Fascinating post over at Experimental Philosophy arising from the recent paper, "The Phenomenology of Free Will." Sadly that paper isn't available freely online. The basic point is related to the old topic of experimental philosophy: so much of philosophy ends up tied to our intuitions or introspections. (Armchair philosophy, as they call it) Yet it seems that philosophers, of all people, ought to be the last consulted in such matters. After all those well read in philosophy seem to have so many theories biasing how they conceive of things that their intuitions and introspections are bound to be unusual. Even consulting the typical American might not be appropriate, given cultural biases If much of the argument of free will relies on these introspections and intuitions, what does that say about the entire literature of free will? The post goes through a few various attempts to analyze experimentally the phenomena of free will in more rigorous fashions than some philosopher in an office conducting introspection ala Husserl or worse yet Descartes.
Where things get interesting are some experiments that appear to connect the phenomena of control with the phenomena of free will. The experiments are somewhat problematic for various reasons, but still suggestive and fascinating. They find that it is when there are clear but difficult choices available that we fee the least sense of control. It is when things are easy and habitual that we feel the most control. Yet this is the exact opposite of what libertarians tell us. For them it is habit that is the poorest example of free will and difficult decisions which are the paradigmatic case. If the perception of free will (surely part of the phenomena under a libertarian case) leads us to the opposite case, where does that leave us?
Of course this doesn't resolve things in the least and the post explains why fairly well. Feelings of control and being free aren't necessarily the same thing and such appeals end up question begging in many ways. Still, it does make one wonder if analytic philosophy can ever break the impasse here.
I probably should point out that it might be good to read the above in connection to a discussion at Garden of Forking Paths on the same paper. (Mainly in the coments) On a related theme I mentioned recently a paper by Williamson on intuitions as simply judgments. In this case intuitions, even by folk traditions, are really judgments about if and when we are free. So I'm not sure we ought to simply reject these investigations of freedom.
The old question though is whether judgments by any person ought to be trusted to tell us how the world really is. It would seem empirical necessity is much more to be trusted, but in terms of real empiricism the natural sciences seem most at odds with libertarian free will.
Paradoxically, I've always had a gut feeling that arguments against free will are actually the best arguments for free will out there. I always feel I should explore this idea of mine and see if I can problematize it a bit, but since I am working on a dissertation, I feel as though my free will is lacking.
Of course, saying that arguments against something are good arguments for it makes it sound like a conspiracy theory (where all evidence against the theory is in fact treated as evidence for how pervasive the conspiracy is). Hmmm, free will as a conspiracy theory......
BTW - I love this website, Clark. I've been following it since you started it, but (obviously) as a lurker until now.
That actually is one strong argument, outside of responsibility arguments, Ivan. The fact we can't show why we ought to reject free will suggests that perhaps we ought not reject our intuitions. I think that was brought up in the Garden discussion.
In a prior post from a few weeks ago though there was the excellent point that outside of religion, there isn't any really good reason to trust our intuitions. Indeed given that there is no empirical evidence for free will and it seems counter to our physical ought we not simply reject it until we are led to it? Of course for a Mormon, we can't knock responsibility. And that's the strongest point Blake makes.
Clark: No evidence for free will? What is evidence if immediate experience isn't? Further, isn't the sheer empirical inability to predict human behavior with any certainty strong evidence of free will? What would count as evidence of free will to you?
Lack of predictability isn't evidence for free will. After all that happens both in deterministic chaotic systems due to measurement errors as well as in random events. What the libertarians must point to isn't negative evidence but some empirical evidence for something that is neither random nor determined. I'm not sure if that is empirically possible on even a theoretical basis. My instinct is that one might be able to do it via entropy. But I'm not sure. (Wouldn't free will be a negative entropy sink?)
As for immediate experience, the phenomena of believing one is free surely isn't evidence that one is free. Indeed that was rather the point of the article I linked to.
Clark: The model of science that you assume is in fact deterministic -- even in its chaos theory. Within the social "sciences," degrees of correspondence and randomness are common -- though we both agree that randomness is not consistent with free will either. However, formulating a test for free will that can be tested by the scientific method seems impossible precisely because the method works with and assumes deterministic systems (a point that William James made well and often). Only a physicist would dare conceive of free will as a negative entropy sink! No -- free will is not mere randomness or lack of order. In fact, it consists precisely in an activity of ordering the data of experience in my view (and that is something that we do at a very basic level).
With respect to immediate experience, I refer to the experience of intuiting through imagination (in a Kantian sense) that there are various possible futures from which we can choose and then deliberating and choosing among them. In this process, we pragmatically must act as if the future is open and we experience directly the process of making a choice among alternatives that we experience as open to us from which to choose. I agree that merely believing something doesn't make it so, but it is important to note that "believing that X" is not the same thing as "experiencing that X." That is my point and one that seems to have been overlooked by the article to which you link.
Why do you think negative entropy doesn't apply? (Honest question) Surely free will, by varying from either randomness or determinate systems entails that the entropy of the system changes.
I don't quite see how you can say it can't be analyzed by science. That seems (to me) to say that it doesn't have any real work effects different from a determinate system. While I can see a compatibilist arguing that, I'd think a libertarian wouldn't say it is indistinguishable from a determinate system.
With regards to "Kantian imagination" to me that seems rather question begging. The fact it appears to us that we are deliberating and choosing says nothing about the ontology underlying our deliberating and choosing. After all the compatibilist would argue that we ought to have exactly the same experience and just differs over the ontology.
If you can give me an experiment or methodology for scientifically testing free will, we are all waiting. It is a philosophical question because it cannot be easily tested or tested in a way that is theory independent.
As for your assertion that the fact that we experience choosing among genuinely open alternatives is on par for both libertarians and compatibilists, I strongly disagree. First, compatibilists may say that our experience remains the same, but they must say that our experience of choosing among open alternatives is in fact not an accurate experience of the truth of the matter. Our experience is ontologically wrong -- and that is my entire point. It is a strange position for an empiricist regarding free will to take! Compatibilists must discount our immediate experience that we choose among alternatives that are open as being a veridical experience. One cannot approach reality pragmatically as a compatibilist because no one can deliberate or choose consistently with the belief that such choices have already been determined. One cannot even believe that we choose rationally because, if compatibilism is true, then our reasoning too was determined long before we thought about it and thus our reasoning is controlled by the laws of cause and effect and not be the rules of inference and reason.
As for begging the question by refering to imagination -- it seems to me that the experience of imagining various possible futures, choosing which one to pursue and then working to bring about the imagined future we have chosen is the essence of free will. So what you see as begging the question seems to me to be the universal experience of free will that we all have -- or do you deny imagining possible futures and then choosing among them? Thus, I see the experience of choosing as evidence that we possess libertarian free will and you see it as begging the question by avoiding the question of whether the experience provides evidence that we are free as we experience it. On what basis do you claim that our experience does not have any onotlogical implications? It seems to me that only a died in the wool Platonist would have such a low opinion of the veridical import of experience.
My basic criticism here, Blake, might be summed up in Peirce's maxim: for a difference to be a difference it must make a difference. As you are here arguing, I just don't see what the difference is. It seems like you are moving from free will being something in us in terms of causality into it merely being outside possibilities. I'm thus a little confused. Put an other way, is the difference you see between liberatrian free will and compatibilist free will entailed fully by something outside the person?
With regards to science, I don't mean whether we can come up with a practical way to measure it now. There's lots of things untestable in that sense. Rather the question might be phrased whether it is inherently untestable. i.e. does it make a difference which is true?
Regarding empiricists critiquing experience. In the holistic sense of experience I think people criticize our experience all the time as untrustworthy. I don't see much new there. Rather that seems ubiquitous in the sciences. Note, however, that one can be empirical without adopting the philosophical positions of empiricism in which there is some foundation of sense-data that is to be trusted. I consider myself highly empirical, but am anti-foundationalist. So perhaps that is the source of the confusion? I don't think experience alone guarantees anything. Your argument, to the degree I understand it, seems to take some kinds of experience as foundational.
Note that now we're really into a discussion of phenomenology, since we're no longer doing logical analysis. So be aware that I am firmly in the anti-foundationalist camp with respect to phenomenology. I think that you are assuming a common ground over phenomenology that isn't there. I think this is where my belief in the approach of Heidegger, Derrida and company may lead to practical differences in how we view experience.
BTW - I should add the following link on Peirce's pragmatic maxim. Your comments on Platonism though might be at odds with his view. (Given his belief in a form of scholastic realism)
Just to add to the above, in thinking about it I think my comment ends up being over internalism and externalism.
Lack of predictability isn't evidence for free will.
If it were, then the church couldn't be true. Since all things, past present and future, are before God. While the church affirms "free agency," it also I believe, affirms God's Omniscience. Of course, it could be said that God simply knows these things because somehow he's observed them before they happen, not because he "predicts" them. But that seems to go against the grain of Mormon reading of scriptures such as, "before I formed thee in the belly I knew the...." where the character of pre-existent spirits are inputs in God's calculations for when, where, and what callings these spirits should have in mortal life.
Oh, also, though I don't buy into "free will," I do believe it's impossible for even the most skeptical to act otherwise and I don't think that means much. Reverse engineering the program doesn't mean the program must cease to function. Intuitions can be "hardwired" and ultimately, our intellectual understanding of how those intuitions work can diverge from the actual experience of those intuitions. Note I'm not suggesting such an intellectual understanding would consist of an unmitigated "objective" vantage point.
Gadianton, I believe Blake has fairly good answers for that in his book. I'm not entirely convinced, obviously. But it does appear there are several people trying to wed Open Theism with Mormonism. Dennis Potter has taken a similar approach at times, as I recall. The basic idea is that omniscience entails knowing all that is possible and all that is actual. Yet the future, by not being actual, can't be known as true and necessary, only the many possible futures as possibilities can be known.
The other possibility, which I don't recall if Blake discusses (I'm sure I'll come to it soon if he does) is that God knows things and not necessarily events. Things endure and don't perdure. That's a distinction from the four dimensional debate -- basically enduring entails that the same thing is at different points in time. Perduring means that a thing is made up of different temporal parts. So my future self is a part of me but not the same thing as me. The difference ends up being important if you buy into an immaterial soul. I don't know Blake's take on that issue, although given Whitehead's process atomism I'd suspect he'd end up adopting perduring persons and not enduring persons ala Leibniz or Augustine.
The discussion on souls I posted yesterday is probably relevant here, especially the Chisholm argument.
Clark,
What constitutes a "possibility?" How would you say one future is possible but another isn't? Is possibility based on extrapolating from past conditions?
Let's say there are two possible futures, A and B, reality being dependent on the free choice of some agent. God doesn't know which choice will be made, but he knows a heck of a lot about the ones that won't be. So there is already, almost as much predictibility at work here with the agent as there would be if the possibility was just one future. The problem is essentially the same, just with a little more nuance. Unless I'm misunderstanding, and everything "logically conceivable" is a possibility.
But I wonder if we're missing something more essential to the problem. And that is the extent to which justification is tied to knowledge. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the problem with predictibility isn't directly with possibility, but what er, causes that possibility to exist. If I can imagine one, or a hundred possibilities, it's because I've come up with one, or a hundred predictions--calculations within the bounds of mundane causality. It would seem to me, that God's knowledge then, for it not to interfere with "agency" must be of a kind that lacks justification (I'm thinking vaguely of the Gettier counter-examples here). And if that's possible, then the actual number of possible futures wouldn't matter. To sum up, I have a hard time understanding how any model that relies on God's beliefs about the future being justified, can allow for the existence of free-will, if free will is negated by predictibility.
Stanford has a fairly good write up on possible worlds.
You are right that there is a whole issue of whether alternative possibilities really are possible in determinism. (The thesis that the state of affairs and the laws of nature entail one possible future) This makes speaking of possible worlds a little more tricky than normal. (I've struggled trying to put into words carefully a relatively simple point precisely because of this) However generally we can be a little more loose and say that even if the future is fixed, there are many possible futures logically compatible with the current state of affairs.
Predictability is quite different from possibility of course. However I'm not quite sure of your line of thinking. Why would God's knowledge lack justification? Recognize that one of the big debates in the free will exchange is over the meaning of free will. If one adopts libertarian definitions of free will then God's knowledge not only isn't justified, it isn't knowledge. Indeed the typical attack isn't on justification but on truth. (Assuming for simplicity that knowledge is justified true belief and not an unique mental state)
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