During his November 2, 2023 podcast, Scott Galloway—the famous investor, NYU marketing professor, and frequent guest on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher—said that "free will denial is almost a movement right now."
My emphasis on automaticity in productivity is one place of overlap with my other main interest online which is the current movement denying free will.
If 'will' is a mechanical process like digestion or cell replication then it can't be controlled. If there are aspects that are not understood or impossible to understand then maybe we do have free will, or appear to. In social contexts we treat free will like a shared language, belief is not as relevant.
Libet's research doesn't show you lack free will in the libertarian of compatibilists sense, unless you narrow the meaning of "you" to just the conscious mind -- as Harris, controversially, does.
Thanks for the comment! :-) Libet, for folks who don't know (and as practice for me), measured subjects brain waves with an EEG machine and asked them to move a finger. There was an apparatus to measure the timing of the movement and the subject's decision. (It's complicated.) But the data were EEG measurements before the decision, at the decision, and at the movement. The results were, roughly, that there was brain activity well before the decision. There's more to it. But the upshot is that the conscious decision is caused by (and predictable because of) unconscious or non-conscious brain processes. If that is the upshot then it's saying one is not free because there is a cause of what you do.
But that only contradicts libertarian free will which says that "to be free is to be uncaused." In other words, the libertarian definition of free will requires that you could have done otherwise in a way contravening causal determinism. A compatibilist definition of free will says you indeed could not have done otherwise but are still free if you are caused in the right way. Diff compatibilists have different ideas of what kind of cause makes you free and what kinds make you unfree. But being caused by one's own desire or even by a spontaneous urge of one's own sounds like the kind of cause that we should say is the free will kind. So that's the sense that The Ancient Geek is saying "you" means your unconscious so it's still you causing your own action and so you are free.
As far as "narrowing"... I think what Harris does is he calls it "voluntary action" when Dennett would call it "compatibilist free will."
But in his 2012 Free Will Harris takes care (unless I am misremembering) to not mention Libet at all. He says he doesn't need Libet. What I want to say here and now is that the upshot of Libet--that the contents of consciousness are caused by or bubble up from nonconscious processes in the brain--could be established almost a priori. Nietzsche established it by argument 135 years ago and Sam Harris says it can be observed if one learns to meditate, if one learns to pay attention to experience in the right way. What Nietzsche said was "thoughts come unbidden" if you care to Google it; and he said that the unconscious is no more "opposite" of consciousness than a cause is opposite of its effect. In other words, nonconsciousness causes consciousness. Why that matter is that many people mistakenly think a la an old fashioned Cartesianism that we walk around all day consciously willing everything we do. But much more than most people are prima facie willing to admit... much is done nonconsciously then stamped as willed after the fact.
What Harris equivalently says is that if you pay attention to experience as he teaches us to do while meditating... you'll see that thoughts come unbidden. Indeed, try to meditate. Focus your attention on your breath. When your mind wanders from the breath, notice that and gently return your focus to the breath. If you are a novice and if you are honest, you get lost in thought and are no longer focusing on the breath every two seconds. You find you have been thinking of something else for a while. etc etc. How did you get off track? Your mind just went off track. Or in my terms some nonconscious process bubbled up and create a conscious experience. Harris would say you immediately identified with that thought and off you went thinking about the other thing and not your breath. Until you remembered that you were supposed to be paying attention to the breath and you realized oh I've been off track for some seconds now.
Harris has some terminology I only learned last week from his guest appearance on Huberman's podcast. Harris says we identify with our thoughts and the goal of meditation is to not identify with our thoughts. When you find you have been off track and your thoughts/experience had gone down a strange tangent away from paying attention to the breath, he calls that being lost in thought. So being lost in thought and identifying with whatever thought pops into your head are the same thing for Harris. That is interesting in its own right. But back to free will.
What this shows, again, is that at some point as we trace back in the causal chain of consciously willed experience like decisions there is a moment when an idea just pops into one's head. It comes up from the unconscious. But, of course, where else could it come from. That's the sense that it could be established by argument. It's a reductio. The chain of causes going back into history, the chain of causes going back from any consciously willed thought/experience/decision/action must perforce eventually dip down below the line of consciousness into nonconscious brain processes. Because where else could it come from? We cannot believe that it's consciousness-caused experiences all the way back to birth.
The best compatibilist view cannot be the one that say you are free if "you" are the cause of your actions and that your nonconscious processes count as you. It cannot be that one because I can be unfree even when I cause myself. How so? I am unfree even when I cause myself when the cause is a desire of mine, but not a desire of mine I desire to have. See, I have lots of desires. I have even conflicting desires at the first order if I am an addict trying to quit, for example. I want to smoke cigarettes and I don't want to smoke cigarettes. If I am addicted and I am trying to quit then my desire to smoke cigarettes is the addiction-based desire and it is a desire I wish I didn't have. That is, I have a second order desire. I am free not merely by doing what I want. I will be free if I do what I want to want to do. Two wants. My point is, let's get a more sophisticated compatibilism on the table, more than just "if caused by you, then you are free" type compatibilism.
The way I see it, compatibilism in general says yes yes yes there is a causal chain going back from a conscious experience. (That is COMP's willingness to endorse causal determinism.) Yes yes yes, there's a chain going back and at some point it goes back to a point where it starts to look like we are not responsible. But, COMP says, that is ultimate responsibility. We do not have ultimate or cosmic moral responsibility of the kind that the libertarian definition of free will imagines. However, if we agree to stop at some point along the chain we can agree we have non-ultimate responsibility. It's the difference between ultimate causes and proximate causes. The proximate cause could be pretty close or it could be further out -- that is what would make for one COMP view versus another. Frankfurt says we may stop and call the person proximately/compatibilistly/non-ultimately responsible if they acted on a desire they endorse. Susan Wolf would say we are free if we are caused by a reason, a rationality-guided process etc. Dan Dennett has some criteria that if we meet he'll say we are non-ultimately responsible.
And Sam Harris has a story here too. He just calls it "voluntary action" and he believes we should hold folks responsible for it. So the stuff to look up would be for instance what he says about deciding to learn Mandarin. (Let's put a moral tint to it. We are at war with China and some of us decide to learn Mandarin and some don't. Learning Mandarin is morally praiseworthy or something like that so it's not just a dull example action without import) I am not cosmically/ultimately responsible for learning Mandarin, but I can be proximately responsible and perhaps praised or blamed if what caused me to learn Mandarin was some voluntary action. (Even if this voluntary action could be traced back to the big bang etc.)
I am just getting started writing online and I knew it would be a slow start in terms of quality. I will be learning to write better and better I hope as we go. But I appreciate the opportunity to practice by responding to your reply. Thanks to everyone who read this far.
I think there is an outline here for a position. Let me add that as far as the question: What is the definition of free will that the lay folk nonphilosophers actually use? That question. That is related to the "narrowing" that The Ancient Geek mentioned. I am less interested in taking one side like I am less interested in insisting that the folk definition is the libertarian one which would make Dennett unhappy. Yet I am also not interested in agree with him that the "best" definition is a compatibilist one (because the question was not what concept ought we to do but what concept is actually used)... Instead of all that, I want to have a view on free will that shows that sometimes makes use of the libertarian definition and elsewhere the COMP. So, my view, if I could articulate it would give an account of cosmic or ultimate responsibility, and everything else. It would say what ultimate responsibility requires (basically use the LIB def here), and that it is never met. This point can be made almost a priori as Nietzsche does or via a revisionist phenomenological argument like Harris does when he wants us to look at experience with the proper level of clarity.... Or Robert Sapolsky can establish this empirically by showing all the causal links going back until the causes are causes outside your control.
"Outside your control" would contravene COMP FW. But LIB FW is contravened as soon as any cause can be described. Why? How's that? What I am trying to say is that LIB FW is a internally inconsistent concept that just doesn't get off the ground. It's like a lot of lay concepts. They are kludged together and need scientists or philosophers to analyze them to show they are internally inconsistent and then replace them with a technical vocabulary. It reminds me of an old Far Side cartoon. A man stands on a fluffy cloud wearing a robe and sporting a halo. He looks bored and there's a thought bubble. "I wish I brought a magazine." At the risk of ruining the humor by explaining it, this is funny because there is a contradiction in our lay concept of heaven. Theologians, I'm sure, have worked it out such that heaven as a concept can be both desirable and a reward and also eternal, full of fluffy clouds, and pain-free, struggle-free, drama-free. But the lay concept has it as a place that is supposed to be desirable or pleasant or at least a reward but also it's supposed to be pain-free which means it's a place where nothing ever happens as the Talking Heads lyric goes. Anyway, the lay concept of heaven is both pleasant and unpleasant/boring. Similarly, the libertarian concept (which is most people's when push comes to shove) is incoherent (as Dennett admits... he admits it's incoherent he does not admit its what most people believe push comes to show)...
So anyway, the LIB concept is undone as soon as Sapolsky convinces you that your decision did not come onto the Cartesian theater of your mind as an uncaused causer. Or it's undone as soon as you realize that almost apriori without Sapolsky's empirical science of the causal chain.
In Sapolsky's new book "Determined" he says he is attacking the LIB view, or that's what it seems like to me. He does not engage enough with the philosophy that COMP-ists muster. But it's still a great book. There's lots else to do besides deal with where we should stop tracing back in the causal chain to establish proximate responsibility. We need that for society to work, at least the courts, The Law, does not use the LIB definition. The mens rea etc is a COMP definition of responsibility. I think Harris pretty much thinks our practices of criminal justice and praise and blame will stay pretty much the same. In any case he does not get as exercised as Sapolsky does, who really believes we need a wholesale revamping and no one is ever responsible he says. Indeed thinks as follows. You can tell me the story about how your character caused you and your COMP definition says you are morally responsible if your character is what caused you because we assume that you are responsible for the type of person you are--you've had all your life as Dennett would say to grow into a responsible non-child. But what Sapolsky always does at that moment is just say Yeah but that is caused too.
I think we probably won't feel the need to change the criminal justice system until the causes that Sapolsky knows in detail personally are known in a kind of collective consciousness the way a meme spreads through culture. I mean, you see it now with people saying "I'm high cortisol right now stay away" meaning "I'm stressed. Give me a minute." When you know how a system works, you are moved to no longer credit it with consciousness/freedom/responsibility.
Up till the Jan 6 capital police suicides, there was a policy that if a police officer died "by his own intention" the line-of-duty death benefits would not be paid. Sapolsky doesn't mention this. This is my observation. But it's a Sapolsky-like move to say "Yeah but where did that intention come from?" It came from line-of-duty stress or trauma. Imagine rather than psychic trauma, we have a concussed officer who commits suicides as often happes after concussions. Perhaps there benefit boards would decide it was line of duty and so death benefits should be paid. The physicality of the cause, the empirically understandable, and mechanistically deterministic nature of the concussion would make it seem like he did not kill himself of his own free will. And so maybe they'd pay his widow benefits (even though he still was caused to die by his own intention, just an unfree intention, a concussion-caused intention)... But, I'd argue, the psychic trauma of seeing your fellow citizens attack you etc etc is just as physical and just as deterministic as a concussion. The light reflected off the Q-Anon Shaman's horns and fur enters the cops' eyeball and forms an image on his retina which sends as signal to his brain which cascades into feelings of despair and meaninglessness and failure and so on. which cascades over a few days into an intention to commit suicide.
Here's another reason the law "not by his own intention" is dumb. What if a police officer jumps in front of a bullet to save someone? The board would want to pay death benefits because it wasn't suicide and it certainly wasn't the suicide-that-is-insurance-fraud-type-suicide- that maybe they were worried about when they wrote the law... He does indeed save the person by jumping in front of the bullet but he has died by his own intention.
My emphasis on automaticity in productivity is one place of overlap with my other main interest online which is the current movement denying free will.
https://twitter.com/drdavefdavidson/status/1754663876476690850
If 'will' is a mechanical process like digestion or cell replication then it can't be controlled. If there are aspects that are not understood or impossible to understand then maybe we do have free will, or appear to. In social contexts we treat free will like a shared language, belief is not as relevant.
Libet's research doesn't show you lack free will in the libertarian of compatibilists sense, unless you narrow the meaning of "you" to just the conscious mind -- as Harris, controversially, does.
Thanks for the comment! :-) Libet, for folks who don't know (and as practice for me), measured subjects brain waves with an EEG machine and asked them to move a finger. There was an apparatus to measure the timing of the movement and the subject's decision. (It's complicated.) But the data were EEG measurements before the decision, at the decision, and at the movement. The results were, roughly, that there was brain activity well before the decision. There's more to it. But the upshot is that the conscious decision is caused by (and predictable because of) unconscious or non-conscious brain processes. If that is the upshot then it's saying one is not free because there is a cause of what you do.
But that only contradicts libertarian free will which says that "to be free is to be uncaused." In other words, the libertarian definition of free will requires that you could have done otherwise in a way contravening causal determinism. A compatibilist definition of free will says you indeed could not have done otherwise but are still free if you are caused in the right way. Diff compatibilists have different ideas of what kind of cause makes you free and what kinds make you unfree. But being caused by one's own desire or even by a spontaneous urge of one's own sounds like the kind of cause that we should say is the free will kind. So that's the sense that The Ancient Geek is saying "you" means your unconscious so it's still you causing your own action and so you are free.
As far as "narrowing"... I think what Harris does is he calls it "voluntary action" when Dennett would call it "compatibilist free will."
But in his 2012 Free Will Harris takes care (unless I am misremembering) to not mention Libet at all. He says he doesn't need Libet. What I want to say here and now is that the upshot of Libet--that the contents of consciousness are caused by or bubble up from nonconscious processes in the brain--could be established almost a priori. Nietzsche established it by argument 135 years ago and Sam Harris says it can be observed if one learns to meditate, if one learns to pay attention to experience in the right way. What Nietzsche said was "thoughts come unbidden" if you care to Google it; and he said that the unconscious is no more "opposite" of consciousness than a cause is opposite of its effect. In other words, nonconsciousness causes consciousness. Why that matter is that many people mistakenly think a la an old fashioned Cartesianism that we walk around all day consciously willing everything we do. But much more than most people are prima facie willing to admit... much is done nonconsciously then stamped as willed after the fact.
What Harris equivalently says is that if you pay attention to experience as he teaches us to do while meditating... you'll see that thoughts come unbidden. Indeed, try to meditate. Focus your attention on your breath. When your mind wanders from the breath, notice that and gently return your focus to the breath. If you are a novice and if you are honest, you get lost in thought and are no longer focusing on the breath every two seconds. You find you have been thinking of something else for a while. etc etc. How did you get off track? Your mind just went off track. Or in my terms some nonconscious process bubbled up and create a conscious experience. Harris would say you immediately identified with that thought and off you went thinking about the other thing and not your breath. Until you remembered that you were supposed to be paying attention to the breath and you realized oh I've been off track for some seconds now.
Harris has some terminology I only learned last week from his guest appearance on Huberman's podcast. Harris says we identify with our thoughts and the goal of meditation is to not identify with our thoughts. When you find you have been off track and your thoughts/experience had gone down a strange tangent away from paying attention to the breath, he calls that being lost in thought. So being lost in thought and identifying with whatever thought pops into your head are the same thing for Harris. That is interesting in its own right. But back to free will.
What this shows, again, is that at some point as we trace back in the causal chain of consciously willed experience like decisions there is a moment when an idea just pops into one's head. It comes up from the unconscious. But, of course, where else could it come from. That's the sense that it could be established by argument. It's a reductio. The chain of causes going back into history, the chain of causes going back from any consciously willed thought/experience/decision/action must perforce eventually dip down below the line of consciousness into nonconscious brain processes. Because where else could it come from? We cannot believe that it's consciousness-caused experiences all the way back to birth.
The best compatibilist view cannot be the one that say you are free if "you" are the cause of your actions and that your nonconscious processes count as you. It cannot be that one because I can be unfree even when I cause myself. How so? I am unfree even when I cause myself when the cause is a desire of mine, but not a desire of mine I desire to have. See, I have lots of desires. I have even conflicting desires at the first order if I am an addict trying to quit, for example. I want to smoke cigarettes and I don't want to smoke cigarettes. If I am addicted and I am trying to quit then my desire to smoke cigarettes is the addiction-based desire and it is a desire I wish I didn't have. That is, I have a second order desire. I am free not merely by doing what I want. I will be free if I do what I want to want to do. Two wants. My point is, let's get a more sophisticated compatibilism on the table, more than just "if caused by you, then you are free" type compatibilism.
The way I see it, compatibilism in general says yes yes yes there is a causal chain going back from a conscious experience. (That is COMP's willingness to endorse causal determinism.) Yes yes yes, there's a chain going back and at some point it goes back to a point where it starts to look like we are not responsible. But, COMP says, that is ultimate responsibility. We do not have ultimate or cosmic moral responsibility of the kind that the libertarian definition of free will imagines. However, if we agree to stop at some point along the chain we can agree we have non-ultimate responsibility. It's the difference between ultimate causes and proximate causes. The proximate cause could be pretty close or it could be further out -- that is what would make for one COMP view versus another. Frankfurt says we may stop and call the person proximately/compatibilistly/non-ultimately responsible if they acted on a desire they endorse. Susan Wolf would say we are free if we are caused by a reason, a rationality-guided process etc. Dan Dennett has some criteria that if we meet he'll say we are non-ultimately responsible.
And Sam Harris has a story here too. He just calls it "voluntary action" and he believes we should hold folks responsible for it. So the stuff to look up would be for instance what he says about deciding to learn Mandarin. (Let's put a moral tint to it. We are at war with China and some of us decide to learn Mandarin and some don't. Learning Mandarin is morally praiseworthy or something like that so it's not just a dull example action without import) I am not cosmically/ultimately responsible for learning Mandarin, but I can be proximately responsible and perhaps praised or blamed if what caused me to learn Mandarin was some voluntary action. (Even if this voluntary action could be traced back to the big bang etc.)
I am just getting started writing online and I knew it would be a slow start in terms of quality. I will be learning to write better and better I hope as we go. But I appreciate the opportunity to practice by responding to your reply. Thanks to everyone who read this far.
I think there is an outline here for a position. Let me add that as far as the question: What is the definition of free will that the lay folk nonphilosophers actually use? That question. That is related to the "narrowing" that The Ancient Geek mentioned. I am less interested in taking one side like I am less interested in insisting that the folk definition is the libertarian one which would make Dennett unhappy. Yet I am also not interested in agree with him that the "best" definition is a compatibilist one (because the question was not what concept ought we to do but what concept is actually used)... Instead of all that, I want to have a view on free will that shows that sometimes makes use of the libertarian definition and elsewhere the COMP. So, my view, if I could articulate it would give an account of cosmic or ultimate responsibility, and everything else. It would say what ultimate responsibility requires (basically use the LIB def here), and that it is never met. This point can be made almost a priori as Nietzsche does or via a revisionist phenomenological argument like Harris does when he wants us to look at experience with the proper level of clarity.... Or Robert Sapolsky can establish this empirically by showing all the causal links going back until the causes are causes outside your control.
"Outside your control" would contravene COMP FW. But LIB FW is contravened as soon as any cause can be described. Why? How's that? What I am trying to say is that LIB FW is a internally inconsistent concept that just doesn't get off the ground. It's like a lot of lay concepts. They are kludged together and need scientists or philosophers to analyze them to show they are internally inconsistent and then replace them with a technical vocabulary. It reminds me of an old Far Side cartoon. A man stands on a fluffy cloud wearing a robe and sporting a halo. He looks bored and there's a thought bubble. "I wish I brought a magazine." At the risk of ruining the humor by explaining it, this is funny because there is a contradiction in our lay concept of heaven. Theologians, I'm sure, have worked it out such that heaven as a concept can be both desirable and a reward and also eternal, full of fluffy clouds, and pain-free, struggle-free, drama-free. But the lay concept has it as a place that is supposed to be desirable or pleasant or at least a reward but also it's supposed to be pain-free which means it's a place where nothing ever happens as the Talking Heads lyric goes. Anyway, the lay concept of heaven is both pleasant and unpleasant/boring. Similarly, the libertarian concept (which is most people's when push comes to shove) is incoherent (as Dennett admits... he admits it's incoherent he does not admit its what most people believe push comes to show)...
So anyway, the LIB concept is undone as soon as Sapolsky convinces you that your decision did not come onto the Cartesian theater of your mind as an uncaused causer. Or it's undone as soon as you realize that almost apriori without Sapolsky's empirical science of the causal chain.
In Sapolsky's new book "Determined" he says he is attacking the LIB view, or that's what it seems like to me. He does not engage enough with the philosophy that COMP-ists muster. But it's still a great book. There's lots else to do besides deal with where we should stop tracing back in the causal chain to establish proximate responsibility. We need that for society to work, at least the courts, The Law, does not use the LIB definition. The mens rea etc is a COMP definition of responsibility. I think Harris pretty much thinks our practices of criminal justice and praise and blame will stay pretty much the same. In any case he does not get as exercised as Sapolsky does, who really believes we need a wholesale revamping and no one is ever responsible he says. Indeed thinks as follows. You can tell me the story about how your character caused you and your COMP definition says you are morally responsible if your character is what caused you because we assume that you are responsible for the type of person you are--you've had all your life as Dennett would say to grow into a responsible non-child. But what Sapolsky always does at that moment is just say Yeah but that is caused too.
I think we probably won't feel the need to change the criminal justice system until the causes that Sapolsky knows in detail personally are known in a kind of collective consciousness the way a meme spreads through culture. I mean, you see it now with people saying "I'm high cortisol right now stay away" meaning "I'm stressed. Give me a minute." When you know how a system works, you are moved to no longer credit it with consciousness/freedom/responsibility.
Up till the Jan 6 capital police suicides, there was a policy that if a police officer died "by his own intention" the line-of-duty death benefits would not be paid. Sapolsky doesn't mention this. This is my observation. But it's a Sapolsky-like move to say "Yeah but where did that intention come from?" It came from line-of-duty stress or trauma. Imagine rather than psychic trauma, we have a concussed officer who commits suicides as often happes after concussions. Perhaps there benefit boards would decide it was line of duty and so death benefits should be paid. The physicality of the cause, the empirically understandable, and mechanistically deterministic nature of the concussion would make it seem like he did not kill himself of his own free will. And so maybe they'd pay his widow benefits (even though he still was caused to die by his own intention, just an unfree intention, a concussion-caused intention)... But, I'd argue, the psychic trauma of seeing your fellow citizens attack you etc etc is just as physical and just as deterministic as a concussion. The light reflected off the Q-Anon Shaman's horns and fur enters the cops' eyeball and forms an image on his retina which sends as signal to his brain which cascades into feelings of despair and meaninglessness and failure and so on. which cascades over a few days into an intention to commit suicide.
Here's another reason the law "not by his own intention" is dumb. What if a police officer jumps in front of a bullet to save someone? The board would want to pay death benefits because it wasn't suicide and it certainly wasn't the suicide-that-is-insurance-fraud-type-suicide- that maybe they were worried about when they wrote the law... He does indeed save the person by jumping in front of the bullet but he has died by his own intention.