sense of purpose and self-determination." And this idea that evolution is destructive to the social fabric is not limited to the religious. People worry about evolutionary psychology taking over the humanities and free will being considered an illusion. However, the author states, "Our deep, ancestral association with the natural world does not undermine our unique humanness."
Chapter 2: Say It Ain't So
While such concerns are authentic, there exist far too many lines of evidence supporting evolution for denialism to be justified. The author reviews much of such information in the fossil record, in DNA, in how phylogeny reiterates ontogeny, in pseudogene locations, and so on. (There is even a technical appendix to the book titled "The Chromosome 2 Fusion Site," which supports our relationship with other great apes.)
Chapter 3: Chances and Wonder
We can't look at ourselves as the culmination of evolution, as some have maintained in the past. The evolutionary history of humans includes 22 species which are now extinct, so there was no linear progression. Unlike the diversity of rodent species, the fact that only one human species exists shows that we have been as much a failure as a success. On a cellular and molecular level, humans are nothing special evolutionarily, and without the luck of the asteroid strike which killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, we likely wouldn't exist at all. There was no teleology to evolution. We evolved to fill the evolutionary niche for intelligent animals among social species.
Chapter 4: Explaining It All
The author explores the ideas of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, and discusses the successes and failures of both forms of evolutionary thought. He says most of the failures are attempts to explain the great diversity of human behaviors, since specific hypotheses often become "just so" stories with little or no evidence to support them. In a few words, such ideas maintain that nature always overrides nurture in humans. He then asks, "What about human nature today has enabled us to largely escape the amoral behavioral chains of our evolutionary past?"
Chapter 5: The Mind of a Primate
The author quotes Charles Darwin from 1881: "Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" The minds of primates were not necessarily evolved for precision and accuracy. The author then goes on to say, "It's more useful to think of evolution as a tinkerer rather than as a designer" since biological creatures, including humans, are very much kluges which just happened to be competitive with other, similar kluges. In that sense, we should look at humans as a generalized adaptation rather than as a hyper-adapted species. If we do that, we can better see how some of our more unusual characteristics likely evolved.
Chapter 6: Consciousness
This chapter and Chapter 7 are the most important in the book, so I will therefore quote the author more extensively.
"In an evolutionary sense, preprogrammed behaviors are brittle and less able to adapt to new situations and changing circumstances. The conscious and deliberative behaviors exhibited by many animals, including ourselves, not only make it easier to adapt to changing circumstances, but also better help to manage the prodigious amount of sensory information collected from the environment. Think of how much information is processed as you shift the gears of a car while navigating through heavy traffic, moving lane to lane, avoiding other vehicles, and reacting to unexpected situations. We certainly did not evolve to drive cars. But the flexible nature of conscious, deliberative behavior has enabled nearly all of us to be capable of acquiring the skill."
"Consciousness is one of the brain's principle functions."
"In even the simplest cell, the unique properties of life emerge from the collective actions and interactions of tens of thousands of different molecules. No wonder physics alone is not enough to describe it! No atom, by itself, is ever alive. But when atoms interact with innumerable others inside a living cell, those actions generate the remarkable process we call life."
"Matter itself does not become alive. Rather, certain groupings of matter are capable of generating the tangled complexity of a self-sustaining process we call life. Consciousness, similarly, is not a property of matter or even a property of individual cells. In a way analogous to life itself, consciousness is a process generated by the hugely complex interactions of highly active cells within the brain and associated nervous tissue. Consciousness, therefore, is something that matter does, not something that matter is."
"The notion that complexity emerges from simplicity is in fact a recurring theme in nature and in life. Sound rises to music, words to literature, and cells to organisms."
The author says we should avoid "the adaptationist trap of concluding that everything produced by evolution exists only to serve the logic of survival and nothing more." That is what is so often considered threatening and dehumanizing about evolutionary theory.
Chapter 7: I, Robot
The author quotes Daniel Dennett from his book Freedom Evolves: "Concern about free will is the driving force behind most of the resistance to materialism generally and neo-Darwinism in particular."
The author then asks, "Is there a way to explain free will within an evolutionary framework?" He goes on to say that contrary to many assertions, free will does not necessitate a soul or a rejection of science.
"If we lack free will, then scientific logic itself is no longer valid. We cannot claim to make decisions or draw conclusions on the basis of evidence, we cannot pretend that scientific investigation is a path to truth, and we cannot even justify writing a book to get people to 'believe' in the absence of free will. The reason is that belief in anything is not a free choice, but an artifice of genetics, circumstance, and uncontrolled external stimuli."
"Acceptance of behavioral determinism undermines not only itself, but all of science and perhaps the arts and humanities as well. It is stunning how few critics of free will seem to realize this and to appreciate the grim nihilism that flows from such ideas."
The author quotes physicist Philip W. Anderson from a 1972 Science article: "At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear" and "Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry." The implication is that determinism may simply not apply at higher levels of organization, just as it doesn't apply to quantum mechanics, if determinism is itself a property rather than a law of all natural phenomena.
The author goes on to discuss the neurophysiology which might make free will possible. He refers to Peter Tse's book, The Neural Basis of Free Will which describes the way our neurons are actually laid out. The brain does not just send message back and forth, it actively switches where it sends messages and therefore controls how it responds. "Thought itself can affect the future activity of the brain. This may satisfy certain definitions of free will."
As Daniel Dennett wrote: "You are not out of the loop; you are the loop."
The author: "If one defines freedom as the ability to choose between alternative paths of action, then we surely have infinitely more degrees of freedom than a bacterium...."
"If the 'illusion' of free will did have adaptive value, then it actually did change the course of events by helping human social groups to cohere and prosper. Therefore, if free will is an illusion, it is an illusion that became self-fulfilling."
"No matter which school of thought you subscribe, you will find evolution right at the center of any explanation of free will, whether genuine or illusory. Darwin is not the enemy of free will. For, if we are indeed truly free, it was evolution that made us so."
Chapter 8: Center Stage.
This chapter is largely a pep talk about why people should not take evolutionary theory as dehumanizing or destructive, because of the "limitless possibilities that evolution put within our reach."
"The antievolutionists have found their best allies among those who argue for the most extreme -- and most dehumanizing -- view of the significance of the evolutionary process."
I also summarized a few points from the book: Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will by philosopher Alfred Mele. This is in answer to those people who think that science is already conclusive in favor of determinism.
There are two main arguments against the existence of free will. The first, from neuroscience, claims that all our decisions are made unconsciously. The second, from social psychology, claims that there exist such powerful influences on our behaviors that they leave no room for free will. Both are based on experiments which are interpreted in such a way as to support these arguments, so the counter-arguments will be against the logic of the interpretations rather than against the science.
The author offers three definitions of free will which are most commonly used:
1) The supernatural concept is that free will depends on a soul. Materialists oppose this definition of course, but most philosophy professors do not define free will this way either. Perhaps surprisingly, according to survey studies of thousands of people, neither do a majority of people who actually believe in souls.
2) An ambitious concept is that free will is a deep openness to more than one option. In other words, even if all circumstances were the same a person could still decide differently.
3) A more modest concept is that free will means making consciously reasoned decisions without undue forces determining those decisions. Some say this is too modest, though it is still one of the most popular definitions in common usage.
The author claims that science has not disproved either the second or third definition, and that in fact some studies prove that the third form of free will exists, even if the jury is out on the second.
The author concedes that “deciding freely depends on deciding consciously,” and cites scientific evidence regarding various free will issues, including conscious decision-making. “There’s evidence that lowering people’s confidence in the existence of free will increases bad behavior” through reducing incentives to control bad behaviors (Vohs and Schooler 2008, Baumeister et al. 2009). There is also evidence that belief in free will promotes personal well-being (Dweck and Molden 2008). Most importantly, making conscious decisions to do something had significant effects on behaviors, according to over 94 independent tests of implementation intentions (all done before 2006). People who consciously form intentions to do something at a certain place or time, or in a certain situation, are much more likely to do it. So science shows that conscious intentions are sometimes effective.
The neuroscientific studies most often cited to support the idea that all decisions are unconscious are the experiments of Benjamin Libet, Chun Siong Soon, and other similar work. In such experiments, scientists recorded the readiness potential for certain decisions as happening a split second or sometimes several seconds before the subjects’ conscious awareness that any decision had been made, and could predict with 60% to 80% accuracy, depending on the study, what the decision would be just on the basis of the potential. (However, Libet did believe that once we become aware, we have a split second to veto our decision. As someone put it, “Libet believed that although we don’t have free will, we do have free won’t.”)
Do these studies prove free will doesn’t exist? No they don’t, for several reasons:
1) Why should we think that a decision was made when the EEG rise began rather than a short time later, especially if no decision has yet been physically made? This rise may show a bias toward making a certain decision rather than a final decision, and biases don’t rule out free will. Acting on urges is separate from the urges themselves because we don’t act on all our urges. In other words, the real decision could have been exactly when reported.
2) Libet and others have suggested we can generalize such findings to all varieties of decision-making, but it’s a huge leap to such a generalized conclusion. The experiments cited specifically gave directions to flex a wrist or push a button without consciously thinking about when to do it, to be spontaneous. This can’t by design tell you that all your decisions are made unconsciously. “If we want to know whether conscious reasoning ever plays a role in producing decisions, we shouldn’t restrict our attention to situations in which people are instructed not to think about what to do.” There’s no reason for conscious reasoning about which moment to pick, since there’s no particular reason to pick one over another. When we do reason consciously, it’s a lot less arbitrary. So the experimental conditions were not similar to situations in which consciousness is involved.
3) More philosophically, there’s a question of what is consciousness. Consciousness and self-consciousness about consciousness may be two separate things. We can’t clearly say that the EEG rise was unconscious. Self-consciousness may simply be slower.
Social psychology experiments have shown any number of biasing factors in decision-making, which some have cited to argue against free will. These include social pressures, obedience to authority, role-playing, situationalism, automaticity, the bystander effect, and so on.
I will not discuss the arguments from the social psychologists like Daniel Wegner, but will only summarize a few points against them:
1) That some decisions are unconscious doesn’t prove all are.
2) Similarly, misperceptions about agency do not prove all perceptions are false.
3) Not all actions need be caused in the same way. Many social psychology arguments take no account of habitual versus conscious decision-making, or of the role consciousness plays in creating habits.
4) Biases do not rule out consciousness as among the possible causes for our behaviors. Influence is not determinism. Some people in social experiments always act differently than expected.
5) Teaching people about unconscious biases does help them to avoid them.
6) Paying attention to someone’s conscious reasoning can often allow you to predict, with accuracy, how they will behave.
Some may indeed define free will in such a way that it can’t possibly exist, like defining a “great baseball player” as someone with a .400 batting average for at least 20 consecutive seasons. For instance, free will could be defined as making conscious choices free of brain activity, or as being absolutely unconstrained by genetics or environment. But there is no scientific reason to think free will is an illusion unless you set the bar too high. It’s an over-statement of the scientific findings to say conscious intentions are never among the causes of actions. “The illusion is that there is powerful scientific evidence for the nonexistence of free will.”
This is a summary of points from Reduction and Emergence In Science and Philosophy by Carl Gillett, Professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University, published by Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Scientists and philosophers have been arguing about reductionism versus emergentism for some time. Proponents on both sides claim they have proven their perspectives with their arguments and with evidence from the sciences. The author critically assesses these claims to come to his own conclusions. He states at the outset, “Far from being mere rhetoric, recent scientific battles over reduction and emergence involve competing, substantive, scientific hypotheses that differ over the nature, and structure, of concrete cases of compositional explanation in the sciences in empirically resolvable ways.”
(Since the author assesses these various claims by delving into what are to me some very obscure philosophical arguments, I will content myself with offering his conclusions. Anyone with a philosophical background would likely follow such arguments better than I did. I would likely have to reread the book several times, and perhaps read more about philosophy in general, to understand it all.)
One of the author’s first conclusions is that philosophical arguments have lagged behind the sciences, so that their ideas are now outdated. “We have reasons to believe that only the scientific discussions have fully succeeded in pursuing the metaphysics of science.” In fact, the progress in the sciences is measured by how much both sides now agree about. What the author calls “the compositional explanations of everyday reductionism” are accepted by both sides. Similarly, both sides also accept that new properties emerge from new combinations of materials. Their disagreements are now much more specific and have to be defined and assessed carefully.
In general, scientific reductionists claim “wholes are nothing but their parts.” What they mean by this is an ontological claim that “the entities of microphysics, as the fundamental components, determine everything to the degree it is determined at all.” So the laws of physics “exhaustively govern both components and the entities they compose in more complex collectives.” Compared with the philosophical perspective of semantic (Nagelian) reductionism, which overlooks compositional explanations, tries to dispense with the higher sciences, and endorses the non-existence of the macro-world, scientific reductionism accepts compositional explanations, embraces the higher sciences, and endorses the macro-world. Nevertheless, scientific reductionists typically claim that all of the higher sciences are reducible to the lower sciences and that a Theory of Everything is literally possible.
In contrast, scientific emergentists claim “wholes are more than the sum of their parts,” or “parts behave differently in wholes.” They base these contentions on observations from various areas of study, including high-energy superconductivity, thermodynamical systems, Benard cells in chemistry, the eukaryotic cell, slime mold, neural populations, the behavior of eusocial insects like ants and bees, and the flocking behaviors of vertebrates, and not just from the gaps in our knowledge in consciousness studies and applications of quantum physics. Some emergentists also defend “a ‘downward’ determinative influence that such emergent ‘wholes’ exert upon their ‘parts’” and that “there are ‘organizational’ laws involving emergent composed entities” which are also fundamental laws. So they do not agree that a Theory of Everything based on physics alone is possible.
The author goes on to describe the different varieties of emergence theories. Qualitative Emergence is based on novel powers, properties, kinds of individuals, or processes which emerge in complex structures. Weak or W-Emergence is based on properties which can’t be derived, computed, or predicted from the laws, explanations, or theories regarding its components. He rejects both Qualitative Emergence and W-Emergence, and says they are not “live” or viable alternatives to scientific reductionism. He states, “Compositional explanations in the sciences routinely explain Qualitative Emergent entities using lower-level entities taken to compose them.” He also concludes that W-Emergent properties are not irreducible, since “the unpredictability of an entity does not suffice for ontological irreducibility.” He then points out that the parsimony principle undermines the claims of emergentists who do not embrace some idea of downward determination from the whole to the parts.
That leaves two other varieties of emergence which do include the concept of downward determination. Ontological or O-Emergence is promoted by some philosophers but virtually no scientists because it maintains that O-Emergent properties are not composed. In other words, it proposes that non-physical, fundamental energies move masses, above and beyond the fundamental forces in physics. The author also rejects this perspective as non-viable.
That leaves Strong or S-Emergence as the only variety of emergence which the author says is still viable. S-Emergence claims that there exist higher-level, composed properties that are determinative. Those emergentists who hold “enriched”views embrace such additional ontological commitments, “including downward causation; the role of boundary, environmental, or background conditions; reduction in degrees of freedom and/or higher-level constraints; entrainment or enslavement; unpredictability or undeducibility of certain kinds; and more.”
The author then describes yet another reductionistic perspective that he thinks is also still a live position. Referring to the first reductionist view as Simple Fundamentalism, he refers to this second alternative as Conditioned Fundamentalism, and it incorporates a certain number of ideas from S-Emergentism. Simple Fundamentalism is based on the simple view of aggregation, which states that “the aggregation of components is continuous and only involves determination by other components.” Conditioned Fundamentalism is based on the conditioned view of aggregation, which states that “the contributions of powers by components in complex collectives is discontinuous with their contributions in simple collectives, components contribute differential powers, and the laws and/or principles of composition holding of components in simpler collectives do not exhaust the laws covering such components in the relevant complex collective.” Or in other words, it adopts the emergentist idea that “parts behave differently in wholes” while maintaining that the component parts are still responsible, not the whole itself.
After considering various criticisms of the S-Emergent perspective, the author concludes that it can make no sense unless it embraces the idea of machresis or machretic determination. Because an emergent property which is composed of reducible parts can’t have new forces beyond those of physics, it must embrace machretic determination. “Machretic determination is non-productive and non-causal because it is a mass-energy neutral relation, is not identical to the triggering and manifestation of powers, is synchronous, involves entities that are in some sense the same, and does not involve the transfer of energy or mediation of force.” The author calls this variety of S-Emergence “Mutualism,” since the components and the wholes are mutually determinative. Further, Mutualism requires emergent laws which express the role of downward determination. There are two types of such emergent laws: supercessional, which replace existing laws, and supplemental, which add to existing laws. In other words, simple rules can be supplanted by other rules. This is why no final Theory of Everything is possible from a Mutualist perspective.
We now have three alternative perspectives the author considers as viable from his reasoning about the present evidence. Two reductionist perspectives and one emergentist perspective remain: Simple Fundamentalism, Conditioned Fundamentalism, and Mutualism. All three accept the compositional explanations of everyday reductionism, qualitative emergence, and the indispensability of the higher sciences. Conditioned Fundamentalism and Mutualism accept the conditioned view of aggregation, while Simple Fundamentalism accepts the simple view. Both Conditioned Fundamentalism and Mutualism accept discontinuities, differential powers, and further fundamental laws. And only Mutualism accepts the existence of determinative higher-level entities.
The author proposes that these perspectives can be confirmed or disconfirmed by empirical evidence now that their various characteristic have been defined in detail. He says we need evidence to move beyond the “de facto stalemate in scientific discussions,” but now have three possibilities which “are all substantive scientific hypotheses.” To test Simple Fundamentalism, we need to examine whether complex collectives contribute differential powers. This can be established by comparing simple to complex collectives. Assuming we have proven differential powers, we can then move on to prove either Conditioned Fundamentalism or Mutualism. We need to answer a few additional questions: “Are the contributions of differential powers by the components in the complex collective machretically determined by the composed entities?” and “Are the supplemental/supercessional laws holding of the components in the complex collective emergent laws referring to at least one strongly emergent composed entity and its machretic determination?” The author goes on to point out that only by looking at the evidence across the sciences, and not just from physics, can we answer such questions. He calls that “inclusivism.”
Finally the author concludes, “I have shown that the ‘established views’ on both sides of the debate, in philosophy and the sciences, have failed to address crucial theoretical issues, endorsed bad arguments and false dichotomies, and overlooked candidates for live positions.” “Neither Fundamentalism nor Mutualism has been successfully established as the best hypothesis about even [the] favored scientific examples.” And both sides haven’t addressed the “strongest opposing hypotheses and the key issues in dispute with them.”
My comment: I think that the determinative properties of consciousness, including free will, clearly fall under the concept of Mutualism, a variety of Strong Emergentism, which is not yet disproven.
(November 23, 2021 at 2:14 pm)Ferrocyanide Wrote: We really should start a separate thread.
The above is all I will add to this discussion, since I don't want to go through it all again.
