The Knowledge, Reality, and Value Book Club continues. Today, we go over Part 3: Metaphysics. Huemer’s in blockquotes, I’m not. Once again, I’m focusing on my disagreements to keep the discussion lively.
1. The Argument from Design.
Back in the 19th century, I guess a lot of people had mechanical pocket watches, and if you looked inside, you could see a complicated, very precise mechanism working. Even if you’d never seen a watch before, you would immediately know that this thing had to have been designed by someone. It’s too intricately ordered to have just happened.
Unless I missed it, Huemer never clearly articulates the fundamental objection to the Argument from Design. Namely: The reason why we infer a watch-maker from a watch is not that the watch is “intricately ordered,” but that we have independent reason to believe that watches are not naturally occurring.
Consider this rock formation:
Now compare it to this rock carving:
The former is far more “intricately ordered” than the latter. But the latter shows design, and the former does not. Why? Because we have independent knowledge that only intelligent beings create rocks with little hearts on them. The upshot is that the Argument from Design literally “begs the question.” It assumes that the universe couldn’t be naturally occurring, which is precisely the point under dispute.
I’m not going to say much about this instance of the Argument from Design, though, because it has not aged well. Paley wrote before the Theory of Evolution was developed (Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859), so in Paley’s time, there really was no good explanation for life that anyone had thought of, other than “God did it.” Paley was correct to think it implausible that life just appeared by chance.
But would it not be even more implausible to think that God just appeared by chance? If so, how would the existence of life have been a good argument for the existence of God, even in Paley’s pre-Darwinian time?
2. The “fine tuning” argument for the existence of God:
So, given that almost all ways of assigning values to the universe’s parameters would be unfriendly to life, why does the universe in fact have life-friendly parameters? The theist says: Because an intelligent, benevolent, and immensely powerful being set the parameters of the universe that way, in order to make life possible.
I say this is an obviously terrible argument, and I don’t say such things lightly. Why? Because we have zero evidence that the anyone can “set the parameters of the universe”! If you went into a music studio, full of knobs and dials, it makes sense to say, “I doubt these knobs and dials just happened to be in the right position to record punk rock.” The reasonable inference is that someone who wanted to make punk rock set them to do so. But that’s only because there are a bunch of knobs and dials amenable to adjustment! If a newly-discovered cave had great acoustics for punk, in contrast, it would be crazy to think anyone “adjusted the cave’s settings” for this purpose.
When responding to “Weak Objection #4,” Huemer presents the following hypothetical:
Made by God: While exploring the surface of Mars, astronauts discover a new kind of crystal. When they look at it under a microscope, they find that the molecules of this crystal spontaneously arrange themselves into patterns that look exactly like the English words, “Made by God” in Times New Roman font. Everyone who looks in the microscope sees it. Scientists are able to figure out that this is actually a complicated, hitherto-unnoticed consequence of some very specific features of the laws of nature, features that no one has any explanation for. Over the next few decades, many more crystals are discovered, scattered across all the planets of the solar system, which, when looked at under microscopes, look like the phrase “Made by God” spelled out in each of the languages of Earth. Again, the laws of nature just happen to be arranged to ensure that this happens.
I’d say this is excellent evidence for intelligent English-speaking life on Mars, but zero evidence for God’s existence. After all, everything on Earth labelled “made by God” is made by garden-variety intelligent English-speaking life, so why shouldn’t we make a parallel inference on Mars?
Am I misreading the point of this hypothetical? Seemingly not, because shortly thereafter, Huemer writes: “If your opposition to theism is so extreme that your position wouldn’t even admit that there was evidence for theism in the ‘Made by God’ story, then I think you need to step back and take a break.” I have stepped back, taken a break, and I still think the hypothetical fails.
3. Next, Huemer turns to the Anthropic Principle’s response to the fine tuning argument. And I have to say, the Anthropic response seems completely satisfactory to me. So what’s wrong with it, according to Huemer? He presents this hypothetical:
Firing Squad: You’ve been convicted of treason (a result of one too many intemperate tweets about the President) and are scheduled to be executed by firing squad. When the time of your execution arrives, you stand there blindfolded, listening to the fifty sharpshooters lift their rifles, fire, and then . . . Somehow you find yourself unscathed. All fifty shooters have apparently somehow missed. Wondering how this could have happened, you start entertaining hypotheses such as: Maybe someone paid all the soldiers to deliberately miss, maybe someone broke into the armory last night and loaded all the guns with blanks, etc.
My reply: Entertaining such hypotheses only makes sense because we have independent reason to believe that people normally don’t survive fifty-man firing squads. In contrast, it’s not weird for humans to exist on planet hospitable to human life. And if you ask, “How did this happen?,” saying, “If the universe were very different, we wouldn’t be here too ask such questions” is illuminating.
In any case, if you take fine tuning seriously, why can’t you just ask, “How did we happen to be in a universe where a divine being fine-tunes the laws of nature to allow our survival?” Are you going to say, “A super-divine being flipped the ‘divine fine-turning’ switch to ‘on'”? In other words, you can think of the presence of a pro-human divine being as another “parameter” of the universe, and say, “This is even more puzzling than I realized. How did the divine being happen to be so pro-human?” Yes, you could invoke the Anthropic Principle here too, but then why not cut out the divine being entirely?
4. “The Burden of Proof”:
I should note, though, that it’s not always clear exactly what the “burden of proof” people are saying – they’re usually not as explicit as I was above, probably because they themselves are not sure what they believe. (That happens a lot in philosophy.) So people will often make remarks that are ambiguous between (a) and (b) below:
(a) In the absence of evidence, you should believe x does not exist.
(b) In the absence of evidence, you should refrain from believing that x exists.Notice that (b) is obvious, while (a) is a lot more puzzling and less obvious. I’m going to address (a).
I agree that (a) is a little puzzling, but it’s sound under straightforward conditions. Namely: If X has a low prior probability of existing, and there’s no evidence of X’s existence, we should conclude that X has a very low posterior probability of existing. What gives X “a low prior probability of existing”? Many things, including (a) being very specific (e.g. X=”a guy with a feathered hat named Josephus who likes pickle-flavored ice cream and has exactly 19 hairs on his head”), and (b) being fantastical (e.g. X=Superman). The Christian God is both (a) and (b). A generic God is (b). Yes, some things in categories (a) and (b) do exist, but if someone asserts their existence without evidence, we should severely doubt their existence. (Especially if the asserter has a poor epistemic track record already).
5. Free Will and Predictability
Huemer persuasively debunks the “compatibilist” view that free will and determinism can both be true. But as far as I can tell, he never debunks one of the most popular arguments for determinism. Namely: Human behavior is often highly predictable. As a social scientist, I hear such arguments fairly often.
My position, which I warrant Huemer would also accept: Libertarian free will and behavioral predictability are totally compatible.
Why? Because libertarian free will is about what you can do, and predictability is about what you do do. I know via introspection, for example, that I can stop watching television. But it remains highly predictable that I will keep watching. Flipping things around, you can often use my genes and environment to make excellent predictions about my behavior. E.g., Per evolutionary psychology and social norms, I’m going to continue taking care of my kids. Still, this doesn’t show that I can’t do otherwise, only that I won’t.
In Bayesian terms, admittedly, the best way to show that you can do X is to actually do X. P(I can do X|I do X)=1, whereas P(I can do X|I don’t do X)<=1. But P(I can do X|I don’t do X) is frequently high.
6. Free will as a continuum.
Most discussion of free will treats freedom as a binary property (a property having only two values): Either you have free will, or you do not have it. Philosophers give qualitative conditions for an action to be free, where satisfying the conditions presumably makes you fully free, and failing to satisfy them makes you not at all free.
However, it seems that one can have varying degrees of freedom. Among actions that are to some degree free, some are more free than others. For example, suppose a person’s behavior is partly explained by their poor upbringing. Or a psychological disorder. Or the influence of drugs or alcohol. I say “partly explained” here because nobody’s behavior is ever completely explained by those things. But the influence of extraneous, non-rational factors can be more or less difficult to resist, and a person can have a more or less active role in their own decision-making process. So these outside influences would diminish one’s free will.
While speaking this way is tempting, the binary position is basically correct. Loosely speaking, it is “harder” for a straight man to avoid romance with woman (to whom he is strongly attracted) than with males (to whom he isn’t attracted at all). Strictly speaking, however, both choices are fully free. One is much more pleasing, but we are fully free to refrain from taking pleasing actions.
If I recall correctly, Huemer is not a fan of the Szaszian approach to mental illness. But it’s directly relevant. I say, for example, that alcoholics are fully free to stop drinking. They rarely do, but they absolutely can. Indeed, there is strong empirical evidence that I’m right, because changing incentives changes alcoholics behavior; and if changing incentives changes behavior, that is strong evidence that you were capable of changing your behavior all along.
Yes, it is often sensible to adjust our moral judgment based on how “hard” or “easy” a choice is. We condemn a starving man for stealing bread much less than a well-fed man for doing the same. The reason, though, it’s not because the latter choice is “freer” than the other, but because the latter choice is less morally justified than the latter.
Consequentialists may insist that we vary the severity of condemnation simply to improve incentives. Yet in that case, we would have to harshly punish doing the wrong thing for “hard” choices, yet could safely settle for light punishments for doing the wrong thing on “easy” choices. The normal view is almost the opposite.
7. “Now, despite what I just said, I think the Soul Theory is the only plausible theory of personal identity that anyone has devised. Every other theory has obviously false implications.” I basically agree. Why, though, call this the “soul theory” with its strong supernatural connotations, rather than simply the “mind theory”? After all, there is a whole field already called “philosophy of mind” (we both took this class from Searle, I believe). When Huemer writes:
Some believe that persons have a special, immaterial component called “the soul”, which determines one’s identity. (This view is sometimes called “mind-body dualism”.) The soul is also said to be the subject of mental states (it is your soul, rather than your body, that experiences thoughts, feelings, and so on). In all the thought experiments about personal identity, you go wherever your soul goes. The unobservability of souls makes it possible to account for any intuitions about personal identity you want; we can just suppose that a person’s soul goes wherever we intuitively think the person is.
Why didn’t he instead say:
Some believe that persons have a special, immaterial component called “the mind”, which determines one’s identity. (This view is sometimes called “mind-body dualism”.) The mind is also said to be the subject of mental states (it is your mind, rather than your body, that experiences thoughts, feelings, and so on). In all the thought experiments about personal identity, you go wherever your mind goes. The unobservability of mind makes it possible to account for any intuitions about personal identity you want; we can just suppose that a person’s mind goes wherever we intuitively think the person is.
8. Let me end with a particularly good passage I agree with:
In response, hard determinists often say this is an “illusion”, adding that we are determined to experience this illusion. This reply, however, is very lame by itself – that is, if not supplemented with actual evidence that shows free will to be illusory. In general, if we seem to observe something, it is very lame to simply say, “Oh, that’s an illusion” and move on. Rational people assume that what we seem to observe is real, unless there is evidence to the contrary; they don’t assume that whatever we seem to observe is illusory until proven real (see §7.6).
In other words, determinism is a supremely unscientific theory that begins by throwing away ubiquitous conflicting evidence that each of us experiences in our every waking moment.
READER COMMENTS
Frank
Jun 21 2021 at 2:35pm
An intelligent designer would have come up with us?
Tom Howe
Jun 22 2021 at 10:19am
Ha! I see your point.
Still, empirical evidence shows that humans are the best possible intelligent species. Perhaps, it’s the universe that needs a better design.
Jan
Jun 21 2021 at 4:11pm
re: the crystals argument. did you miss the part where huemer says they are a direct consequence of the laws of nature? how could this not be evidence for a very powerful being/simulator?
anthropic principle: i think it breaks down because the a priori chance that of all possible universes a hospitable one exists is just infinitesimal, or so the physicists seem to think.
what I dont get is why huemer thinks the standard multiverse argument doesn’t solve this. please explain!
KevinDC
Jun 21 2021 at 5:38pm
Regarding:
This brings to mind the old (and false) adage that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” It would be true to say that absence of evidence is not proof of absence, but proof and evidence are not the same thing. Absence of evidence for X can be evidence of X’s absence – depending on how strongly we should expect X to be evident. A few hundred years ago, there was little solid evidence in favor of the giant squid, but that by itself didn’t constitute much evidence of absence either, because the habitat of giant squid was only slightly more accessible than the surface of the moon was in those days. By contrast, the continued absence of evidence for Bigfoot in this day and age doesn’t just recommend Bigfoot agnosticism – I think it give us strong grounds to positively disbelieve in Bigfoot’s existence.
I found this mildly surprising, because in the reading I’ve done on the free will debate, I’ve never heard anyone argue that the predictability of behavior is evidence against free will. (Possibly due to the fact that most of the arguments I’ve read have come from philosophers and neuroscientists rather than social scientists?) I usually hear a nearly opposite sentiment – even those who argue strongly against free will also argue that this does not imply predictability of human behavior – Steven Pinker, David Eagleman, Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris, Dan Wegner, Susan Blackmore, and Patricia Churchland come to mind.
Still, I found the free will discussion the weakest segment of the book – I actually ended that chapter significantly more skeptical of free will than I was when I started. What both Bryan and Mike seem to think is a really strong evidence in favor of free will – the argument from introspection – is for me the most persuasive argument against free will. I know I’m not unique in this respect – in the last several years when talking with people who don’t believe in free will, the appeal to introspection is by far the most commonly given reason. If I’m not being introspective, I guess I have a the usual sense of “free will,” but the moment I start to introspect and pay close attention to my thoughts, inclinations, etc, this feeling completely vanishes.
Thoughts just appear in my awareness – I don’t have any sense that I control them, or choose them. In any given moment, some thought or inclination just “comes to mind,” but I can’t tell you why that particular thought occurred to me instead of some other, I don’t feel like I chose or controlled it, I don’t have any sense that I could have caused some other thought or inclination to arise instead of the one that did. I don’t get a sense of “freely choosing among options” – when I ask myself why I went with a specific inclination over another, or why I found some consideration to be decisive over another one, it very quickly collapses into “I don’t know, I just did.” My introspective observation is much more aligned with a sense of experiencing thoughts and decisions, but not at all with a sense of freely choosing them.
I was also flatly unimpressed with the quote Bryan found strong enough to end on, when Mike says:
Here Mike seems to be strongly implying (without outright saying) that critics of free will actually do, in fact, just claim it’s an illusion and move on without providing evidence for why such a feeling would be illusory. But…that’s just not the case! The critics of free will I’ve read provide lots of evidence and arguments for why the feeling of free will is an illusion. Mike actually provides a nice lead in to one of the most famous examples in the next chapter. On page 202 (of the paperback version) Mike says:
One of the most famous pieces of evidence in the free will debate literature were the experiments done by Benjamin Libet which looked at the intention to move one’s hand. Libet found that the start of the brain activity creating the physical hand movement begins taking place consistently and measurably before the intention to move your hand is consciously experienced. This has been replicated and expanded upon by a variety of different experiments since then with increasing sophistication, consistently finding that the subjective experience of intention is a mid-to-late stage in the process of actions being performed, and not the start of that process. (This also matches my aforementioned introspective experience – when I pay close attention, I simply feel like I’m becoming aware of thoughts and decisions, and not actively creating, directing, or controlling them.) Confabulation is another line of evidence given, when people will confidently report and explain introspective experiences for particular thoughts, actions, and decisions, even when their introspective explanation is provably false. (This can be demonstrated most dramatically with split brain patients but you can get similarly dramatic results from patients with normal brains with a little effort.) These are only a couple of the many arguments that critics of free will have offered for why the common feeling of free will is an illusion.
Now, maybe these and all the other arguments are bunk, or they don’t have the implications for free will that their advocates claim. Could be – I’m no expert in this area. But to imply that a conclusion is declared with no supporting arguments given is a pretty large oversight, in my never-to-be-humble opinion.
Henri Hein
Jun 22 2021 at 9:00pm
I believe you, but I do have to confirm something: don’t you ever have a sense of being able to direct your thoughts? I certainly do. If I think “I don’t want to think about my ex anymore right now” or “I need to stop thinking about food until I get closer to dinnertime,” sure, sometimes I fail, but I also sometimes succeed. That could be random, which I cannot prove either way – but my introspection led me to believe in control. I have also engaged in mind-control exercises like Buddhist meditation, in which the attempt to control your mind is explicit, and which does seem to succeed in ways that appears strongly non-random.
I have a question about this. I should preface by admitting I know nothing about neuro-science, so I have no basis to critique Libet’s findings. What I am curious about is that even if this is true at some micro-level, it does not seem to be explanatory at a macro-level. If I (think I) want coffee, I don’t suddenly find a cup of coffee in my hand and think “Oh, I guess I must have wanted coffee.” How does Libet’s findings apply at the macro-level?
KevinDC
Jun 23 2021 at 10:28am
My tremendously unhelpful answer to this is “yes and no” 😛 Do I ever have a sense of being able to control my thoughts? Yes – but only when I’m not paying close attention to my thoughts and how they’re arising and playing out. Suppose my wife asks me to think of a movie. I think of a few movies and pick one. If I’m not paying close attention, I feel like I was in control of and directing that thought process. When I pay attention, though, this feeling goes away. I’m asked to think of a movie, and in my mind, there’s a pause, and then the names of movies just start “coming to mind.” I have no idea which movies will come to mind, I’m not directing that process, after the names of five movies come to mind, I have no sense that I could have thought of a different list of five movies using free will. The thoughts are just appearing, and I feel like I’m witnessing them, but not creating or choosing them. And after I pick one, and I try to understand why I picked it, I’m equally stumped. When I’m not paying close attention, I’ll feel something like “Oh, well I picked The Imitation Game because it has Benedict Cumberbatch in it and I saw Doctor Strange last weekend and he was in that too so I just went with another movie he’s in.” But when I pay closer attention, I don’t feel like I was controlling this inclination either, because I can’t explain why the actor was a deciding factor that came to mind, or even why it had that effect. Why didn’t it have the opposite effect? Why didn’t I say “I just saw a movie with him last weekend so I’m going to go with something different this time?” And very quickly my sense of why or how I’m making these choices collapses into “I don’t know, I just did.” So I’d say that weak introspection leads me to a feeling of free will, but careful introspection completely undercuts that feeling.
I think your macro-level example is mixing up the steps. It’s not the case that an action is fully carried out and then you become aware of an intention to carry out that action, on either the micro or macro level. My point was that Libet (and many others with increasingly dramatic results in the subsequent decades of research) have found that the conscious feeling of choosing an action occurs after the brain activity leading to that action has already started, but before the action is fully carried out. That doesn’t mean that the action is fully carried out before you become aware of that desire, like your coffee analogy suggests. It only means that once you’ve become aware of the choice to take an action, the biological activity in the brain which leads to that action was already ongoing prior to your awareness to take that action. This is how David Eagleman analogizes it in his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain:
Other macro level implications are found in the confabulation I mentioned earlier. A common description is that our conscious experience is, to use Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor, simply serving as a “lawyer” trying to sensibly explain the actions, judgments, and choices we make, but these lawyerly explanations, real as they seem to us subjectively, are just post hoc rationalizations for things that our brains set into motion unconsciously and beyond our control. The literature on cognitive experiments designed to make these confabulated explanations dramatically obvious can be fascinating and oddly funny too. Given this, even when people self-report a highly confident account of their introspective experience of deliberating and choosing, the quality of that evidence doesn’t seem very impressive to me as a defense of free will. With friends like these, the idea of free will doesn’t need enemies.
Re: Buddhist meditation – I’ve very little experience here so I can’t speak much about it, although I have started taking some baby steps in this area. But I’ve done a fair amount of reading about Buddhist philosophy and a common thread I find there is that, to them, the very idea of “free will” is incoherent, because they don’t believe there is a “self” that is or can be making choices to begin with – the very notion of a “self” is an illusion. I suspect this is a point of view that Bryan and Mike would not find agreeable.
John
Jun 23 2021 at 9:30pm
I’m not sure if we actually disagree, but if you’re inclined to say that the adage “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” is false, we probably do. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, at least on a Bayesian framework and any other that is plausible. If you have some prior regarding the existence of x, and you don’t gain any evidence regarding the existence of x, your prior should remain unchanged. Sorta by definition. Of course, sometimes failing to find or come across evidence for the existence of x is itself evidence against the existence of x. If I’m wondering whether there’s an intruder hiding in my house and I look all around and fail to find “any evidence of” an intruder, I should downgrade my credence in there being an intruder. But in that case I’ve actually come across evidence against the existence of an intruder. If looking and seeing an intruder hiding in my closet is evidence of an intruder, as it obviously is, then looking and not seeing an intruder hiding in my closet is evidence against an intruder (at least on a Bayesian framework). But if I don’t look around the house, and just sit there, the fact that I don’t gain or have any evidence of an intruder isn’t evidence against an intruder: my prior regarding the existence of an intruder should remain unchanged.
Mark Young
Jun 24 2021 at 1:14pm
Bryan Caplan wrote:
KevinDC replied:
Your answer here presupposes that an argument for determinism is an argument against free will — ruling out compatibilism.
I’m not an academic philosopher, but I am interested in debates about free will, determinism, moral agency and punishment (both criminal and social). In on-line debates I’ve often faced the claim that predictability is incompatible with liberty and thus with moral responsibility. I usually got that from people arguing against compatibilism from a free will perspective, but it also works for determinists — anti-responsibility types, that is: people are predictable (they say) and so they have no liberty and no moral responsibility.
The Libet experiments that you mention later in your reply are often advanced by those opposed to the (usually U.S.) penal system. Libet shows that human decisions can be predicted (these particular objectors say), and so it’s wrong to punish people for any any actions they took based on decisions they’d made. I think this position might be the sort of thing Caplan had in mind.
(I’d like to note for the record that I am not offering unconditional support for the U.S. or Canadian penal systems. I just think that that particular argument is wrong.)
Brian
Jun 24 2021 at 1:55pm
“Thoughts just appear in my awareness – I don’t have any sense that I control them, or choose them. In any given moment, some thought or inclination just “comes to mind,” but I can’t tell you why that particular thought occurred to me instead of some other, I don’t feel like I chose or controlled it, I don’t have any sense that I could have caused some other thought or inclination to arise instead of the one that did.”
KevinDC,
Of course, free will is about decisions and not about thoughts. But even with thoughts, you never think you can control them? I’ve often asked myself “What do I want to think about now–there’s something I wanted to do…” A thought will come to mind. it is indeed what I remember wanting to think about earlier, and then I start thinking about it, with specific aspects or details being conjured up on demand under my conscious gaze. I have a very strong sense that these came to mind specifically because I called them out from my memory.
Decision-making for me is even more deliberative. There will be an extended back and forth in my mind about the options and which one is best, perhaps over minutes or even months, until I settle on one. There’s nothing about this kind of process that acts like a snap judgement or that arguably occurred under the threshold of consciousness. That’s not to say that there wasn’t some subconscious processing, but the overall process clearly occurred in the light of consciousness. I challenge you to claim you never or even rarely have experiences like that. I have them all the time.
BW
Jun 21 2021 at 6:23pm
Hey Professor Huemer,
What do you think about this video? In it, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder argues that the fine tuning argument begs the question because it assumes a probability distribution that makes the constants of the universe unlikely. But, quoting her, “we do not have an empirically supported probability distribution for the constants of nature. And why is that? It’s because they are constant.”
KevinDC
Jun 22 2021 at 11:05am
He notes that as “Weak Objection #4” in his book and responds as follows:
This actually leads him into describing a situation where it turns out there is a law of physics causing “the phrase ‘Made by God’ spelled out in each of the languages of Earth. Again, the laws of nature just happen to be arranged to ensure this happens.” He then notes that:
Alan Reynolds
Jun 21 2021 at 7:10pm
How does one really disagree with the idea that all human behavior can be traced to physical causes? Doesn’t the libertarian free will argument have to assume that humans are someone exempt from the laws of nature that govern literally everything else? I don’t even know what it would mean for human choice to operate independently of causal/deterministic networks.
The argument about how alcoholics can choose not to drink if they want is totally beside the point. Of course in some sense this is true. But the determinist simply believes that whatever choice is made is the product of previous causes (from both nature/nurture, brain/environment, etc).
It’s also not hard to see why our intuitions about free will are misleading. I clearly experience myself making choices all the time. But I am unable to see and understand all the deep causes of those choices. This kind of knowledge is way beyond what we’re capable of knowing, and there’s no reason within natural selection that such knowledge is required for evolutionary success.
Philosophy of mind & personal identity is truly a bizarre field, but defaulting to the soul theory (or Bryan’s mind theory) seems weird. Why not just say “personal identity arguments lead us into extremely counterintuitive conclusions and ambiguity – this is a field where we still don’t have good answers.” The soul theory is subject to plenty of devastating reductio arguments as well. (I haven’t read Huemer’s book, so I assume he has a lot more to say about this though.)
Henri Hein
Jun 22 2021 at 9:05pm
No, only emergent properties. It may be the case that free will is a poorly understood property, but it would not be the only one.
How is evolution compatible with determinism? It requires randomness.
KevinDC
Jun 23 2021 at 2:50pm
Well, I suppose it depends on what you mean by “random,” which it turns out is notoriously difficult to precisely define, and also gets used to mean very different things in different contexts. One common definition of “random” just means “not following any predictable pattern.” In the case of evolution by natural selection, Richard Dawkin’s bumper sticker length summation of the idea is “Life comes from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.” In each generation, there will be some small variations, which are “random” in the sense of not following a predictable pattern. But this doesn’t mean that the actual processes creating any specific instance of variation didn’t occur deterministically.
It’s kind of like when you drop a Ping Pong ball down a Plinko board. We say that the path the ball takes in any given drop is “random” because it’s unpredictable (to us) and doesn’t follow any recognizable pattern. But still, the process of each fall is deterministic. So randomness (in this sense) is compatible with determinism, as is the relevant randomness involved in evolutionary variation.
John
Jun 21 2021 at 8:51pm
Huemer is right and you are wrong about all the design stuff. I was going to try to explain why, but since Huemer has already explained why my writing an extra 200 words per point doesn’t seem like it is likely to move the needle. I’d be happy to drive into DC to talk about it over lunch or something though. (Alternatively, maybe read this: http://www.yoaavisaacs.com/uploads/6/9/2/0/69204575/ms_for_fine-tuning_fine-tuning.pdf) For now, I’ll just make one point: in the ‘made by God’ case, I think it is going to be close to impossible for you to state coherent and plausible priors such that that doesn’t raise the probability of God’s existence. I mean, your alternative suggestion is that there are some non-supernatural beings with what appear to us to be God-like powers who are using those powers to try to convince us that God exists. That itself should increase our credence in the existence of God, right?
Emil Karlsson
Jun 22 2021 at 3:59am
“Rational people assume that what we seem to observe is real”
To know what we seem to observe, wouldn’t we first have to know what the options would look like? If both theories predicts the same observation, we can’t tell if we seem to observe theory 1 or theory 2. So what would the deterministic world look like?
John
Jun 22 2021 at 7:06am
Alan: Libertarians definitely don’t assume that humans are exempt from the laws of nature–they’re incompatibilists! They say that for freedom to exist the laws of nature can’t be deterministic. If we were exempt from the laws of nature then it wouldn’t matter whether the laws were deterministic.
KevinDC
Jun 22 2021 at 10:45am
This isn’t what Huemer argues, however. He ends his chapter on free will by recounting vague notions of “agent causation” or “downward causation” which are supposed to account for how free will works – the idea being that immaterial and non-physical minds can engage in interaction with the physical world and create new causal chains of action in a way that is separate from and independent of the laws of nature which apply to everything else that exists.
It doesn’t matter much whether or not the laws of nature are deterministic on this view – to say that your behaviors are caused by indeterministic and random laws of nature doesn’t support free will anymore than saying your behavior is caused by deterministic and fixed laws of nature. In either case, it’s the laws of nature, rather than you, causing your behavior – whether such laws operate deterministically or randomly is besides the point. Hence the appeal to some form of “agent causation” which isn’t accountable to the laws of nature.
John
Jun 22 2021 at 4:00pm
Agent causation doesn’t presuppose that minds are immaterial. It’s just the idea that, in the final analysis, some of the relata of the (or a) causal relation are agents: that not all causation is event-event causation. Agents might still be wholly physical beings. If agents were non-physical, then you’re right that in a way it doesn’t matter whether the laws are deterministic, since the agent causation is coming in “from the outside” and so wouldn’t violate laws in either case. But if agents are wholly physical, it does matter whether the laws are deterministic: given plausible auxiliary premises a physical agent would be determined to make the choices she does given deterministic laws, which (according to incompatibilists) is incompatible with her choosing freely.
KevinDC
Jun 23 2021 at 9:18am
This brings me back to my starting comment that “This isn’t what Huemer argues, however.” In his book (which is the topic of discussion) Huemer does specify that when he speaks of minds he means something immaterial. There may well be other people who argue that minds are fully material things, and agents are fully material things, but this is denied by Huemer (and, I believe, Caplan) in the argument for free will they endorse.
I must confess though that the issue of determinism vs indeterminism still seems irrelevant to me when discussing free will. For example, you say:
I don’t see why the laws being deterministic matter. If agents are wholly physical things, not at all exempt from the laws of nature, and said laws are indeterministic, then then it would be true that in a given moment there are multiple possible actions a physical agent might take, and whichever action said agent takes would not be perfectly determined from their previous physical state. But so what? It doesn’t follow from this that the next action the agent takes was therefore “freely chosen” in any interesting sense. The next physical state of affairs which occurs may not be “determined” – maybe it occurs totally randomly, or maybe it follows some kind of probability distribution, but the indeterminism of what happens next in no way implies that next state was therefore freely created by said (physical) agent. You can’t get freedom from deterministic causation, but I don’t see how you get it from probability distributions or randomness either.
It seems to me what you’re saying, if put into a syllogism, would look like this:
This is an invalid argument – the conclusion does not follow from the premises. If we added in a fourth premise that “Anything not caused deterministically is freely chosen” the argument would become valid but unsound, because that premise is false. (Unless, of course, we simply define “freely chosen” to mean “anything not caused deterministically”, but then the argument would just beg the question.) Possibly I’m misunderstanding you though – blog comments only allow so much to be unpacked.
John
Jun 23 2021 at 9:21pm
Sorry, busy, so this will be brief and probably inadequate. But it’s really important to distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions. You’re absolutely right that the conclusion of your argument doesn’t follow from the premises. But determinism can rule out free will without indeterminism being sufficient for free will. If (nomic) determinism rules out free will, it’s important whether the laws of nature are deterministic, even though finding out that they aren’t wouldn’t establish that we’re free.
I will have to re-read to say anything definitive about the mind stuff, but my own view is that while Huemer and Caplan may think that minds are immaterial, they shouldn’t define minds as being immaterial, since if they do the term will cease to be common ground with their opponents. (Compare: consequentialists think that right actions are optimific, but they shouldn’t define ‘right action’ as ‘action that is optimific’, since then you can’t frame their dispute with deontologists as being (at least partly) about which actions are right, as it obviously is.)
Liam
Jun 22 2021 at 9:57am
Huemer’s crystal hypothetical stipulates that the words are a result of the laws of nature themselves; it’s not just that there is writing on the sides of the crystals.
To see the problem with Huemer’s example, consider the following passage from J. L. Mackie:
“Paley argued that if we found a watch on the ground we should infer that it had been made by an intelligent being. This is true, because we hardly ever find watches except where the supposition of human manufacture is antecedently plausible — on people’s wrists, in people’s pockets, in jeweller’s shops, and so on. But if watches were found as commonly on the seashore as shellfish, or as commonly on dry land as insects, this argument would be undermined.”
I think Mackie’s objection also applies to Huemer’s strange case of the crystals. If it really were true that words from different languages were spontaneously appearing in crystals as part of the laws of nature, that very fact would undermine the design hypothesis. Instead, I would start to wonder whether there was a common physical mechanism leading to the appearance of these words in the minds of human beings and in nature. We would have discovered that language is far more peculiar than we originally thought.
To see the plausibility of this, imagine an alternative history in which humans had always seen random words written on rocks, in the clouds, on the sides of trees, and so on. Suppose our earliest historical records contained descriptions of this ‘writing’, and nobody knew what caused it. Every day, people see clouds of words appearing in the sky. In such a world, would we count Huemer’s crystals as evidence of design? I do not think so. There would be nothing marking it out as particularly special. We wouldn’t automatically attribute it to intelligence.
Why isn’t this an example of dogmatism, as Huemer implies? Remember that the God hypothesis deals with the nature of reality at its bedrock. If the theist is willing to accept that words can just appear or exist in the mind of God with no further explanation, then why can’t the atheist instead suppose that the fundamental laws of nature lead to words in crystals, and that there is no further explanation for this? Explanation has to come to an end somewhere, whether it is in the mind of God or the laws of nature. For familiar reasons (e.g. the problem of evil), I think the laws of nature hypothesis is more reasonable.
A final objection is that we would never accept this reasoning in more local cases. If we saw writing on Mars, we wouldn’t immediately chalk it up to the fundamental laws of nature. But that’s only because of our background evidence and prior experience (a point that Caplan rightly emphasises). Extra-terrestrial life would be a more natural initial hypothesis. Huemer’s example is weird because he stipulates that the writing is caused by the laws themselves, and in such a case I do not think that normal design inferences are justified.
John Alcorn
Jun 22 2021 at 10:23am
Re: Burden of proof & arguments for theism/atheism.
Bryan Caplan writes:
In a previous bookclub comment, I mentioned social epistemology. Rational belief-formation often involves also testimony and trust. (Science usually requires also replication.) I submit that we judge the credibility of testimony partly by appropriate or optimal specificity. If an apostle recounts the life of Jesus, we expect specifics about appearance, personality, and behavior. An exact estimate of the number of whiskers in Jesus’ beard would diminish the testimony’s credibility, but so would general lack of specificity. Upon inspection, the Gospels say surprisingly little about Jesus’ look — quite the opposite of what Bryan calls “very specific.” Instead, the Gospels narrate at a breathtaking pace, focussing squarely on Jesus’ deeds and pronouncements, about righteousness, problems of living, and social tensions.
My point is not that Christians meet the burden of proof. My narrow point is that portrayals of Jesus in the Gospels aren’t implausibly specific.
Tom Howe
Jun 22 2021 at 10:27am
From the top,
I must object: “God did it” is not an explanation at all; it’s a declaration that no explanation is possible. Since we know that some things can be explained, this declaration is the wildest sort of extreme.
John Alcorn
Jun 22 2021 at 2:08pm
Re: Pascal’s Wager
Micheal Huemer writes:
But the Wagerer must also make herself forget that she is going through the motions, instrumentally, in the hope of acquiring belief. She must act to forget-and-believe. Is there “a good chance” that she will forget her subtlety and acquire faith, in synchrony?
Henri Hein
Jun 22 2021 at 9:39pm
In almost all fan-clubs, the subject of the club is inflated in the minds and words of the fans. For instance, Democrats have an inflated view of Democrat politicians and the Democrat Party; the same is true for Republicans; sports fans have a notoriously inflated view of their teams and players, etc. This is true for almost all fan-clubs in history. I’m not exempting myself. I probably think of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek as taller and more beautiful than they actually were. Given this state of affairs, why does Philosophy accept the descriptions of Gods given by the worshippers? They are almost certainly inflated.
In fact, I doubt the two propositions that most worshippers accept:
1. God is great; 2. Humans are one of the most important things to God. They are unlikely to both be true. If God is as great as the believers make him out to be, humans are probably an unimportant side-show.
In the section on “why does God allow evil in the world,” I was missing the “Satan’s Promise” scenario. Perhaps it’s specific to Christianity, so does not apply to general philosophy, but I would think it could be adapted to other religions. According to this interpretation, God made a promise to Satan that he, Satan, could rule the world for while. Of course, God cannot break his promise, and presumably he would have known in advance how bad things were going to get. However, the awful interlude is supposed to be made up for with the perfect world that is to come once God reestablishes his rule. According to the Christians, the beneficiaries of this perfect world is mainly us humans, but it also occurred to me that maybe the entire exercise is for the benefit of Satan. It’s possible that the eternal, divine rapture he will experience later easily makes up for the horrors suffered by humans, which are, after all, like ants in comparison.
I don’t believe this myself, but I do find it to be one of the better explanations for why God allows evil in the world.
Henri Hein
Jun 22 2021 at 10:00pm
Under “The Concept of Free Will,” Huemer writes:
I disagree that it is important. I agree that it is interesting, and maybe even profound, but I don’t see any implications from it. If Free Will is established, we should continue to do what we have been doing, since almost all of us go about our lives as if it was already established. As a poignant example, that includes the prominent Determinists that Kevin DC listed above. (Which I agree is the correct thing to do, btw). If Determinism is established, then we will continue to do what we have (and will) be doing. I don’t see any resolution to the question that would mean we can and should change anything.
In the deterministic counter-factual, the people doling out the punishment also cannot help doing that.
John Alcorn
Jun 23 2021 at 9:48am
Re: Degrees of freedom
Bryan Caplan writes:
In an important class of cases — strategic ‘ratchet crimes’ to escape detection for impulse crimes — consequentialists and laypersons alike endorse harsher punishment for ‘easy’ criminal choices. Consider, for example, the case of a pedophile, who impulsively abducts a child when an opportunity unexpectedly presents itself. The pedophile finds it ‘hard’ to resist the impulse to abduct the child, but then ‘easy’ to choose, strategically, to kill the child in order to escape detection for the impulse crime. Consequentialists and laypersons will want to have in place extreme punishments (incentives) — perhaps even capital punishment — in order to deter a strategic (‘easy’) homicide.
John Alcorn
Jun 23 2021 at 1:27pm
Addendum:
One might ask: Why not short circuit both crimes — the impulsive abduction and the strategic homicide — by making the initial, impulsive crime (child abduction) punishable by the most severe punishment? Indeed, Bryan Caplan states that consequentialists “would have to harshly punish doing the wrong thing for ‘hard’ choices.”
There are two consequentialist answers:
1) Psychologically, the prospect of extreme punishment might deter a strategic murder, but not an impulsive abduction. This is an empirical issue.
2) If, despite the prospect of extreme punishment for abduction, the pedophile nonetheless does abduct a child (perhaps because the choice not to abduct is very ‘hard’ in the salient circumstances), then he has every incentive to murder the victim. The second crime adds no penalty to the first.
(In my comments, I have assumed that the criminal has a rational belief that a strategic murder of the abduction victim would reduce his overall risk of being caught.)
John Alcorn
Jun 23 2021 at 11:03am
Re: Degrees of freedom
Michael Huemer writes:
It’s complicated. Self-awareness can be crippling. Some people wish they could be spontaneous. Personality is real. Reflection has multiple equilibria and exhibits path dependence. Etc.
However that may be, a free society, based on voluntary interaction and individual liberty, can increase our (psychological) degree of freedom in two ways:
1) A free society increases our exit options. We can move or sort in search of fit (‘to be oneself’).
2) A free society increases individual responsibility, time horizon, and psychological maturity. See David Henderson’s blogpost, “Failure to Launch and UBI.”
But how to get to a free society? See Bryan Caplan’s cautionary words, “Self-Help vs. Power-Hunger.” It seems that a start is to encourage individuals to practice smart, responsible freedom at the margin.
KevinDC
Jun 23 2021 at 11:08am
One other note, and man, I hope I’m not overcommenting here because I’ve already thrown out a lot, but although Mike sort of hand-waved away the issue of whether divine omniscience is compatible with free will as a cute puzzle but not fundamentally important, I still think it’s interesting so I’m going to comment on it anyway 😛
Spoiler alert – I don’t think divine omniscience precludes the possibility of free will, but for people who do, I think they’d structure the argument like this. First, for some action A, to say that I have free will to do A must mean it’s possible for me to do A, and possible for me to not do A. Second, they’d also contend that God is infallibly omniscient (it says so right on the label!) so obviously its impossible for God to be wrong about anything. So for some future action A, lets say God knows I will do A. If God knows I will do A, then it is necessary that I will do A (because otherwise God would be wrong about something which is by hypothesis impossible). Those who see a conflict with free will would probably structure the argument like this:
P1: If I have free will regarding A, then it is possible that I do A, and possible that I not do A.
P2: I have free will regarding A.
C1: Therefore, it is possible that I will not do A.
P3: God knows that I will do A.
P4: If God knows that I will do A, then necessarily I will do A.
P5: If it is necessarily true that I will do A, then it is not possible that I will not do A.
C2: Therefore, it is not possible that I will not do A.
C1 and C2 are, of course, contradictions. It can’t be both possible that not-A, and not possible that not-A. And, so the argument goes, something has to give. Either God can’t be omniscient or we can’t have free will. However, I don’t accept this argument, because it is unsound – one of the premises are false.
Jackson Johnson
Jun 25 2021 at 3:37pm
I hope I’m not too late to make a comment! I thought I was too late two days ago for some reason, so I haven’t made one yet.
I’ll let Huemer comment on your objections. I want to raise my own.
First of all, on Page 191 Huemer writes:
I don’t think this is fair to the theistic position (mine). It’s not merely a tradition about God that theists are promoting. It’s a position based on alleged divine revelation from that “O3 world-creator” about his properties. This revelation could be through miracles or religious experiences in the context of a religion that promotes the “O3 world-creator.” Many Protestants, especially evangelical Baptists, think that Christians put far too much weight on traditions like creeds for a reason. Therefore, of course Christians are not going to want to give up the “traditional” concept of God; it goes against the evidence.
And regarding the Problem of Evil, I highly suggest checking out Perry Hendricks’ work on Skeptical Theism. I think it’s a decisive refutation of the Problem of Evil. I wish that your “God works in mysterious ways” section engaged with at least one form of Skeptical Theism. ST of this kind is not merely “it’s possible that God has a reason to permit evil.” It’s far more sophisticated.
Regarding your objections to the argument from contingency, one can merely weaken the PSR to avoid your objections. Here’s your definition of the PSR:
Now, we can modify it.
Next, imagine a world with only the only contingent facts are a piece of paper, pencil, and all of the relevant facts having to do with them. We’ll call this group of things A. Under this definition, it is possible that the existence of A has an explanation. It is also possible that they don’t. If you don’t believe me, imagine the paper and pencil being created by a factory. Now imagine that they exist for no reason.
This seems to escape your objections. There are still contingent things, and no distinctions are undermined.
How do we get to God from this PSR? Well, A is the conjunction of all contingent facts in that world. This is what philosophers call the BCCF or the “Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact.” Whatever explains the BCCF must exist outside of the BCCF, otherwise, it would itself be a part of the BCCF. And it doesn’t make much sense for a paper and pencil to explain itself.
So, it seems like it must be necessary, or it itself would be a part of the BCCF.
Now, what would this necessary being be? I would suspect some invisible thing of some sort. Why? Well, try to visualize/conceive an invisible thing out of existence. You can’t really. I think this is evidence that the necessary being is an invisible thing with causal powers, much like a soul in your preferred model of libertarian free will. This is because an explanatory thing is typically causal.
Also, this thing can possibly explain all contingent things. That sounds extraordinarily powerful, and nearly if not identical to omnipotence.
pgbh
Jul 13 2021 at 1:28pm
I don’t understand this at all. Bryan seems to be saying that the experience of making decisions is evidence against hard determinism.
This is wrong, hard determinism definitely does not predict that you will not have that experience.
I’m not aware of any determinist ever having said that if determinism is true, you will not feel that you are making or have made decisions. I think they realize that would be an absurd claim.
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