I was catching up on old episodes of
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe on my flight back home from TAM 5 and listening to the
Tom W. Clark interview in
episode #20 raised my philosophical ire.
I hate it when naturalists so whole heartedly and easily abandon free will to the spiritualists and the dualists. It doubled my frustration when he so often cited Dennett. Dennett whose whole project in his two major works on the subject of free will (
Elbow Room and
Freedom Evolves) is reclaiming free will for naturalists and proving that a deterministic universe far from being in conflict with free will it is a necessary condition for its existence.
Apparently Mr. Clark (apologies Dr., if he is a PhD) has read Dennett but didn't get it. I am not going into the intricacies of Dennett's arguments (I highly recommend you buy his books if you are interested in the issue) but I am going to try and set the record straight using my own much simpler and clumsier arguments.
Yes, as far as we know the universe is determined and we as things contained in that universe must also be determined so free will as defined as the ability to act outside of the causal chain of events cannot exist.
But this is a not the really the kind of free will we want. This Bronze Age, metaphysical free will is both myopic and absurd. It also has about the same explanative and functional power as unicorns and fairies.
Think about it. Do we have the free will to act outside of all external causes? If we could chose to ignore the force of gravity or to not die from starvation when denied access to food then we would have this sort of free will.
But this sort of free will would also free you from internal causality as well which is a completely inconsistent notion. What could it possible mean to choose independent of your thoughts, emotions and desires? Is this something we would want or need? "I felt x, thought x, wanted x but I chose y! I wonder why I did that? Not that there is a why, a why is a cause after all, and I have metaphysical free will!" Does this sort of choice resemble the kind you have in your internal life?
So far I seem to be shooting myself in the foot. I have been bad mouthing free will when I set out to defend it and that's because I want to emphasize the distinction that Dennett makes. Really when philosophers have talked about free will through the ages they have muddled two distinct ideas together. There is the nonsensical free will that determinism negates (which is okay because no one really wants that anyway) and there is free will worth having (which Dennett sets out to prove we have and explain how it evolved).
The free will we want is the could-have-done-differently free will and we have that. We get this ability by the virtue of the fact that we are limited agents, working with a limited understanding of the causes around us.
We are designed by our genes to seek some outcomes and avoid others but our genes can't know exactly the situations we will find ourselves in. Our environment is too complex for our genes to perfectly predict the future and script out every motion we are to make through out our lives. If they could do this they would simply make us like clockwork automatons. Our genes cope with the complexity of the world by building flexibility into us: limited senses and limited speculative power so we have limited ability to determine how to reach goals we are designed to reach.
Ironically, our limited ability is the key to free will. If our genes could have designed us as super agents capable of perceiving and processing all causes then we would be no better off than the clockwork automatons, we would simply always take the optimal route (determined essentially by the interest of our genes) and our consciousness would be redundant.
It is in the middle ground of imperfect agency where free will emerges. We are complex multi-state avoiding and seeking machines with a high degree of flexibility. And thus we have the could-have-done-differently free will. Determinism states that everything has one ultimate outcome but within that deterministic universe we have build in flexibility so if it were possible to rewind the deterministic universal tape and whisper a piece of advice into ear of one of us imperfect agents the whole tape from that point on would change. If we could have known better (or just differently) we could have done differently. And in that is the free will we have and desire.
So in the only rational sense of the word we have free will. There are objections I can anticipate to my explanation but this is a forum so I will wait to others raise them to respond to them.
But there is another thing that Tom Clark said that I thought was horrendous. He claimed that (since there was no free will) we can't hold criminals truly responsible for their actions! I know he couched it with provisions that did not follow from his argument to make it more palatable, like we still need a criminal justice system, but seriously this is a complete non sequitur.
First, I resent the intellectual elitism that is implicit in this kind of thinking: we educated, liberal-minded sorts are capable of understanding the big picture but we need to make allowances for those lesser unfortunates without the advantages and abilities we have.
Second, if criminals cannot be held responsible for their actions because they lack free will, how can we (also lacking free will) be held responsible for the way we treat them? Morality goes right out the window.
Third, I think Tom Clark is quick to embrace this faulty reasoning because he is blinded here by his agenda of taking retribution out of the criminal justice system. I sympathize with his cause but there are much better arguments for it, there are studies he could cite for example that I'm sure have been done. Cherry-picking bronze age metaphysical arguments that erode our agency to make your moral point is just as bad as cherry-picking bronze age myths from the bible to make your moral point.
